There appears to be a slight stir regarding the impending irrelevancy of traditional academic journals and the formalized processes they enact when formulating their contents, which, of course, consist of submissions made by contributors to the field. The specific social process that is followed during the decision making regarding whose work merits publication - referred to as peer review - is conducted by established members of the discipline, who assess the scholarly merit of submissions according to the standards that they adopt, propagate and revision.
The exclusionary properties instantiated by this internal decision making process, only including the input of those who are already recognized as dominant members of the profession, is rapidly becoming obsolescent, due to the publicity that is provided by online venues of representational space. This availability of representational space that is not controlled and distributed by an oligarchy of alleged experts - and we certainly have no reason to suspect that they are anything other than experts, since they are also charged with determining what qualities are consistent with one’s possession of expertise - has already motivated in one case a formidable figure in mathematics, from Russia, to bypass the peer review of the academy, and, instead, publish his work directly on an online journal that provides.
These are important developments for the following reasonings: The products of academic research should be freely available to the people who fund it. In short, if my taxes are responsible for the funding of research - such as my taxes contributing to the budget of state universities - then I should not have to pay Blackwell - or, even worse, Nature - to read the conclusions derived from the research I have, in part, paid for. Additionally - and this is related to the erosion of the powers traditionally wielded by the oligarchs of disciplinarity - the pursuit of knowledge should not be predicated upon professional membership; rather, it should be founded upon a social condition that is open and inclusive, engendering a positive attitude toward epistemic pluralism, where social identities and individual biographies are not parsed, for purposes of determining who exhibits the semiology of professionalism, when assessing the merits of the work. Instead, in the tradition of Popperian philosophy, objectivism should be the measure determining the inclusion of contents into the aggreed upon knowledge belonging to any particular field of study.
Russell Cole
To begin, you might take a moment’s pause when I mention that Foucault – who developed the analytic, Bio-power, used to understand power, its circulation, and its effects – had originally set out to study the development of sexuality. One’s first inclination is to presume that sexuality has remained constant throughout the scope of the history of human existence. This might be true with respect to the purely biological aspects of sexuality, allowing for reproduction. Although, even such an assumption limiting itself to purely biological distinctions between the sexes and the role in reproduction that the complimentary functions of the male and female in the process of procreation provide might not be entirely supportable, since subversive biology has introduced into the mix various gradients – what are called morphs – which constitute additional sexual classifications, which – despite their androgyny, in some cases – continue to provide important functions within the context of genetic populations.
to dislodge many preconceptions of sexuality that you might possess, which translate into expectations that sexual identities were a constant through human existence, I should point out that Hellenistic Culture did not make distinctions among men with respect to their proclivities to engage in pleasures of the body with other men, or women, or, for that matter, pubescent boys. All of these activities failed to possess any significance beyond merely constituting pleasures of the body. In other words, one’s sexual appetites did not indicate a particular identity associated with a form of sexuality. Therefore, they failed to possess concepts, marking social identities, such as gay, or heterosexual, or pedophile. In fact, man-boy relationships were considered appropriate as long as they were structured according to ethical imperatives that reflected the fact that the participants in these relations were both Free Men; the man as well as the boy. Therefore, there were concerns about the man dominating the boy in the relationship, and subjecting the younger counterpart to a form of subjugation inappropriate for any Free Man to endure. Consequently, these relationships were fomented through an elaborate courting process where the older man would present the boy with gifts until the younger member in the affair finally felt that it was appropriate for him to reciprocate in a romantic fashion.
This process might be comparable to popular conceptions in American society regarding the courtship stages that are executed in order for a man to seduce a woman. The woman, for various reasons – not least of which includes potentially being labeled as sexually promiscuous – reserves intimate relations with the man – according to this perception of heterosexuality and its entailments – until she feels she has performed sufficient impression management work to ensure that her motives appear to involve more than simply inciting the pleasures associated with sexual intercourse. The preceding description is, of course, not universally held, and is now way supposed to be more than a reference to what might be considered a traditional conceptualization of sexuality in American society. Obviously, following the Second Wave of Feminism and its revision of the definitions of ‘woman’ and its relationship to ‘man,’ many women no longer feel the encumbrance experienced by such a ritualism. Furthermore, it should be mentioned that Sexual Liberationist ideologies have existed prior to the Sexual Revolution that is typically associated with the 1960’s. Sexual Liberation was prevalent during periods such as the 1920’s; sometimes – although not entirely accurately – associated with the counter-cultural movements referred to as the Bohemians. In opposition to the Sexual Liberationist discourses, scholars in sexuality typically identify what is referred to as Sexual Communitarian discourses, which stress the important of placing moral restrictions upon sexuality for the benefit of societal and community social structures.
Referring back to Hellenistic sexual conventions, I do not want to explore this subject any further, for obvious reasons. However, compare this understanding of the identities and the expected relationships among them – especially, since the older men who seduced, “The beautiful boys of Athens,” also had wives and the men would, additionally, partake in sexual activities with their wives – with our current understanding of sexuality, which the Greeks, quite obvioosly, did not possess.
r purposes of efficiency and expediency – when it comes to correcting behaviors socially defined as deviant – we have medicalized sexuality; consequently, leading to an understanding a man-boy relationship as something that indicates more than a pleasure of the body, but, additionally, an underlying psychic abnormality, and, in fact, a pathology that we might call pedophilia. Now consider, why have we created an intellectual environment where we have academic professionals devoting their careers to the study of this invisible – although, ‘character’ defining – psychiatric attribute – residing somewhere in a space we can only imagine in our mind’s eye – referred to as the psyche - called pedophilia? Why might we as a culture find this kind of relationship – which must be a result of our cultural conditioning, because the Greeks certainly did not possess such a sediment – so aberrant? What social forces are responsible for generating a cultural condition where we feel compelled to regulate – not only health – but what descriptions or polemics can be offered while being taken seriously, regarding issues pertaining to sexuality? If one is labeled under a social category that falls under the provision of psychiatry, he or she no longer possesses the prerogative to participate in public discourse regarding issues and public policies concerning such matters. Obviously, the institutional forces responsible for conditioning us to interpret particular behaviors as symptomatic of illness have a profound effect, because they not only define what constitutes a sexually related pathology, but preemptively discredit those who might argue in opposition to the medico-juridical discourses produced by these institutions.
I would suggest that the ultimate precipitant to our aversions toward socially defined ‘unnatural’ forms of sexuality rests in our conditioning into a systematization of social institutions and, more specifically, the relationships and conducts – what we call roles in sociology – they define and impose upon our bodies and the ways we use them. Further, our internalization of these codes, which we come to apply upon ourselves when evaluating our own behaviors, and, additionally, what we should aspire to when comporting in the social reality we have been socialized to understand and embody with respect to its prescriptions for healthy versus unhealthy modes of conduct.
All of the definitions of good health versus pathology are definitions and understandings generated by the complex of disciplinarian knowledge adjudicating and constructing institutions that have been littered so prolifically in the civil societies of Modernity. It is due to the semiology of these disciplines – i.e., psychologists, doctors, social workers, sociologists, demographers, and criminologists – where they symbolically own membership to science – that their discourses are endowed with a preemptive property causing it to trump in knowledge competitors; thus, reserving the authority to legislate truth.
This is all fie and good. However, think back to the hyperactive – or, what we could, in a different sense, refer to as aware and attentive to his surroundings – young male, who fails to conform with behavioral expectations; resulting in his treatment by medical professions, who feed him stimulants in order to make him disinterested with the environment that surrounds him, and, instead, capable and willing to stare into a text book, as he is trained to assume a position as a laborer – where he performs mind numbing repetitive tasks – contributing to the production of resources that ultimately belong to other people.
All of these forms of correction and treatment and training fall under the expansion of the concept, Bio-power. Concretely, I am referring to the interests that compel society to regulate the pleasures of the body in a way the implements sexuality as an organizing schema that maintains social relationships in way that society is ensured of reproducing – in an orderly and consistent manner – the identities, who are defined by virtue of their contributions to the production of social resources. In order to regulate this system, so that it continues to function, disciplinarians have innovated an expansive repository of knowledge implemented – often through the operations of medical professionals, such as doctors and psychiatrists, and quasi-health care professionals, ch as social workers and counselors, who have devised corrective mechanisms serviceable for the purposes of normalizing behaviors that fail to conform to this homogenized field of social agents whose existences are integrated into a systematization, allowing for the manufacturing and disproportionate distribution of products.
I had thought windows live writer to be a well integrated and multi-functional suite. However, this apparatus that I used for this post is integrated much more seamlessly with the Mozilla browser. Additionally, for those who are doing research, scribefire offers a few unique functions that facilitates the process of managing the information that one retrieves while surfing the web.
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What is the role of authorship in the social context of Web 2.0? In order to begin to understand the transformation that has taken place - reshaping the institution of authorship as it existed previously to the expansion of Web 2.0 - it is useful to begin by examining the changes in many of the legalities that are attached to Web 2.0 authorship. For and foremost, legal institutions have been developed such as the Creative Commons licensing, which effectively remove many of the prohibitions that are associated with the use and re-appropriation of materials that were once restricted due to the rights associated with the proprietorship of publicly available documents. The expression, “Share and share alike,” has become a common phrase - in the context of Web 2.0 - indicating that the use of material authored by another is only restricted if one attempts to lay claim to that work in a way that reflects more traditional conventions embedded in authorship that demand reference and citation as well as only non-monetary benefits that might result from possessing a copy of another’s work. A Creative Commons is typically tailored in order to allow others to use one’s work for commercial purposes as long as they make that work available for others to similarly benefit from its existence. Although these loss of proprietorship once attached to instances of authorship is certainly not the only form that can be assumed by a Creative Commons License, it does reflect to preponderance of uses associated with a Creative Commons. Further, the conventions set out by GNU also reflect the loss of the legacy of authorship,which extend implications from the institution of property, in order to abandon the effects of more conventional institutions dictating the meaning and social consequences of property in favor of the ramifications concomitant with sharing and sharing alike.
