This project combines my established interests in how the U.S. media represents itself in times of war (the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in particular), with my desire to use the privilege of being a tenured professor to express sometimes unpopular or “dissenting” views. A key thread that runs through the book is how corporate-owned media often fails to serve the democratic role of the press, and how not only digital media but publicly-owned airwaves are crucial to a democracy, as a means for holding press to standards of accountability. The chapters—which range from interviews with journalists, to analyses of how digital media is redefining journalism, to thorough discussions that define tactical media both theoretically as well in art-based digital media practices—offer a portrait of the “state of digital political media.” 

As a public intellectual, part of my role is to ask questions about such topics as the aggressive militarism of the U.S., and the role of the media in shoring up politicians who deceive  the public they are elected to serve.  I was a student of semiotics and the politics of representation in the interdisciplinary graduate program History of Consciousness at University of California Santa Cruz in the early 1990s. During the PGW, I began what has become a lifelong commitment to analyses of the media’s portrayal of dissent and other forms of public anti-war protest. While a professor at Virginia Tech from 1998-2003, I worked at the forefront of numerous social justice causes within the university and regional community.  In regions like southwestern Virginia –  where religious and cultural conservativism limit the range of  issues that can be discussed  (a situation exacerbated at Virginia Tech by the University’s military history and the extensive military funding of the science and engineering departments)— it is crucial to have community. I was fortunate to become part of a small but vibrant group of activists. After September 11, we boldly commenced a weekly protest against the impending invasion of Afghanistan, and later, Iraq—for which we paid the very real costs of verbal and even  physical threats from those who drove or walked by. We also experienced harassment by campus and local police for non-violent demonstrations each week on the Main Street that bordered campus.

I was fortunate enough to receive funding to build the website Critical Media Literacy in Times of War while at Virginia Tech (www.tandl.vt.edu.  Then in 2005, as an invited scholar at a Cyberdisciplinarity Institute at the Humanities Center at Dartmouth College, I envisioned a much-needed contribution—which is now materialized as Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times.

How does it relate to your previous books and the topics in education that you are known for exploring before, such as emotions and dialogue? 

All of my scholarly work tends to be motivated by commitments to social justice. My work on emotion was in part an attempt to politicize our understanding of emotions—to bring them out from the dark shadows of the legacy of the Enlightenment scorn of the body and emotions, the privileging of Cartesian or Kantian rationality.  Rationality is not neutral, but a culturally-constructed, Western stance.  One of its handy by-products is the way rationalism’s domination simultaneously supports the denigration and othering of classes of people. So, for example, Christianity’s rationality took the form –  through missionary work –  of ushering in “civilization” to cultures and continents while simultaneously appearing  to be  the “caring” and gentle face of colonization.  How far have we really come, then, when we see the Bush administration claiming to “deliver” freedom and democracy to the Middle East?  In Feeling Power: Emotions and Education, I use  feminist and poststructuralist theory to document how the political and cultural construction of emotions support existing hierarchies of domination, for example by policing women as well as male and female gender roles.  But my interest is also philosophical, that is, epistemological and ethical: what is the role of emotions and affect in our perceptions, inquiries, analyses, judgments and knowledge systems?  If we are unable to develop self-reflection about personal and culturally inscribed habits of (in)attention and emotion, we have no chance of intervening in systemic inequities of racism, classism, sexism, etc.  Fear is an enormous part of Western cultural indoctrination; it is an emotion that helps maintain real and psychic  borders and boundaries of exclusion.  Education ideally is a site where we have an opportunity to invite students, though what I call a “pedagogy of discomfort,” to reflect on how different emotions are learned, how they signify, how they limit and harness as well as offer new openings and connections and vision of what could be.

I am often asked how I came from my work on emotions to work on the politics of digital media.  The answer is in one sense simple, yet requires a global view.  These two major areas of my scholarship connect in an overarching commitment to social justice.  They both call attention to the “democratic” ideal of a diversity of voices, and ask us to acknowledge difference in all its fraught and thorny forms.  This interest in how power informs who is allowed to speak and be heard, and the power of language--whose naming and representations of the world are authorized--is informed by my training in radical semiotics and an interest in the “politics of representation”.  It is important to ask who has the power to name, and to consider how others are forced to abide by laws of discourse which, in a Foucauldian sense, reach into our very bodies and pattern our actions.  My colleague Ron Glass offers a helpful metaphor that aptly describes the process of learning ideology through this landscape of inexplicit, osmotically-learned rules: How did we learn the etiquette of riding on an elevator?  A practice learned primarily tacitly, with a few instances of perhaps having done something “wrong” within elevator-riding cultural practices, and being explicitly frowned upon or corrected.  But by and large we experience these ways of conforming as “common sense” and hence “natural”—defying our critical analysis, and instead becoming internalized like the oxygen we breathe without reflexive awareness.  For post-structural theorists, the commonsense, the taken-for-granted, is exactly what must be examined and challenged.

I see my role as a scholar as that of a gadfly, and whenever possible a public intellectual—bringing public attention to issues that the profiting-powers-that-be would rather we didn’t critically scrutinize or challenge.

Why should those of us concerned about educational policy be inclined to race to the bookstore and read it?

