Happy New Year: Hope Against Hopelessness for the New Year 2013

Happy New Year graphic 2013 © Sunitbajgal | Wikimedia Commons

Accused of being an optimist once again last year, I was sure that Barack Obama would be re-elected and that this potentially had great importance. As the election contest unfolded, it seemed to me that Romney and the other Republican candidates made little sense and that a broad part of the American electorate understood this. A major societal transformation was ongoing and Obama gave it political voice: on the role of government, American identity, immigration, social justice and a broad array of human rights issues. Thus, I think the re-election has broad and deep significance, and I conclude the year, therefore, thinking that we are seeing the end of the Reagan Revolution and the continuation of Obama’s.

But, of course, I realize that my reading is a specific one, and partisan at that. My friends on the left are not as sure as I am that Obama really presents an alternative. From their point of view, he just puts a pretty face on the domination of global capitalism and American hegemonic military power. I have to admit that I view such criticism with amusement. It takes two forms. The criticism is either so far a field, so marginal, that it is irrelevant, leftist sectarianism, which is cut off from the population at large, confined to small enclaves in lower Manhattan (where I work and have most of my intellectual discussions) and the upper west side, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Austin, Texas, Berkley, California, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Brooklyn and the like. Or there is the happy possibility that the critiques of Obama and the Democrats engage popular concerns and push responsible political leaders to be true to their professed ideals. I have seen signs of both of these tendencies, significantly in the Occupy movement. I hope the leftist critics of Obama pressure him to do the right thing. Marriage equality is an important case study.

I think the criticism of Obama from the right is much more threatening. If conservative critics of Obama don’t take seriously the significance of the election results, they are not only doomed . . .

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Facebook and the Digital (R)evolution of a Protest Generation

Cover of 'I ragazzi del '77', by Enrico Scuro in collaboration with Marzia Bisognin and Paolo Ricci (Bologna: Baskerville, 2012).

In 2011, protests across the globe placed contentious politics at the heart of media attention. From the Arab Spring to the global Occupy movements, the world was caught in a rapid of rebellion. The role of new media in sparking, diffusing and connecting these protests did not go unnoticed.

But it’s not only the younger generations of protesters who increasingly have recourse to digital and mobile media in their activism. Old-timers are discovering new media technologies as well. This was exemplified in the recent publication of a series of photo albums on Facebook, containing hundreds of snapshots of Italian activists from a 1970s student movement, the so-called “Movement of ’77.” This was not the first attempt to reunite the 1977 generation, and yet, it has never been so successful. What makes Facebook different? Are we dealing with plain nostalgia here? I would rather argue that these digital photo albums, which open up a whole new perspective on the 1970s, as they turn attention away from dominant memories of terrorism and violence, have potentials in that they contribute to a more inclusive, alternative “history from below.”

In 2011, Time Magazine elected global activists “person of the year”. That same year, Italian student protests which had occurred 35 years ago revived on the web as photographer Enrico Scuro – class of ’77 – uploaded his photographic collection to Facebook. In doing so, he unchained enthusiastic reactions from former protesters, who tagged themselves into the photographs and left comments of all sorts. People also sent Scuro their own photographs, thus contributing to what has become something of an online family album, currently containing over 3,000 photographs. As they narrated personal anecdotes, complemented by other people’s recollections, the former protesters collectively reconstructed the (hi)story of a generation, a history not tainted by traumatic memories of terrorism and political violence – typical of the official and public version of the Italian 1970s. Furthermore, the Facebook rage led to a series of reunions outside the virtual world and, a few months ago, to the publication . . .

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