What can be inferred from the preceding that might shed light on the appropriate path of inquiry for understand the meaning of authorship in Web 2.0? First off, the use of the term, “Commons,” certainly possesses semantic significations that extend beyond the lexicon’s role in forming a distinctive referring expression. the Commons is an institution that entails an absence of private property, in order to create a field of resources that is publicly available - and the public in the traditional formations of the institution of the Commons only extended to include those who could lay claim to opportunities to access the resources by membership to a Peoples or a Public. The same description holds sway in the context of Web 2.0, because membership to the Public entails the adoption of the conventions and ethics associated with institutions, such as sharing and sharing alike, which provide qualifications that must be met in order to obtain a status of membership in the public. This does not entail an interpretation of Web 2.0 communities as exclusionary, because such an adoption of the aforementioned conventions is not something that ascribes a status of outsider to anyone who elects or desires to enter into the social contract defining the Commons.
To further tease out the significations of the role of authorship in the context of Web 2.0, it is advantageous to look at social institution that belongs to a field of social activity that falls outside the Commons, but nevertheless produces commodities that are relevant to the resources sought in the Commons, and attempts to benefit from the integration of some of its intellectual projects into the open field of resources constituting the Commons.
The recent developments in Microsoft’s releasing of programming for purposes of engendering open sourcing communities under the auspices of peculiar licenses is of interest because it is demonstrative of an entity that is attempting to come to terms with Web 2.0 while continuing to promote its own interests, which are defined in the context of alternative - sometimes competing - social fields shaped by different conventions and conceptualizations of social institutions such as property. Microsoft seems to allow for the use, modification, and enhancement of its code. However, it insists on implementing a restriction forbidding the live deployment of applications, derived from Microsoft coding, by independent developers without the expressed consent of Microsoft. The licensing agreement is certainly more complex than the description provided above; nevertheless, the preceding encapsulation appears to be the understanding that is circulating among programming communities coalescing around message boards and so forth, so I shall use it for the time being. This is an issue that calls for further exploration due to its relevancy in the more general considerations concerning the form that has been assumed by authorship in the changing environment of knowledge development and distribution.
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A working paper currently embodying the initial stages of analyses, which were created in reflection to observations gathered during ethnographic research conducted upon third-party sociopolitical movements in American society. The research included participant observation in a Midwestern State Green Party , as well as the Populist Party of America . I layout some of the major themes that have emerged during the research and analysis performed during the execution of this project. Most importantly, I examine the possibilities for radicalized sociopolitical movements in American society that have been engendered through the proliferation of Internet communications. I contend that this new form of representational space offers a potential for publicity that is unprecedented. This is due to the absence of the institutionalized gate-keeping devices that have operated as regulatory mechanisms for a dialogical process, where access to the modes of representation has been a privilege enjoyed by the few and often the elite. Such editorial devices have served as a filter, preventing discursive forms that have fallen outside the normative grids underlying discourse that embodies the interests of standpoints, who have historically controlled representational spaces and, consequently, the publicity of public spheres belonging to American social formations.
My participation in radicalized sociopolitical movements came to assume a capacity where I contributed to Internet media campaigns that sought to exploit the insights of the new paradigm in Web based programming, Web 2.0, and its instances of Social Media. I argue that Social Media and the design patterns, according to which Social Media are devised, are extensible to the domain of practical knowledge development - belonging to Public Sociology.
It is probably advantageous to first provide a description of this document’s purpose as well as its architectonics, in order for the significance of the various literary objects contained herein to present themselves to the reader in a more transparent form.
To begin with the teleological principles: The study is a contribution to the sociology of social movements and the sociology of mass media. However, since it deals primarily with the sphere of American sociality that can be termed as the sociopolitical, more basically, this document may be both an augmentation and specification to political sociology. Further, this study additionally purports to be a contribution to public sociology, which simply indicates that the knowledge belonging to professional sociological pursuits is integrated into the social knowledge already belonging to extant social publics falling outside the scope of sociology’s praxes that are taken up in the context of the Academe and its sociological professional enterprises. Therefore, this document is intended – not only to forge additional sociological knowledge – but to tailor its sociological components so they are of service to organic publics, qualifying – in this particular instance – as sociopolitical movements whose ultimate agenda consist of transforming the power relations embodied by and defined within American sociopolitical institutions. In this respect – along with the fact that the sociopolitical movements addressed herein are socially marginalized – these contents are both contributory to political sociology as well as social action theory.
The empirical research involved participant observation in two sociopolitical organizations falling within the realm of third-party oppositional culture in the United States: The United States Green Party and the Populist Party of America . The preponderance of research performed upon the two political organizations constituted what has come to be referred to as virtual ethnography; a form of participant research that is conducted in virtual spaces engendered by Web based communicative technologies. Although, since the research conducted upon the Green Party was supplemented with ethnography performed in real spaces, research activities assumed, in addition to virtual ethnography, a more conventional ethnographic form.
Although involving the work of participant observation, during the periods of the project in which research was conduct, the empirical research did not follow the typical Grounded Theory methodological prescriptions prevalently deployed in sociological praxis. Immersion in virtual spaces and the concomitant reliance in the context of research activities in virtual spaces upon computational mechanisms acquainted me with practices deployed by specializations in computer science. Subsequently, I modified my approach when executing the research practices associated with, putting to task insights derived from readings of theorists belonging to the scientific and the technological enterprises of software design and application testing.
The methodology section explains the procedures I developed under the partial instruction of one of the more radical, although recognizable, thinkers in computer science, who deviates from orthodoxy by virtue of his infusion of philosophical insights, derived from discourses falling outside the boundaries of analytic philosophy – into his understanding of the procedures applicable to his empirical research. Specifically, I incorporated guidelines developed for the execution of exploratory testing: a methodology that emphasizes the heuristics that can be developed during the engagement occurring under the meta-theoretical directions of what I would call an epistemology of fallibilism. I found that the deployment of heuristics - even in the context of computer science - could provide a viable alternative to the use of statistical measures.
By the nature of exploratory testing, the trajectories of research followed no definitive research design that would inhibit extemporaneous decisions made in situ. Rather, exploratory testing allows for the pursuit of objectives that are only tangential to the initial concerns that were responsible for disclosing the alternative opportunities for further accumulation of empirical discovery. Consequentially, ethnography conducted under exploratory testing possesses a centrifugal dynamic that is not necessarily present in during instances of Grounded Theory : an approach to ethnography that attempts to narrow the field of empirical concerns by continuing to focus upon a single recurring process, or pattern, rather than allowing the scope of the research to proliferate.
The result of exploratory testing in my own case led to the broadening of the thesis I was involved in forging. As opposed to limiting findings to the political organization of the Green Party, I increasingly came to possess larger concerns, which enveloped American oppositional political culture as a single cultural phenomenon in American social affairs. Additionally, I found myself in ideological conflict with the Green Party on a consistent basis, where I often objected to the implicitly proposed expansions of statist institutions embodied in many of the Green’s policy proposals for socioeconomic reform.
For instance, they would claim to promote economic diversity through their formulation of ideal economic conditions, which were labeled under the term, Community Economics. However, their understanding of diversity consisted of all economic agents conforming to their values, which would entail cottage industry and sustainable – according to the Green definition of sustainability – modalities of production. The Greens contend that the implementation of Community Economics would, in fact, create economic diversity. However, the Green Party positions regarding economic reform seems only to accommodate, as legitimate expressions of economic productivity,
My political ideology was profoundly more Libertarian, not in respect to free-market capitalism and the Libertarian tendency to use it as a conceptual prototype for the resolution of all social issues, but with respect to my feelings toward statist institutions, as well as the inherent undesirability of the paternalistic relationship that political structures can assume in relation to individual agents. Also, I have began to recognize the finance industry as the most salient issue to address for a movement that wanted to actually level the massive inequalities
Furthermore, after becoming versed in this typically neglected aspect to the American story, I became fixated on the truly unique poignancy it deserved in any narration of American sociopolitical history; one characterized, in most every other instance, as a historical rendering that has obfuscated class; economic inequality; as well as stratifications extant within sociopolitical institutions; all of which can be conceptualized – although they rarely happens to be – along patrician and plebeian dimensions. This stratification has persisted for so long and it has had such a profound influence upon the cultural codes – which go on to reinforce the this social arrangement – that shape and form the American understanding of sociopolitical institutions and the relations that are ascribed therein that it has gone unmarked in American discourse.
It should not be understated the impact that implicit sociocultural traditions have upon the surface reality, the veneer of American politics. As Tocqueville pointed to, Americans rarely voiced radicalized sentiments toward their sociopolitical institutions and their operations. In fact, as he considered, American democracy – in the form it assumed – might not be possible without such willing obedience among the population of America .
The deferential posture that Americans have been conditioned to assume in relation to civil and political institutions reinforces this lack of discursive treatment of a society divided along elitist and commoner lines. American history, by and large, has been accounted for under the pre-determinacy of Whiggishness, discounting enduring quasi-caste distinctions as temporal aberrations to an underlying narrative that ultimately tells of its advancement toward an increasingly democratic condition. There are, of course, notable exceptions to American Whig renditions of history, such as The People’s History of the United States. However, another treatment of these issues is by no means a contribution to an already saturated field of political sociological inquiry.
As both a result of my new interest in an organization that called itself the Populist Party of America as well as a family history - although fairly distant at this point in time, which, nevertheless, included political participation in populism - I began researching the history of this movement, which presented itself in its fullest embodiment in the form of the People’s Party. After becoming versed in populism, I was awe struck at what appeared to be an under treated anomaly when in taken in the purview of the overall course of American sociopolitical history: a narrative that persistently omits accounts of sociopolitical and economic inequality; a lack of criticality that contributes to a facade of civic egalitarianism originally manifested in what has become the persisting mythology of Jeffersonian republicanism. This false ideology configures a conceptualization of American political relations, which neglects to recognize the influences had upon political opportunity by the material conditions belonging to the economy.
The Jeffersonian version Libertarianism exclaimed the virtues of the citizen agriculturalist; a body composed of citizens who stood side by side one another in lateral sociopolitical uniformity. Thus economic class was conceived in the Jeffersonian account of American sociopolitical relations. The narratives circulative in the Jeffersonian account reinforced an abstraction consisting of and, needless to say, such an account failed to address the impact that economic inequalities, or class, had upon the feasibility of each citizen coequally affecting the public policies of the American state .
