(research summary by Elaine Schnabel)
Inequality is a bigger threat to democracy than polarization. In fact, polarization is often a sign of a healthy democracy beginning to confront systemic inequalities. And yet scholarship about technology and political communication often frames polarization as the biggest ongoing threat to democracy in the United States. This seeming contradiction, CITAP’s Daniel Kreiss and Shannon McGregor argue, is about race.
In “A review and provocation: On polarization and plaftorms,” Kreiss and McGregor point out that the content of the poles in polarization is both important—and often ignored. Polarization does not account for the crucial differences between, for example, white supremacists and racial justice activists. Black Lives Matter and Stop the Steal are not equally good movements for democracy: as BLM activists explicitly calls for greater equality in a democratic society, Stop the Steal activists seek to overturn elections.
As Kreiss and McGregor put it, “polarization is… the necessary byproduct of the struggle to realize democracy in unequal societies.”
If political communication and media and technology scholars want to understand polarization, they cannot continue to do so from a power-disinterested lens. Polarization and systemic inequality are co-produced. And yet frequently the problems caused by polarization are blamed on those simply calling for justice. Ultimately, scholars frame struggles for justice as “polarizing” because:
our field’s conceptualizations of democracy are so thin, solidarity is so treasured, racial analytics are so rare, and historical memory is so short. It is not polarization, but racial repression that has been far more challenging and destabilizing to democracy over the past 300 years if looked at from a non-White perspective.
Publications and appearances
“I keep my eyes on the South for a lot of reasons. This is my home. It is the region of this nation’s original sin. Nothing about the future of this country can be resolved unless it is first resolved here: not the climate crisis or the border or life expectancy or anything else of national importance, unless you solve it in the South and with the people of the South.” Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote about political moves in the Tennessee and North Carolina state legislatures in her New York Times column.
"More than any other platform, it gives us a sense that we're witnessing the world beyond us, but in a really visceral and personal way," Shannon McGregor told NPR’s Bobby Allyn about why we haven’t all (yet) quit Twitter.
“The frenzy is confounding given how elementary the app is.” Affiliate Zari Taylor wrote about BeReal for Flow.
Tressie McMillan Cottom’s talk at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute is available on video and summarized by Harvard Magazine:
You can also watch her discuss digital blackface with Rachelle Hampton and Karen Hawkins, hosted by the 19th.
“How do social movement actors use consciousness-raising communicative practices to reconfigure political understandings of race? And how can such practices shape the analysis of political communication?” Affiliates Rachel Kuo and Rohan Grover released a new piece on “Destabilizing Race in Political Communication.”
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Congratulations to Bridget Barrett for successfully defending her dissertation on “Merchandizing Democracy”!
Coming soon
April 20, 3pm: Join us in person in the Freedom Forum Conference Center or via livestream for Melanie Feinberg in conversation with CITAP about her book Everyday Adventures with Unruly Data.
April 21: The School of Information and Library Science will host its annual Symposium on Information for Social Good, with keynote from Tonia Sutherland. Full agenda and registration.
April 23: Tressie McMillan Cottom will give a keynote at the Faculty Women of Color conference. Program and registration.
May 2-3: Join us at “Social Justice and Technological Futures,” hosted by the University of Tübingen. Registration is free.
May 30: Release date for Alice Marwick’s The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media.
Rest of Web
The National Telecomunications and Information Administration has a request for comment out on its Artificial Intelligence accountability policies.