What is it about?
This article investigates the 2005 amateur online protest video, "The French Democracy," which was a critical response to mainstream news accounts of the 2005 riots in Paris's suburbs. It is interested in the historically new means of commenting on violent social conflict, but also in the new problems of getting attention an audience, through circulation and reception. Finally, it is also interested in how the story is re-presented or --marketed as it is "advertised" in different news venues--it appears to be a very different story as it circulates. The article first compares the contrasting stories, causes and solutions proposed by mainstream news and the protest video. It then turns to the problem not just of access to means of producing alternate stories but of circulating them in ways that get attention. It looks at how they garnered international news media attention, potentially creating international media and public opinion that could boomerang back on public discussions and opinions about racial conflict in contemporary France. Documenting international news media attention, the study shows how that attention did not boomerang back to the French public sphere; the protest was recuperated by news industry values (it was a breakthrough in using gaming technology to make films, for example). The paper shows the new challenges for protest speech in a global attention economy.
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Why is it important?
The video is historic! It was hailed as the first ever film made with video game technology. The paper shows the new challenges for protest speech (in this accessible video production format) in a global attention economy.
Perspectives
Just being able to easily create and post a video, digital photos, or written statements today is perhaps too often assumed to be "speech that matters," even though it is arguably not even "free" speech in social networks. We need to better understand the dynamics of amateur citizen protest speech circulation online and in conjunction with more traditional/prestige news media. Such protest speech has potential to affect public conversations about public publems, but does it? In which cases? Why or why not? The article shows the new challenges for protest speech in a global attention economy.
Jayson Harsin
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: “The French Democracy”: Mapping Promise and Limitation of Glocal Digital Protest, Communication Culture and Critique, April 2014, Oxford University Press (OUP),
DOI: 10.1111/cccr.12044.
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