Populism – as it was incepted in economic affairs of the Midwestern and Southern farmer in the latter part of the Twentieth Century – was an emergent pattern of economically directed intellectualism, which – through processes of its development – came to identify itself as a political movement with a more prodigious agenda than mere economic reform. Furthermore, it was a consequence of organic intellectual social processes. By that, populism culminated largely out of social mechanisms that existed independently from the institutional guard belonging to the Academe and other vested interests. Of course, populism was affected by Marxism, and, on occasion, in some of its expressions, it appeared proto-Marxist. However, the populist critiques of the economy and, in particular, the finance and monetary systems proved to be not only original and penetrating, but, additionally, they ultimately served as the precipitants of economic reforms that had lasting legacies.
For instance, the contemporary conceptualization of the free-market is heavily indebted to the populist movement in America. It was through populism that legislative fixtures intended to promote free-market competition, such as anti-trust and anti-monopolistic statutes, came to regulate the practices of capitalist interests. Indeed, we can go so far as to say that it was through populism that the modern conception of the free-market came about. Even more, it was due to its emphasis upon a competitive market that the Democratic Party was amenable to the infusion of the populist ideology into its platform, which would come to mark its public disposition throughout the first half of the Twentieth Century. I realize that many students of American political history would delineate among the Populist era: the period when Bryan was the leading figure; and the Progressive era – associated with Wilson, as well as, the New Deal, which, of course, was the domestic policy of FDR. No matter, as John Gerring has demonstrated through a careful content analysis of American Party rhetoric, the consistencies among the three proposed eras out-weighed the significance of the differences demonstrable in the three proposed historical periods of Democratic Party ideology.
Many discount the ethical accomplishments of the People’s Party, which was the first to embrace multiple racial identities; the first to include women in its organizations, prior even to Women’s suffrage; and the first to demand in a recognizable voice the democratization of various political institutions that had been, till then, the decision-making province of political elites. Recourse to the denial of populism as an event that demonstrated advanced ethical and moral sensibilities on the part of its conceivers, promoters, and adherents is typically sought through citing aspects of the multi-faceted social critique leveled by populism, with the intended result of identifying internal inconsistencies in the populist ideology.
For instance, one of the more prevalent criticisms of populism is that it reflected a racial tolerance while, concurrently, possessing a nativist agenda. However, this criticism speaks more of the lack of analytical faculties by those who make such a claim as it points to the lack of sophistication in the populist social critique formed in reflection of the American Gilded Age . I am always dumbfounded each and every time I find myself explaining to detractors of populism that there is no a priori analytical relationship between nativism and racism. Although there might be empirical relationships between the two conditions, where nativists tend also to be racists, this has nothing to do with the People’s Party, per se. America was already a multi-racial society prior to populism’s emergence, and the nativist policies taken up in the advocacies of the People’s Party were not latent with racial discrimination. Objecting to undesirable immigration is not necessarily predicated upon race. Instead, as the case was with the People’s Party, nativism was based upon the impact that particular elements of any society might bring about if permitted to migrate to the United States.
Additionally, and this should be apparent to anyone who has expended any efforts, at all, when attempting to come to terms with American immigration – despite the conventional wisdom, belonging to American economics – which we are persistently instructed to embrace and believe – immigration does not proportionally benefit all sectors of the economy. One such group that certainly does not experience positive outcomes resulting from immigration consists of those who dwell in the middle and lower tiers of the labor market. Immigration both diminishes the value of labor in every sector of the economy to which its skills happen to apply, as well as, posing obstructions to the successful formation of cooperative institutions, either constituting organized labor, or qualifying as the financial cooperatives, such as credit unions, that leverage the monetary resources of those who are excluded from the many implicit trusts that dominate the financial industries controlled by organized-capitalism.
Indeed, the recent revelations concerning the use of Visas for the import of labor to be employed in the technology sectors of the economy reinforces the conclusion that immigration is not advantageous for labor. Despite the conventional wisdom, as it turns out, the overwhelming preponderance of Information Technology workers who are allowed entry into the United States are in the lower strata of the technocratic hierarchy comprised of Information Technology laborers. Therefore, America is not taking in the best and the brightest; rather, corporate America is merely increasing productivity by importing cheap labor that is only qualified to work in the most entry level of positions in an organization’s IT infrastructure. This – topped with the fact that wage stagnation, in recent history, has been an enduring feature of the employment market for the middle and working classes – indicates that immigration is only beneficial for those who dwell in the higher socio-economic tiers of American social relations; the ownership classes belonging to corporate America.
Another ill conceived critique of populism consists of instances where commentators remark upon the internal inconsistency of populism’s anti-statism along with many of its ‘socialist’ sentiments. It is true that populism called for the nationalization of the railroading industry as well as the banking industry. However, unlike what nearly amounts to ideological absolutism on the part of contemporary Libertarians, the populists were not constrained when devising possible solutions for social problems by a conviction that all instances of government should be curtailed, even in scenarios where the absence of government intervention appears to create a more undesirable social condition. Additionally, populism and its instances of economic cooperatives is more an expression of anarchistic sensibilities than anything approaching socialism. Certainly, no one can credibly contend that organic cooperatives intended to extricate the American farmer from his social positioning that amounted to serfdom was motivated out of an affinity of statist institutions. Indeed, it was only until such endeavors proved to be ineffective against the trusts that had been established by organized-capitalism that the populist movement became politicized.
This is not to say that populism – especially when taken up by the Democratic Party – did not come to reflect a pro-statist position on the majority of matters qualifying as issues of public concern. Nevertheless, this ideological posture on the part of Democratic populists was perceived as a necessity in order to guard against the publicly harmful excesses of what came to be called “predator elites” in the economy. To paraphrase The Great Commoner; also known as William Jennings Bryan:
Men are the creation of God. Corporations are the creation of man, and what man creates man can destroy.
In respect to this – which can be identified with less ambiguity as the regulatory measures needed to quell the popularly harmful greed of the corporation – that the adoption of a pro-statist approach toward public policy reveals its real character: Government was a device of necessity, and the pro-statism of the Democratic populists should not be conflated – in its interpretation - with the authoritarianism embodied by the Whig-Republicans and their mercantilist conception of political and economic social relationships.
Finally, what more that can be said about populism arises from an inference that is generated from mechanisms that are alien to the processes of scholarly research, but deserves mentioning, nonetheless. The populist movement seemed to stimulate the activation of ethical dispositions belonging to the social characters of those who would come to be participate in this movement. Individuals, whose ideologies had been immured in white supremacist backdrops, eventually identified with African-Americans, as social agents with whom they suffered the exploitations engendered by common same social conditions. In fact, there are accounts of former slave owners coming to advance the causes of African-Americans by serving as chairs to African-American farmer alliances.
Therefore, rather than specifically addressing fabricated shortcomings of the People’s Party, it is more worthwhile for a student of political sociology to treat the aspects belonging to this movement that set it apart from nearly all other facets of the American experience. Specifically, what strikes the attention of the epistemic agent – who is not predisposed to dismiss the accomplishments of the various farmer alliances and the People’s Party, which they came to establish – is the fact that these dissolute, degraded, and politically inexperienced agrarians could come to mount the most redoubtable third-party insurgence to the duopoly embedded in partisan politics in the whole of American history.
Families in the Midwest and South – who dwelled in a social condition where observances of women and children afoot in bare feet was commonplace – arose from a state of sociopolitical ignorance to one of penetrating insight and criticism upon American social relations. Even more, the political ideology developed by populists was emergent, composed from intellectual processes that were organic. Additionally, the populists were faced – when developing this intellectual formation – with constructing their own social institutions through which their knowledge could be manufactured as well as disseminated. Journals needed to be published and circulated. Travelling lecturers had to be trained and financially supported. Financial schemes had to be creatively fostered a deployed in an attempt to coerce other economic agencies into bargaining directly with the farmer alliances, so that the trust under which the crop-lean system was actualized and enacted could be overcome. Finally, populism transcended sectionalisms – which were the by-products of superficial material conflicts in American society, such as white supremacy and its opposition to African-American interests – in order for African-Americans as well as Southern Whites to attend the same gatherings and applaud enthusiastically as the political orator explained racism as an instrument used by Southern elites to deflect the attention of the farmers from their real adversaries, whom Blacks and Whites commonly faced.
Recently, I had listened to a service given by a Unitarian Church in New York, which commemorated the outing of the Pentagon Papers. At this service, I became audience to descriptions of the subversive inner-workings of activists responsible for the publication of these documents, which were entered into the Congressional Record by Gravel, and, finally, published in book form by a Unitarian publishing syndicate. I was struck by words that were spoken in reference to Gravel that remarked upon an aspect to American culture where Americans are taught – from the time they assume comfort upon a parent’s lap – to, “avoid looking silly,” or foolish; to avoid orating that which strays beyond the comfortable parameters of orthodoxy. According to the wisdom embedded in this shared stock of social knowledge, not adhering to such standards would render the speaker as suspect to aspersions labeling him or her as a crackpot or a voice from the margins of society to be dismissed, because he or she conveys sentiments that are outside of the recognizable: the familiar domestic environment qualifying as the mainstream.
In contrast to the insightful words spoken of Gravel and his current candidacy for the Democratic Nomination, in recent weeks, I have also heard a speech given by Bill Clinton during the memorial for Arthur Schlesinger. Clinton’s - in remarks that can only be interpreted as self-congratulatory - lauded Lincoln, who had also given oratory at the theater where the service was being held, for attempting to reach out to the, “Great American center,” prior to the collapse of the Nation into civil war. According to Clinton, Lincoln’s initial attempt to avoid confrontation, by remaining amenable to slavery as long as it did not extend into new territories and states, demonstrated an understanding of the great American center and how it allows for progress to be made during intervals belonging to a larger cyclical pattern; where the mushy middle of American politics would slightly tip its balance toward the Left or toward the Right. During instances where the Left was favored, small, incremental steps of progress could be made. However, it required a savvy leader who could continue to appeal to the middle, in order to coax the Country in the right direction without inciting a backlash by introducing proposals that were too radical, which would entail too abrupt a departure from the trails that had already been worn into easily transverse paths.