I was once asked, by a senior faculty at a leading university’s education department, “What does media have to do with traditional education?”  When I mentioned my dumbfounded frustration at this question during the interview with Robert McChesney in the MIT book, he said, “A better question would have been what do schools have to do with education?”  Educational policy (as we address in a special issue on Media and Policy in the journal Policy Futures in Education http://www.wwwords.co.uk/pfie/content/pdfs/5/issue5_1.asp) needs to be informed by  questions about  the politics of representation and mainstream media.  Whose voices and views are represented in public (news) debates about school issues?  Why are educators, students, and parents and teachers so often not interviewed and given voice in news coverage? Further, because social practices of ICTs are changing the literacy, networks, experience, and even epistemology and ethics of young people’s experience, educational policy needs to consider how such practices can be used towards realizing democratic and equitable ideals. 

What do you hope readers will do after they read it?

Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times addresses multiple audiences, and is intended to generate debate about the role of media in the political landscape. The collection asks how media can serve ideals of democracy, and how digital media practices can shift the agendas of corporate- and government-influenced media. I hope the book inspires readers to consider how their own sociable media practices offer opportunities for user-generated networks, social organizing, and alternative public expression.  I hope that students of communications, new media, journalism, political science and philosophy consider not just the professional aspects of journalism, policy, and digital media, but also the significant political and social questions that make these disciplines so highly political. The collection brings readers up-to-date on the intertwined practices of sociable media, inspires them to use digital media for creative and political purposes, and urges them to organize within their communities to engage in crucial policy struggles, including efforts to “save the internet.”  The time is now to make every attempt to ensure that telecoms are not (further) permitted to enforce tiered-access to the internet, a policy shift which would impose higher fees for those who use greater broadband traffic (upload and download larger files and streams), and which will severely limit what we currently see as the democratization of access to production and distribution. 

How and when does access to sociable media practices, the production of user-generated content, and the increased plurality of voices expressed through multimedia , demonstrate new possibilities for democracy in action? The book captures a unique historical moment: a moment in which, after September 11, 2001, the U.S. news media failed in its role as the Fourth Estate and instead became the parroting mouthpiece for the U.S. Bush administration.  However, during these same bleak years spent beneath the cloud of the Patriot Act and its continuing erosion of civil liberties and penalization of dissent, the uses of the internet exponentially increased.  By 2004, thousands upon thousands of new blogs were started every day, and  access to the means of production and circulation came into the hands of citizens through forms of sociable web practices to an extent never before witnessed.  The journalists, art-activists, and media scholars who contributed to Digital Media and Democracy offer diverse views of these hypes and hopes about the democratizing potential of the Internet, and whether and how it is significantly changing journalism.  The book represents many places along the  optimism/skepticism continuum. People will gain hope from reading the sobering yet dedicated insights and work of journalists such as Amy Goodman, Hassan Ibrahim from Al Jazeera, and Deepa Fernandes from WakeUp Call, WBAI Radio New York. The book opens with founder of Free Press and Media Reform Robert McChesney’s overview of “The State of Media” which summarizes U.S. legislative policy and corporate media ownership. It then moves on to topics such as tactical media (Alessandra Renzi), philosophies of digital media politics (Geert Lovink), censorship of Internet access and global policies and subversion (Ronald Deibert), and the relationship of the U.S. press to democracy (Susan Moeller).

Readers will also learn about cutting edge scholarship and studies of “tactical media” in articles which address satiric interventions into the media-scape by The Yes Men, and Jon Stewart and The Daily Show (Graham Meikle, Boler with Turpin). The international practices of digital art activism are explored in an interview with media artists Shaina Anand in India and Ricardo Rosas of Brazil.  Other authors question the radical potential of digital media. Scott, for example,  analyzes “blog-flops” ( blogs that should have reshaped mainstream media coverage yet failed to do so) while  Statzel offers a disturbing account of how white supremacists effectively use internet for organizing and building vast membership.   Experts in the area of communications and journalism offer snapshots of such practices as citizen journalism (Chris Atton), as well as the ideal vs. actual practices of journalists and news (Axel Bruns).

It is my hope that readers, in the end, will be able to situate the hype about the democratization of the Internet, while simultaneously taking stock of the tremendous impact of sociable media and tactical media on both traditional journalism and the public imagination of democracy.  By engaging in the book’s many debates , I hope that readers will be inspired to join local and global efforts to ensure equitable access to the internet and airwaves, and to creating community, local, and educational based creative and political uses of digital multimedia.

Any highlights on your current or future research projects?

I have just completed co-editing an issue of the Electronic Journal of Communication with Ted Gournelos on “Irony and Politics: User-Producers, Parody, and Digital Publics” (http://www.cios.org/www/ejcmain.htm).  I am completing, with the help of an astounding research team, a three-year funded project “Rethinking Media and Democracy, and Citizenship After September 11,” a qualitative research project on “digital dissent”: How is digital multimedia used to create organized networks of dissent in relation to mainstream media? What are the motivations of the hundreds of thousands of people using the Social Web to express their political views and share creative political productions? “Rethinking Media, Democracy and Citizenship” has carefully investigated these questions through discourse analysis of online media, 35 interviews with user-producers, an extensive online survey, and collaborative analysis of our findings with a savvy research team of scholars, journalists, and activists (details can be found on www.meganboler.net).

In the meantime…it is fascinating to watch the U.S. electoral politics unfold within the digital media environment from my “ex-pat” position here in Toronto, Canada.  I am currently trying to ensure that the state of Virginia, where I last resided in the U.S., allows me to cast my ballot. I hope to have book launches in Toronto, New York, Amsterdam, and Vancouver for Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times that will also serve as benefits for non-profit organizations seeking to uphold digital media rights.