Virtual Im/mobilities: Three Ethnographic Examples of Socialised Media Usage, Civic Empowerment and Coded Publics

Abstract

Berthold Brecht seems to intriguingly anticipate the reality of today's social media-be it Twitter, Instagram or Facebook-where every user receiving a message is just one click away from socially sharing its content with a good many "others". At the beginning of the 1930s when Brecht developed his radio theory, he did not think of a radio as just a nice little gadget, but envisioned a truly revolutionary potential that this media technology might bear: [T]he radio has only one side where it should have two. It is an apparatus of distribution, it merely allocates. Now, in order to become positive-that is, to find out about the positive side of radio broadcasts-here is a suggestion for changing the function of the radio: transform it from an apparatus of distribution into an apparatus of communication. The radio could inarguably be the best apparatus of communication in public life, an enormous system of channels-provided it saw itself as not only a sender but also a receiver. This means making the listener not only listen but also speak; not to isolate him but to place him in relation to others. (Brecht 1967, 129; emphasis mine) 1 If we consider the public to be an important part of any democratic society, one can easily imagine that such a "conception-come-true" would indeed bring along tremendous political consequences. Brecht's model of broadcasting would revolutionise the texture of medialized politics: externally governed subjects metamorphosing into self-determined citizens. What had at that time been a monolithic, centralised and state-controlled monopoly of mass communication-Brecht called media usage "propaganda" (132)-could become a pluralistic, decentralised and democratic net of competing political thoughts and opinions. In 1932, this idea of a technology that places people "in relation to others" instead of "isolating" them seemed very Utopian.