What are we to make out of these two contrasting stylizations of political existentiality? It is in respect to this question - more than anything else - that has led me to firmly believe that populism has a role to play in the development of the sociology of democracy. My understandings of populism are primarily derived from the historian, Goodwyn, who possessed the uncommon tenacity for summarizing the necessary antecedents for an authentically democratic insurgency to unfold: First, a group must obtain the institutional autonomy needed to formulate a conceptualization of sociopolitical mechanisms operative in a political structure, which foments in contradistinction, and in to varying extent, opposition to the preemptive orders of knowledge and the sociopolitical institutions that are arranged under the cloak of legitimacy derived from these hegemonic discourses. However, as Goodwyn wisely points out, such a development - an alternative episteme - is not, in and of itself, sufficient for democratic insurgency. In America in particular, there is a long untreated - yet, all too pervasive - posture of deference habitually assumed by commoners in relations to the established institutional guards of sociopolitical power. Without a shaking off of the deference toward institutions of the old guard encumbering the shoulders of those - who have long been conditioned to internalize the identity of plebiscite - the provision of an alternative interpretation of the Human Condition - currently embodied in the way things stand - would fail to incite the mobilizing of masses.
According to this parsimonious and elegant rendering of the necessary conditions for a democratic insurgency to take root, Goodwyn goes on in his minor masterpiece, A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt, to catalog the events that culminated in the establishment of the People’s Party. The process that resulted in the type of psychic characteristics necessary for democratic insurgency was a slow incremental process, involving quite a few setbacks and failures on the part of the various farming alliances as they initially endeavored to extricate their members from the crop lien system, which basically amounted to a trust comprised of financial interests along with manufacturing - both of which maintained credit as well as distributional relationships with local town agents, who dealt directly with the farmers. These relationships that were established and protected by the these interests precluded the farmers from entering into the necessary financing arrangements for them to bypass the insufferable arrangements imposed upon them by the local town agents, who extorted as much as possible from the farmers each time the farmer was forced to obtain credit for the oncoming year.
It is in these considerations that Web 2.0 assumes significance. The democratization of representational spaces in civil society fosters both the intellectual autonomy necessary to form alternative sociopolitical interpretations as well as the political self-respect necessary to abandon to the deferential posture assumed in relation to the institutions of the old guard.
In order to provide a brief description of the organizations and the public policies that they advocate, I will begin off by treating the Green Party. Although the Green Party has a legacy of social democracy, the organization has been generally turning in a direction where it mirrors the two established business parties and their corporatist structures. This attempt to integrate into the mainstream of American politics by forming a party organization that submits to orthodoxy can be largely attributed to the movement set in motion by Cobb during the last Presidential election.
However, in opposition to such an interpretation, the movement toward normalcy by the Greens can be exposited through reference of the explosion of support they received after their candidacy of Ralph Nader. During the period when it appeared as though the Greens were acquiring the popular support of a mainstream party, it is natural to suspect that the Party might take up a developmental course with the intended result of placing it in structural conformity with the conventions of American politics proper.
What is important to take from this short deposit of propositions is precisely what marks the organizational affairs of the Populist Party radically different from that of the Green Party: Populist America does not attempt to usurp power from the vested interests that currently monopolize the institutional repositories of power in the field of conflict constituting American politics. Instead, Populist America is involved in forging new insurgent technologies – including the exploitation of Web based communications – for purposes of enacting the reforms it endeavors to achieve.
In fact, the value of decentralization is probably the most commonly cited principle embedded in the platform documents published by the Populist Party. The notion of decentralization is fashioned from a Madisonian conceptualization of republican politics and the tendencies of such a social establishment to fall under the control of a single hegemonic faction. Like Madison, Populist America, in order to contend with the tyrannical possibilities with which republicanism is latent, advocates a refitting of political power within a federated system of polity so that local communities are provided with additional policy making powers. Such an emphasis localized democracy will, in theory, amplify the impact that a single agent can have upon the dynamics shaping his or her socio-ecology, due to the magnified political influence he or she can have in the context of local politics as opposed to politics conducted on a grander scale, such as the case with State and Federal political structures.
This notion of enhancing democracy through the device of political localization has been coined by the Populist Party of America as Localized Democracy. I realize that this model for democratic polity conducted within federalism might appear, prima faci, to be encumbered by an unrealistic conception of the ability of localized communities to effectively regulate the practices of economic entities whose bodies and interests expand far beyond the compounds of localization. Additionally, with the proliferation of Informationalism – and the ensuing collapse of geographical spaces – which has freed the formation of social forms from the parameters imposed by the necessity of immediacy within dimensions of geographical space, one might object to any conceptualization of localized democracy on the basis that such an idealization of social interaction within the contours of real spaces has already entered into a stage obsolescence; a postmortem state incited by the expansion of the spaceless representations of virtualism.
Since I am, in part, responsible for the formulation of localized democracy, I feel compelled to modestly defend against some of the most apparent exceptions that one might take when conceiving of an opposition to it. Obviously, I realize that the nature of the material conditions constituting the economic relations of American society and, increasingly, the world, at large, have made localized policy formation difficult if not impossible. Economic interests transcend the confines determining the extension of the political scope of governmental fixtures. However, if we look to organic social movements and the mechanisms they have devised to contend with corporate institutions targeted for reform, we can see the emergence of a paradigm that is applicable to governance in the context of a globalized economy.
The term, glocalization, has been introduced as a neologism
The Green Party - rhetorically, at least - possesses a similar devotion to the ideal of democratic reform to the United States. However, such a sentiment is often contradicted in the official platform positions that have been adopted by the Green Party. For instance, the Greens advocate an open border with Mexico - even going so far as to suggest employer amnesty for the hiring of undocumented immigrants. Obviously, such a policy is oriented toward the administrations performed on the scale of Federal Government, which, therefore, imposes itself - as a principle of governance - upon all other factions in America, who will be obliged to essentially melt their social infrastructures with that of Mexico and, additionally, Canada.
The Populist Party does not even address undocumented immigration in any statements that could be interpreted as the position of the Party as a whole. However, Populist America would - in the case of the proposals proffered by the Greens - take exception to such a policy due to the fact that it would be interpreted as an affront to democracy and the political autonomy of the various repositories of power within America’s federated system of governance. This this regard – and in the anti-statist tradition of Populism in America – Populist America possesses somewhat of a Libertarian streak in its interpretations of government and its relation to the ability of citizens to be autonomous and self-determining. Of course, as was the case with the Agrarian Revolt of the Nineteenth Century, the mistrust of government is balanced to a some degree with what are often interpreted as socialist sentiments, which spring from a desire to implement democratic reforms to the economy. However, in large measures, this sentiment on the part of Populism reflects more of an anarchist form of economic interpretation, where risk and finance can – supposedly – be achieved through organic cooperatives: a conclusion that, if installed, would not entail submitting, necessarily, to any expanded governmental bureaucracies.
Before going further, I should state that decentralization is a Key-value of the Green Party. However, this philosophical principle finds a different significance in the overall topography of Green ideology than it does in the case of the Populist Party. The Green Party has a plethora of policy positions that are geared to national - and sometimes international - reform while Populist America’s treatment of national governance is focused upon dismantling as many powers as possible that have been accumulated by Federal political fixtures.
The contrasting political theories instanced by the juxtaposition of the Greens with Populist America finds expression within the tactics that are deployed by the two respective groups. The Greens have a centralized approach toward the planning and organization of Party mobilization when striving to accumulate the necessary powers for it to advance its agenda. The Populist Party, alternatively, even applies the concept of decentralization to the organization of its own body.
By this, I am referencing the fact that the Populist Party goes so far as to neglect to construct any substantial hierarchy of offices in its organizational schema. In other words, the Party has adopted an approach to its organization that embraces networking as opposed to other forms of social organization, which take on - in their most pronounced form that stands in contradistinction to the morphology of networking - the form of the American mainstream business parties and their corporatist institutional arranged hierarchical offices that are integrated into internal organs intended to facilitate party planning and party political mobilization on a monolithic scale.
To summarize from the proceeding - in a manner that illuminates the points most salient to the empirical and theoretical considerations of this particular study - the Greens continue to possess an understanding of social organization that falls within the orthodoxy of what can be referenced as organizational capitalism, which is associated with industrial economics: a form of social interaction where the agents are constrained by the obligations of the statuses they assume when operating under the auspices of the institutions to which they possess identification. These social arrangements are not only structured according to hierarchical orderings of agents and the powers - including the positive and negative rights that the offices entail in the context of the institution’s affairs - but the rigidity of the social organization - structured according to the corporatist regime - extends to multiple dimensions of the social intercourse that ensues between and among the agents fall under the auspices of the corporatist complexes.
The most notable organizational property attached to this form of life – the Organizational Ethos - is the synchrony of social actions performed by agents who track and coordinate their behaviors through linear temporal dimensionality. Point in fact, clocks and watches became prevalent only after industrial capitalism became established as the dominate mode of social organization occurring in the economy as well as other social spheres which would also adopt and implement such structuring principles when dictating their own means of social organization.
The Populist Party of America, on the other hand, embraces an alternative to the organizational ethos. Rather than stressing concern over the vertical structuring that the Party might assume, Populist America attempts to facilitate organizational growth that assumes the shape of lateral expansions. Further, there is little emphasis on the development of an integrated hierarchy of offices. Albeit, for the purposes of practicality, I as well as other certain members have taken the initiative in the organization of various loci of internal and external Party related social engagement, where others pull from the resources that are provided – typically upon websites - in order to spread the message and expand the effect of Populist America.
I, for instance, in order not to connote anything that might be associated with an office that wields power, have adopted the title, coordinator. However, the title does not really correlate to any status with an associated role that is endowed with positive expectations, or privileges. I would contend, although, that I do burden myself with overbearing responsibilities.
As I will argue, the contrasting organizational characteristics of the Green Party and the Populist Party of America mark more than mere diverging aesthetic preferences. Instead, this distinction in organizational types entails to alternative approaches toward existing in the political realm of human sociality. The two forms of political existentiality are structured by partially unique ethical precepts that culminate – respectively to the Greens and the Populist Party of America - into alternative sociopolitical ethos that both perceive politics differently as well as the strategies their tactics that can be deployed depending upon how the social field is conceptualized.
As I will endeavor to justify, my contention can be crystallized in the following: The Populist Party of America continues to possess and push forth an agenda that includes radicalized politics, in the sense that the organization calls for restructuring the institutions that comprise American sociopolitical structures. The Greens, on the other hand, during the period of time when the Party was under the central influence of the Cobb regime, underwent alterations through which the Party lost much of its radicalized sociopolitical understandings of democracy and how those characterizations of democracy translated into American governmental changes; a process leading to the movement – still extant within the Green Party to differing degrees – for the Party to develop a structure that discarded with a significant amount of its socially democratic endogenous practices in order to institute measures that would – in theory – make the Party a more substantial and formidable alternative to the Democrats and Republicans.
As I initially set out to perform the research associated with the dissertation, marking the completion of a terminal degree in sociology, I had planned to conduct participant observation upon a Midwestern state Green Party. Additionally, I conceived of my research design under the pretext provided by Grounded Theory: an approach common to sociological ethnographies. Consequently, since Grounded Theory involves an inductive epistemology, I had little incentive to prepare in advance for the fieldwork I was to perform. I did not want to enter into the events comprising the instances of empirical observation with any unnecessary preconceptions, because such prejudices would possibly interfere with my ability to recognize an emergent pattern of social conduct that was unique and previously undetected by research conducted on socio-political organizations.
In order to gain access to the group under investigation, I initially joined the party and began to participate in the forums of debate and discussion, where I invested the effort necessary to acquire some notoriety within the Party’s circles. As I continued to participate in discussions concerning platform policies and methods of political advancement, I had figures from the national structure of the Green Party come in contact with me, offering me guidance concerning tactics and methods serviceable for purposes of personal political advancement, in which I had, really, no interest, apart from their relevancy to the scope of my research. Nevertheless, I seized upon the opportunity, after acquiring recognition by influential members of the Party, and assumed to position of Chair of the Bylaws Committee. The position was not one of Office, which would have required achieving the status as the result of an election held by membership; consequentially, my procurement of the position merely involved a nomination and subsequent ratification by the Executive Committee, which, at the time, was, according to the Bylaws, a functionary comparable to what is typically referenced as a Steering Committee.
The position I held was a peculiar one since I acquired no actual powers associated with the status. My directives where to facilitate work among the committee members upon projects that were delegated to the committee by the Executive Committee, as well as advising the Executive Committee on matters concerning the Bylaws. Fortunately, the Green Party and its various appendages do not typically deploy some version of Robert’s Rules for purposes of its Parliamentary affairs. As a substitute, a more socially democratic version is adopted, which entails a kind of consensus forming dialog, though which unanimous consent is sought, prior to bringing a matter of contention to closure - if it is determined that no resolution can be achieved through dialogic activities - upon which a vote is taken. I found such a method for agreement charming if nothing else and certainly less complimented than a set of parliamentary procedures defined under Robert’s Rules. However - and quite unfortunately - I found that such a methodology was ill suited for the cultural dispositions of the preponderance of the membership, who failed to possess the tenacity for engaging in public forms of dialog. This condition led to a vacuum of power with respect to the decision making processes entailed by the organization, which, subsequently, came to be filled by the more experienced and enthusiastic members of the Party. The acquired, extra-constitutional powers by more prominent members of the State Party led to a rather difficult situation when it came to preserving the bylaws structure of the organization.
Explicitly rendered in the bylaws were preemptive clauses, which endowed the Membership of the Party with the exclusive authority to make legislative modifications to the Party structure. However, since the Party only held conventions - at most - upon a biannual basis, such a provision in the constitution of the Party was unrealistic and, in fact, debilitating. The inability to legislate quickly in order to reflect the contingencies that arose called for alterations in the constituent parts of the organization. The most apparent exemplar of such a difficulty came in the form of moderation within the communicative forums in which Party Members would participate in an affair that - in theory, at least - embodied the dialogic consensus building activities delineated in the parliamentary prescriptions for the organization.
My engagement with, and in, the organization was a tumultuous affair, since I was ill prepared for such work due to an education that, ironically, was primarily devoted to sociology. In short, I was encumbered with a Weberian ideology where I idealized the social order and understood the dimensions of the organization as a posit that existed over and beyond - not in a realist sense, but in a conception that understood a positive normativity that could be juxtaposed as idealization independent from the concrete actions of agents operating under the auspices of collective entity. After becoming familiar with the actual workings of organizational interactions - I abandoned all Weberian pretenses, learning that an effective ontology - in neither a positivist sense nor a realist sense - should be configured in a form that dichotomizes organization from contingent actions committed by agents. Reification only has significance as long as it is continued to be processed in an ongoing basis; never does it obtain an ontological status, because its significance is never independent from its invocation in situ. Furthermore, the reference in speech acts to organizational components or the apparatus in totality assumes contingent significations depending upon the context in which the expression is deployed. To sum from my experiences, organizations are messy affairs - as are all social interactions - in which the ripe chaos of fluctuations; variations, deviations, similarities, and analogous events are glossed under the superficiality of dramaturgically reinforced tacit pretenses.
This proved to be problematic for the following reason: I could not establish, empirically, the relationships between the decision-making processes that determined the sanctioned tasks and projects undertaken by the group with the observations of concrete behaviors of the members who were delegated the responsibility of executing the functions contributory to the completion of the imperatives that were to guide party activity. Since I refused to demarcate competency from preformativity - a device deployed by rationalists, such as Chomsky - I was left in an inferential Limbo, where I could not estimate the significance of various aspects to the decision-making processes, since the subsequent behaviors they precipitated were opaque. Further, due to the refusal to provision an analytic distinction between the knowledge pertaining to how the execution of commands generated from the decision-making processes could be brought about with the actual ability to physically demonstrate the knowledge through concrete actions - I was hesitate to assume that I had adequate knowledge of the processes of decision-making, because there are always multiple frames of reference through which to interpret such affairs. The famous hypothetical deployed to demonstrate this point by Geertz - involving the narration of events in a classroom, where a boy is winking; or, alternatively, shutting and opening his eye due to an involuntary reflex; serves as a archetype for the type of multi-dimensionality of interpretations - depending upon one’s frame of reference - that need to be taken into account when rendering narratives of social events.
In the scenario in question, without the ability to perceive the form of the relationships assumed by decisions and executions, I felt unable to draw any sound inferences regarding the processes of decision-making, because I would not possess the empirical observations necessary to determine the presence of any implicit contents embedded in the observable dimensions to the organizational activities.
However, this is not the resolution to the narrative recounting my evolution of thought as I endeavored to complete the research involved in bringing to a ‘fruition my dissertation in sociology. I underwent another transition with respect to my theoretical orientation when indexing and relating the objects constituting the contents of my experiences. At this time, I became involved in a new movement, which took radically different approaches toward the accomplishment of its sociopolitical reform agenda. The Populist Party of America was in the process of inventing itself, and the individuals involved in the project were of a completely different background than the preponderance of Green Party leaders.
This group was comprised of Web site designers and SEO specialists. It devoted the majority of its time to the innovation of new methods that could alter the social condition through the dissemination of electronic documents. The alacrity to the new possibilities engendered by the Internet was a disposition markedly distinct from the practices of the Green Party. The Green Party attempts to establish a presence as a viable alternative to the opposing faces of the head, often referred to as the Republicrats, by struggling to penetrate the old guard institutions that have traditionally brokerage political power. The Green Party’s efforts primarily went into campaigns to acquire a sufficient number of signatures for entry onto the ballot of major state and, in the case of the Presidency, Federal elections. Even if these unconstitutional restrictions, institutionalized by Republicrat legislation, designed to prevent other parties from usurping any power from the plutocratic class of career politicians belonging to the distinguished departments comprising the preemptive corporate party establishment, were overcome, the candidate running as a Green in these elections would never have the opportunity to surpass the single digit threshold due to other institutions in collusion with the Republicrats in propagating the old guard, such as the corporate mass media. There are simply too many obstacles to surmount in order for a third party entity ever to achieve mainstream status.
The Populist Party, on the other hand, does not attempt to work within an institutional configuration designed to prevent access to insurgent competitors to the inner-regions of polity, where power is delegated to various institutions operating as agencies of government. The Populist Party, in short, works to extend its message through unconventional techniques that exploit technologies yet to be dominated and censured by the corporate establishment. As the computer “teckie” concept became prevalent, we soon recognized the importance of Web 2.0 and the possibilities it fosters for the promotion of a sociopolitical movement.
Web 2.0’s meaning, therefore, extends beyond the scope of computer programming and Internet technology and expands to encompass conditions that constitute a sociological phenomenon. Web 2.0 involves in its current manifestations the deployment of Internet technologies as a platform upon which the communicative field -shaped by the unusually complex language-game in which Web 2.0 is enacted. There is contention over the analytic parameters defining “Web 2.0.” There is a notion that Web 2.0 is a new business paradigm, which it certainly is. However, the significance of Web 2.0 should not be limited to a particular sector of social relations, where it is prevented from offering its full range of potential senses. Joe Lobkwosky has seized upon the concept and has introduced it to the Extreme Democracy discourse. The ideological formation referred to as Extreme Democracy grew out of the Social Software movement, which provided stimulus to the Extreme Democracy contributors by virtue of the observable social patterns that emerged in their interaction when endeavoring to develop open source software. The relationship between the theoretical contents of Extreme Democracy and the form of interaction associated with Web 2.0 is quite evident. Furthermore, the semantics of the debate over Web 2.0 should not impose a barrier thwarting the potential intellectual developments that might result from a liberal deployment of the concept. Therefore, as an operating definition, this document will assume Web 2.0 to span to all knowledge building activities that assume a form of inclusive membership practices as well as community editing protocol.
After beginning to conceptualize the differences between these two organizations, I began to crystallize inferences germane to the purpose of enunciating programmatic recommendations for social movements in the Information Age that lack the social resources - mostly elitism and cronyism - to affect change through the traditional avenues that social movements have conventionally run course within the sphere of polity in an attempt to enact social reform through public policy formation and administration. The institutions comprising power, which are effectively controlled by a class of plutocrats who make government not the business of the people but an exclusionary enclave from which to both protect and extend their privileges, rendering them a people onto themselves, cannot be overcome in a playing field defined by their own terms. Rather, the network of old guard institutions must be combated through insurgent tactics that define the playing field rather than acquiescing to the orthodoxies instituted to prevent populist insurgencies. These insights were substantiated by other recent research in the sociology of social movements: efficacious movements conducted by the Plebeian masses bypassed, to a large extent, these impenetrable institutions and rather directed their energies toward disrupting the flow of intercourse between and among institutions in a more broadly defined field, extending polity, into the economy, and, further, into civil society.
This is a relatively new discursive domain. Additionally, the study of electronic communications is a complicated affair due to a peculiar relationship between the work currently being done and the empirical domain that is being investigated. Of course, issues related to reactivity emerge in every form of empirical research. However, in this scenario the effects are exacerbated because those who study the domain of electronic communications are sometimes concurrently charged with structuring the objects and relations falling under the purview of their empirical considerations.
For example, in the field of communications, there currently exists some contention regarding how electronic databases should be constructed. One side of the issue contends that the databases should be structured in order to preserve disciplinarity, and, in fact, cater to researchers who are interested in finding resources falling under the extension of the disciplines to which they belong. However, in other instances, disciplinarity is not a consideration, which influences the construction of databases that, when queried, return results that span across numerous disciplines; a condition that facilitates cross-disciplinary research. However, agents who are attempting to find relative results for queries intended to return references to studies falling within their particular discipline are challenged.
The relations of relevancy that are assumed by the literary objects included in an electronic database will - in the former of the two hypothetical scenarios - constrain the material that is accessed by members of various disciplines to the writings endogenous to the discipline itself. The latter of the possibilities will engender a greater degree of inter-disciplinary research, because the queries made by the end users will retrieve materials not channeled by any pre-configuration according to parameters that reflect the institutional arrangements that have taken form, organizing knowledge according to the information type architectonics mirroring structures of disciplinarity.
Those in Communications, who study electronic forms of human intercourse have been involved in the design and implementation of electronic archives, intended to provide more accessible access to literary materials for members of various intellectual pursuits. Whether the designers decide to organize the electronic archives according to parameters that reflect disciplinarity versus a holistic approach entails impacts upon the empirical domain that the academic practitioners of communications are, concurrently, investigating and contributing, resulting in a recursive system of inheritance.
Therefore, the studies and polemics justifying their conclusions do not only represent the domain of objects and properties - along with the relationships assumed therein - additionally, by contributing to the discourse, one is actively constituting the sphere of reality that he or she has focused upon during research engagements. Furthermore, as already touched upon, the frenetic pace of process associated with the collapsed geographical dimensions within the interactive media of virtual spaces that are engendered by Informationalism present a jeopardy to scholars, who might invest their careers studying an ephemeral set of phenomena without any substantial legacy and no apparent significance within larger historical narratives. Consequentially, the scholar’s work runs the peril of obsolescence prior to its publication.
For instance, after the first DOT COM bubble burst toward the end of the 1990’s, most of the early work pertaining to electronic democracy was rejected due to sentiments that interpreted such initial assessments of the Internet and its impact upon American civics as overly optimistic and impetuous. Following the crash of the speculations that had driven the technology sector of the market during the first major expansions of Internet services, analysts and scholars had reverted - in reaction to the ebullient excesses leading to the crash - by adopting an attitude toward the Internet and its possible influences upon American civics that was marked by thorough and explicitly exhibited cynicism. With the end of optimistic speculations concerning the potentials for electronic democracy, a wave of literature was ushered in coming from the old guard of political sciences.
These studies purported to discount the significance of the Internet and its potentials as a catalyst for sociopolitical change in America. Numerous studies of the 96 and 2000 Presidential elections were cited, where small percentages of American were estimated to be utilizing the Internet as a source from which to learn of the candidacies of politicians in the Primaries as well as the Presidential Elections. Furthermore, as they often pointed out, those who did use the Internet as a source of information pertaining to elections often only perused sites that were published by firms who were in possession of established brands within other sectors of journalism and political commentary; i.e., the New York Times Web presence.
Further, according to this research and commentary, academics have historically demonstrated a tendency to overestimate the impact that new forms of mass media will have upon American communities and their patterns of interaction as well as the sociopolitical institutions that, alternatively, fall under the sociological conception of societal relations. Frequently referenced exemplars of this pattern among academics are the radio and the television.
One final characteristic of interest is the thematic congruency that underlines much of the analysis - within this discursive formation - upon the Internet and its effects upon American civics consists of the pessimistic tone that is assumed by commentators assessing the prospects for American sociopolitical engagements engendered through the proliferation of Internet communications.
One notable concern manifests from those who are adherents of a Madisonian pluralism. They see the Internet - and the ensuing collapse of geographical spaces - as a threat to republicanism, due to the possible fomenting of factions across diverse regions and populations, which pose the risk of establishing a sociopolitical hegemony. This is probably the most interesting theme to come out of these studies. It is one of the few dimensions of this literature continuing to possess saliency in contemporary considerations. However, when written, most of these works lacked the empirical observations needed to render a compelling thesis propounding either a Madisonian alarmist narrative, or, alternatively, a fear of a pressing tribalism brought about by technological innovations allowing consumers of journalism - and other genres disseminating shared knowledge - to specify, more precisely, the type of contents that they desired to consume.
I will quickly remark upon these studies. Both of the aforementioned interpretations have failed to pan out. In the case of Madisonian criticisms, the personalization of content has precipitated a state where people are not inclined to subscribe to ideological formations that possess the potential to dominate American Politics. Conversely, due to the poly-dimensionality of hypertext, the filtering that can be deployed when personalizing streams of content has preserved an adequate degree of overlapping within American sectionalism, preventing - most assuredly - anomie, but in large, tribalism, as well.
From my own interactions, I find myself working with other writers who share many of my economic sentiments and, even, most of my stances on civil liberties while, simultaneously, possessing a strong and often intransigent pro-Second Amendment ideology. Despite the amount of time, I spend attempting to explain that the Second Amendment was written as a measure to protect against, at the time, the deterioration of republican values - where individual citizens might fail to service their states and country during times of war - I find that I make no headway. Nevertheless, I continue to work with people who are far from carbon copies of my own ideological positions on matters of social concern. In short, rather than a device leading to the disintegration of American social relations, the Internet is, arguably, a communicative development concurrently creating conditions of provincialism as well as an enduring cosmos of American culture by both bridging geographical differences as well as allowing the communing of interest groups with concentrated ideological concerns that are fairly limited in scope.
With respect to the final theme to be elucidated, belonging to the post DOT COM collapse, there was a tenacity to relegate the Internet, altogether, to the concern of a fleeting trend, which warranted little attention and consideration by serious scholars interested in exploring salient issues affecting American civil life and civic patterns of interaction.
The justifications offered for conclusions that relegated the Internet to a position of consequential superficiality seemed to invoke the following thematic consistency: The thinness of the interactions prevented the development of the trust required to foment substantive communities. Phenomena disclosed in Web activity, such as gender bending, were typically referenced in order to exemplify the negation of the necessary conditions for the building of communities that could have a substantive impact upon the communal relations of American social agents. Gender-bending is a potential predicate that is attributable to what is termed in the vernacular as cyber-sex. During instances of Gender-bending, a counterpart in a cyber-sexual affair would assume a gender role not in accordance with physiological semiotics of gender, which would be accessible to the counterpart in the relation if the interactions were not disembodied. Apparently, this phenomenon is fairly frequent in the intercourse that transpires in virtualism.
Stemming from adduction drawn from observations of social events in virtualism - possessing similarities to the characteristics rendered in the short account of Gender-bending - conclusions were drawn and espoused within the discourse of American political science, contending the epiphenomena of virtual communities within the context of larger civic affairs, due their thinness, resulting from the inability to become layered with trust within the disembodied spaces of virtualism. In short, the creation of Social Capital among participants in the virtual communities occurring within the Internet is not a prospect that appears to be likely.
This consideration leads to the work upon civil society that has been inspired by Robert Putnam in his Bowling Alone. Although, it is undesirable to expend time treating all of the excessive complaints leveled by Putnam and his adherents upon the current state of American community affairs, the concept of Social Capital, and, more specifically, the prospects for the production of Social Capital, occurring in the virtual spaces of the cybersphere, is a salient concern that has far-reaching consequences. It is particularly significant for those working to cultivate an understanding of the social action potentials and barriers - to be both exploited and circumvented - in the present American sociopolitical topography. As stated in the Abstract, this is the pinnacle of contemplations that will be deposited herein. However, for purposes of maintaining the present course, exploring the textual terrain that has been put to prose by forerunners of the study of virtualism, it is necessary to maintain discipline, and to treat the next noticeable development within the social sciences directed upon Internet studies.
Following the discourse that assumed a reactionary posture after exposure to the sobering lessons to be learned from the DOT COM crash, some scholars attempted to revamp work contributing to the study of electronic democracy. Although not entirely dismissive of the Internet’s potential relevancy to American sociopolitical affairs, nonetheless, it did embody a marked conservatism in respect to the changes that could be ushered in through the digitalization and inter-connectivity of governmental workflow processes. Electronic democracy, as conceptualized in these studies, did not involve a qualitative break with the form government currently assumes. Rather, the purpose and role of government - including the power structures responsible for the determination of the public policies to be administered by governmental fixtures, was not questioned. The benefits derived from the implementation of electronic democracy were conceived along the lines of Customer Service Management, where the ability of government to deliver its services to the population would be enhanced through the adoption of intranet structures. This would allow for the rapid integration of streams of data gathered through the various appendages of government and their interface with the agents constituting the citizenry, whom government was servicing.
The organizational studies to which this form of electronic democratic studies fell under, from what I have extrapolated, can be summed under what one might denote through the referring expression, a Weberian paradigm of organizational research. Further, an underlying premise to these studies consisted of a presupposition that the ultimate teleology of an organization was to increase its preformativity, allowing its processes to operate more efficiently and to produce their sanctioned outputs more prolifically.
This literature is of little interest, however, for those who feel compelled to transcend considerations constructed under the parameters of preexisting sociopolitical structures - merely endeavoring to understand the potentials of technological innovations and paradigms within established matrices of power relations - in order to, instead, pursue agenda that are radicalized. Nevertheless, there is one interesting aspect to this literature, which, I suspect, is the result of the familiarity of the researchers in this field with Information Technology. Specifically, I am speaking of incorporation within this domain of research and theory of concepts derived from Information Technology, such as virtualism, which has a different meaning in this context than the sense it acquired when used in previous passages. Rather than advocating the institutional restructuring of government agencies to adjust for new developments demanding from the government new services and functions, this strain of organizational theory, alternatively, calls for the creation of virtual agencies that consist of inter-organizational teams temporarily installed for the purposes of executing the changes requiring implementation. The reason the term, virtualism, is apropos as a reference for the temporary agencies to be deployed under certain circumstances is that it, additionally, refers to a trend in Information Technology, which promotes the use of virtual computing environments for purposes of testing new software applications and enterprise deployments. Virtual computational environments leave no footprints upon the systems in which they operate after they have ceased to run. Likewise, inter-organizational teams leave no employment related legacy after they have completed the projects to which they were assigned.
There is a more insidious aspect to this philosophy of organizational management. The use of contingent labor has become - despite its name - a permanent aspect to the human resource management of firms in the new economy. Often paraded under the pretenses that the casual labor market consists of individuals who have opted out of traditional forms of employment, the defenders of the casual labor market persistently fail to mention that the institution of seniority - and the correlative rise in compensation historically associated with employment longevity - is no longer an attribute of the American economy. In fact, despite one’s age, there is no associative expectation of seniority for an employee at a particular firm. In short, employment is no longer an institution that commands respect within the context of the firms and businesses who dictate the terms of such relationships. Apologists for the new economy claim that employees are “leap-frogging” to better occupations. However, they lack any longitudinal data - related to career trajectories - which might be used to defend such claims. Further, the statistics that demonstrate even skilled professionals experience occupational changes in their lifetimes run in the face of any claim that the loss of seniority is related to incentives that are exogenous to the firms in which people toil.
Related to the growth of the casual labor market is an emerging theme in the social theorizing literature written in response to the rapid innovations and diffusions of Information Technology. I shall refer to this genre of literature as the re-enchantment theme. Much of the research and analysis contributing to this discourse has been inspired by Castells, who offered an early assessment of the changing cultural and socioeconomic conditions, shifting as a result of communicative technologies connected to the expansion of the Internet. Prior to elaborating upon the similarities of this scholarly thesis with the literature devoted to the casual labor market, I will quickly summarize the crux of the re-enchantment thematic subtext.
Castells - although not necessarily a postmodernist - expresses in his voluminous writings extrapolations taken from the altering socioecological conditions, which have been undergoing changes due to the profusion of Informationalism. He counters the global democratization thesis - as its has been propounded by Habermas, Rorty, and others - with a thesis contending that the collapse of geographic spaces would result in a global community of divergent cultures. Culturally unique groups would be compelled to exploit Web technologies in order to express their uniqueness in relation to other cultures, and they would be motivated to compete in this globalised forum out of a curiosity of the differences they possess in juxtaposition to other peculiar cultural expressions. However, the global forum for communications - created from the expansion of Informationalism - should not be interpreted as the consolidation of provincialism into a cosmopolitan culture. Instead, groups will continue to retain their differences; however, the differences among groups will be shared and examined in relation to one another out of a drive to express humanity in all of its forms and individuated instantiations.
Within this context of multiculturalism, the concept of re-enchantment takes hold. The expression, re-enchantment, is, of course, an allusion to Weber and his disenchantment thesis, where Weber lamented the spread of rationalization in a process that effectively led to the homogenization of populations under an order conducive to industrial capitalism in order for populations to be existentially disposed to behave in a manner reflective of the organizational imperatives emanating from this type of economic production. In short, the property of unpredictably had to be minimized in the context of human relations. The requisite of synchronized human interactions - in order for industrial capitalism to successfully function, where the modes of production called for regimented adherence on the parts of individual to the recurring, successive stages dictated by mechanized assembly lines - necessitated conformity to an all encompassing order.
It was during this period of the Human Condition that clocks became prevalent, placed on walls and on the wrists of individuals. Mass production called for the standardization of the parts used to construct larger commodities. This provided the necessary regularity, despite the proliferation of the distribution of labor, to solidify the expectations among manufacturers. One agent in the modes of production could now predict and safely come to expect consistency in the components produced by different agencies, allowing for the creation of auxiliary and ancillary components according to the same stipulations of regularity and predictability.
In opposition to the rationalization of industrial capital, a new economic order has taken hold, and - rather than conformity and predictability - has promoted creativity and counter-conformity. We can call this new Zeitgeist the hacker ethic; a complex inter-grouping of predicates attributed to the current economic state that cuts to the core of re-enchantment. Succinctly put, the hacker ethic promotes a culture where eccentricity is celebrated, rather than disparaged. The encouragement of unpredictable creative impulse is related to the modes of production. In the informational economy, the primary mode of production involves the reorganization of information into new streams of data that can be used to generate unique knowledge that foster the possibilities for new forms of social action that can be exploited for purposes of targeting new sectors within the consumer markets. It is due to this in-determinable node in the processes of production - precisely put, the reorganization of information - that creativity and individuality are promoted. The charisma associated with genius - and all of its connotations, such as eccentricity - have become desirable as opposed to unruly and unwelcome among employers. If we look to the moguls who currently possess statuses of celebrity in popular culture, we can find exemplars of the genius that has become cherished. Steve Jobs serves as a prototype of this kind of persona. He is considered eccentric as well as innovative. Further, he has learned how to exploit these public perceptions in order to create an allure for his products and even his managerial style and philosophy.
In order to round out this literature review, some descriptions should be deposited on the paradigmatic shift that is occurring in the field of the sociology of social movements. It is due to the successful populist movements in Latin America that some of the core principles of the studies pertaining to social movements have undergone revision. Most significantly, the thesis contending that the successful outcome of a social movement depended upon the networking resources of its social components - or membership - has been called into question. The requisite of effecting change, through appeal to elites in polity who could enact the changes through the implementation and administration of public policy, has been bypassed by these populist insurgencies. In short, the accumulation of Social Capital - cultivated through local and communal economic projects - has been called upon in order to transform power structures through electoral institutions.
This is a discursive and ethnographic study of American insurgent socio-political movements and their relationships to representative spaces engendered by the expansion of Internet infrastructures. The study is intended to contribute to the sociology of mass media as well as the sociology of social movements. Included under the rubric, insurgent socio-political movements, are both third-party socio-political organizations and the larger and more complex cultural field that breeds and sustains them in the United States. However, rather than contributing to the typical discourse associated with the two aforementioned disciplines, I have elected to integrate my research and insights into public sociology.
To quickly define public sociology: The designation of the referring expression can be understood as a movement - whose constituency consists of a faction within the larger community of sociologists extant in American intellectual networks and enclaves - pressing to integrate the knowledge developed within the discipline of sociology with organically derived forms of social theoretical knowledge and social action knowledge belonging to publics outside of the Academe. As a result, public sociology conceptualizes itself under a teleology that appropriates sociology for purposes of facilitating the projects and the advocacies taken up by social movements of various organically determined compositions. Ideally, the end result of such a venture is the synthesis of sociological knowledge - derived from professional pursuits; knowledge formations that can be likened to basic research - with the social theoretical conceptualizations and the stock of recipes for social action already in circulation among the members of the organic community to which the public sociologist wishes to contribute.
It should be remarked that the praxis of pubic sociology does not entail, necessarily, the adoption of crystallized instances of normativity - as well as their derivative ideological formations - already extant and propagated by organically cultivated publics. If one is to distinguish professional sociology from critical sociology - both of which are subsumed under the practices of the Academe - where critical sociology is the modality of sociological inquiry involving the critical questioning and reevaluation of social norms and the institutions that are both shaped by such norms as well as responsible for the generation and the preservation, and, additionally, in many instances, the reification and the naturalization of normative systems - then the additional integration of critical sociology into the mix created by public sociology is an augmentation that is arguably called for.
Critical sociology - during felicitous occasions - incites reflexivity on the part of the public that has been mobilized - in varying degrees - when coming to form a socio-political movement. Further, the sociologist comes away with a more material and practicable understanding of the relation of hos and her sociology with the concrete work of agents, who might benefit from its understanding and incorporation of its utilities into their endeavors intended to transform social relations.
Consequentially, the organically generated movements are not to be treated as though pristine - as if the sociologist is to assimilate into their preexisting patterns of demonstrable social knowledge and the teleology that underlies the execution of the recipes for social action belonging to the publics stock of knowledge. Rather, the sociologist actively engages him or herself with the public - in the process of applying critical sociology - enacting a dialectic where both the agencies of the sociologist as well as the public are subsequently transformed.
The intermingling should bring to light antipathies that become recognizable during stages of the hermeneutic accomplishment. Such oppositions will compel the critical reflexivity - on part of both agencies - necessary to reformulate conceptions of Self in order to transcend the contradictions; thus, producing a synthetic composite, integrating previously incompatible elements arising from the conflicting perspectives. Further, the alien perspectives will come to compliment each another; forming a synthetic product embodying a normative structure that has been subject to the scrutiny of additional social perspectives, rendering it compliant - assuming the hermeneutic accomplishment did, indeed, incite the critical reflexivity - with a larger field of social interests.
I am hesitant to assert that this process will result in the social movement transforming in a trajectory heading toward the cosmopolitan for the following reason: Such a presumption involves the posit of a global culture that is conceptualized - according to the framework deposited within the writings of Kant and, latter, Habermas - as a social progression that will end in the achievement of a global democracy. The maintenance of such a position can provide credence for the absolutism that has plagued Leftist social reform agenda by lending itself to justify the monolithic conceptions of ideal socio-cultural formations, propagating the provision of states exhibiting the character of totalitarianism. Further, a subscription to the cosmopolitan - in the form it assumes in progressive accounts of history that are proffered in Modernist writings - can be used as a rhetorical device that undercuts populist interests.
Perchance, the best way to indicate the significations intended by this remark is through the device of a concrete exemplar: Anyone who has had the misfortune of stumbling upon the research reports published by the Blue Dog Democratic think-tank, the Third Way, has been exposed to the prototypical, progressive rhetoric that discounts and, subsequently, dismisses complaints concerning the material conditions manifested in American social formations, under pretenses that such class related antagonisms reflect a short-sighted provincialism voiced by elements of the population, who lack the detached perspective necessary to realize that they are situated in an economic environment, which offers itself to progressive renderings American history. In other words, the complaints arising out of what is often referred to as neo-populism - a term that connotes the negative associations of including European totalitarian movements of the Twentieth Century - emanating from an unrefined episteme of the chattering masses, which embodies irrational emotive reactions to conditions - while neglecting to realize that such conditions are merely an intermediary stage in a process of advancement.
Through references to indicators that purportedly express states of material wealth or production in this country; knowledge constructs that are devised and justified under pretenses of science; but - since the normative sciences are, of course, normative, and, consequentially, rely upon foundations, or premises, that are declarative rather than empirically contingent - they unavoidably promote a framing of socio-political reality that is based upon endices that reflect a particular standpoint’s perspective regarding desirable material conditions. Evaluation of the economy, then, turns out, to be motivated by groups that disproportionately control the institutions vested with the social legitimacy of producing ‘objective’ knowledge. In other words, since organized capitalism possesses a disproportionate degree of influence upon socio-political institutions, the metrics chosen as indications of economic health - which, one must keep in mind, are predicates belonging to propositions that are declarative, not empirically contingent, and, therefore, not objective - are likely to be capitalist-centric; thus, often, failing to incorporate into considerations metrics that might provide insight into the material conditions in which labor endures, which emerge in concurrence with the economic indicators used to support conclusions of economic growth and health. For example, wage stagnation during periods belonging to and following heightened rates of productivity can be simultaneously interpreted as a sign of an increasing rift between economic classes or an indication of economic growth without risk of overbearing rates of inflation.
Another reason for not impetuously extrapolating expectations that the public will be driven toward a cosmopolitan disposition: The interaction between perspectives - even, assuming that a hermeneutic accomplishment does transpire - might leave the public in a condition of where is sees itself as alienated from other publics to an even larger degree. However, even in such an event, the public will be forced to clarify its own perspective and refine it, in order for it to address inconsistencies that are illuminated as it is constructing a newly formed reflexive understanding of itself and its constituent aspects.
Therefore, to condense from the preceding, I have pursued a course leading me to take an active role in matters of social significance by contemporaneously researching the groups I had identified as subjects of my investigations - a process, which I understood, primarily, as a hermeneutic enterprise - as well as, actively criticizing the group’s socio-cultural constructs, which formed its interrelated understandings; both of Self, as well, as social identities that it discerns and defines - in a reciprocally complimentary contradistinction - in estrangement to its own conceptions of Self; a juxtaposition that illuminates the states of alienation or opposition between the reflexively built construct of Self with the other identifiable publics and social identities.
Recent studies of Latin American social movements have focused upon the success of grass-roots insurgencies consisting of mass mobilizations overturned existing hegemonies through electoral political processes. Peculiar to these successful social movements appears to be the following attribute: They achieved sociopolitical power despite their lack of elitist networking capital; a resource that has been considered within the sociology of social movements a prerequisite for a movement to effect substantive structural changes. The question that is derived in reflection to these events in Latin America can be expressed as follows: Can such an insurgency be duplicated in American social formations?
The question posed above contains several problematic issues with which one must contend in order for the question to be adequately addressed. Most significantly, one must specify the antecedents to the successful outcomes incurred by social movements in Latin America. Although Marxist literature pertaining to this subject is immured in ideological prejudices - which compel the ensuing Marxist analyses of these social movements to reject the importance of the electoral victories, due to the absence of revolutionary events that would enact change through mechanisms exogenous to the preexisting sociopolitical arrangement - it has become clear - through my own readings, at least - that the ascendancy to power of socialist and social democratic parties in Latin American polities do mark a significant alteration in the elitist configurations that - prior to change of powers - essentially operated as proxies for American politico-economic interests in the region. Further, the success of these insurgencies can be largely attributed to the production of Social Capital at the local, communal levels of social organization in these political structures. The cultivation of Social Capital was primarily conducted through initiatives - occurring at the communal levels - of public projects intended to bring benefit to the communities; a process of economic development that markedly lacked the privatization of economic resources in favor of cooperative projects. This attempt to improve socioeconomic conditions of Latin American villages took hold as it became increasingly clear that the neoliberal model, which stressed macroeconomic mechanisms for material improvement, was defunct.
In the context of the considerations contained in this document, these two fields of sociological research bare direct relationship to one another, since the sociology of social movements is being examined in the purview of the alterations that are taking place within the representational spaces through which publics in American social formations achieve the publicity necessary for their dialogic activities to take place.
The specific dynamic to which I am making reference as the precipitant to the reorganization of representational spaces are the proliferation of the technological infrastructures engendering Web based communications; or, borrowing from Castells, Informationalism. This trajectory of sociological and social theoretical research - forged, mainly, by Castells - is investigated in respect to the impact it has upon American sociopolitical interactions - both among agents as well as the collectives they form in societal relationships. It is my position that the erosion of the social institutions that have provided a centrality to editorial decision-making - what is tantamount to gate-keeping - has the effect of engendering possibilities for third-party sociopolitical movements that have been traditionally excluded from the representational spaces.
The research that was performed for purposes of this dissertation included ethnographic studies of two distinguishable - although, to some degree, overlapping - socio-political movements, also assuming the statuses of federally registered political parties: The Green Party and the Populist Party of America. Both of these institutions - in terms of the of the semiotics circulating in the cultures associated with the party organizations - define themselves in opposition to the current and long-standing monopolization of socio-political power by the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Additionally, the third-party cultures typically disassociate themselves with many of the extensions of mainstream party politics. For instance, the relationship between mass journalism and the preemptive party structures is often cited as - if I am to translate the sentiments into anthropological terms - an ongoing series of transactions conducted under the auspices of a balanced reciprocity.
In this light, journalism is not only perceived as being in collusion with the dominant party structures, but is additionally considered to be a part of a larger phenomenon, consisting of a complex of social institutions that advance and protect the interests of certain minorities in American society; namely, the interests of corporatism. Corporatism - when properly understood within this larger purview - consisting of the identification of the complex of institutions spanning both polity and various sectors of the economy - is believed to be associated, in most instances, with the transnational movement, globalism. Globalization, in this context, possesses no sanguine connotations. It is a spectrum hovering over humanity that - in defiance of its name - embodies the most provincial of interests. The multinational corporatist consortia insist upon persevering in their profiteering, despite the un-sustainability of the modes of production they promote and organize; thus, amounting to a social force that operates in contradiction of both democracy and popular economic interests.
Therefore, when invoking terminology, such as third-party oppositional culture, I am bringing to the fore more than typified political organizations. In fact, these organizations in their current form represent, in part, manifestations of an underlying condition that can be understood as a culture of insurgency; cultural enclaves in American societal relations that have already developed the “intellectual autonomy” and the “political self-respect” necessary to formulate their own versions of radicalism, where they strive to not only participate in American socio-political institutions, but to structurally transform them, in order to extricate the loci of socio-political power from the intransigent grip of corporatism and the interests that underlie corporatism, which are becoming increasingly global and trans-political.
Of course, both parties are not manifestations of third-party oppositional culture in their entirety. In the Green Party, for instance, there are elements who have integrated into this third-party organizational configuration, who do not possess or advocate the political radicalism that demands the reorganization of socio-political power in the United States. Most saliently, the Cobb campaign of the 2004 Presidential Election advocated a position that essentially took the Green Party into the entry of a process designed to conform the Green’s practices and organizational structure into a state reflecting the mainstream of American politics.
Acting as apologists for the Democrats - a position that I am not criticizing; only critically analyzing - by only conducting a limited campaign intended to foster growth for the Green Party by, concurrently, vocalizing a Green Platform while not estranging other Leftist elements in American socio-political ideological formations by lessening the Democratic Ticket’s chances for defeating an incumbency that was already considered by many circles within the Left as the most inept, widely reckless, and hyperbolically imperial - in fact, transcending the imperial, and entering into realms once only the province of the popular imagination inspired by the narrative fiction of George Orwell - in American history.
By most accounts, at this point in time - and despite the obfuscating press releases of cherry picked election statistics, which even provoked some Cobb supporters to leave his ranks -Cobb’s strategy is largely considered to be a failure. The detour from radicalism in favor of conformity with extant socio-political institutional structures resulted in the diminution of the Green Party. If one was to compare this chain of events with other episodes in American history, the deterioration of the CPUSA would, most likely, be invoked, due to its parallel follies when enunciating apologias for the Democratic Party positions, such as the Communist Party’s public concession during the Second World War not to provoke strikes among laborers falling within America’s manufacturing complex.
The cultural enclave from which the Populist Party of America draws supporters appears to possess a constituency that is more decidedly antagonistic to mainstream political establishments. I would attribute this characteristic of the Populist Party of America to its basic platform stance that calls for radical transformations to the current socio-political structures through which governmental power is sustained. Specifically, the Populist Party advocates reforms that have come to be encapsulated under the slogan, localized democracy.
The Culture of Insurgency and its Relationship to Web 2.0
The crux of the thesis deals with the potentials generated by the proliferation of virtual spaces in which Internet based communities find the representational venues through which to conduct their dialogic activities. Such spaces are often defined as Social Media. The concept, Social Media, is an aspect of the larger conception, Web 2.0. These concepts will be treated extensively in subsequent portions of this document; however, for the time being, we can understand Web 2.0 as the paradigmatic switch that has taken place in Web site design and optimization, which leaves behind the principles that were originally transferred from other media technologies that expressed their contents in textual forms; a state of the Internet that can be designated as Web 1.0. During this stage of the Internet, the expressions published on the Web assumed forms that reflected the grammar that shapes the literary media assuming the material constituency of print on paper. By this, what is meant is the content published on the Web was often static as well as unilateral in its composition. Essentially, these traditional media formats - occurring in the form of ink on paper - were emulated by those publishing on the Internet. Consequently, the preemptive design patterns giving form to publications taking place upon the Web embodied the historically typical asymmetric flow of public dialog, where a few are privileged with the access to representational spaces through which they can speak to the many.
The elitist control of representational space was a character that was initially mirrored in the communicative practices expressed in Internet activity. Website publicati