Uldam,  J.  &  Askanius,  T.  (2011).  Calling  for  confrontational  action  in  online  social  media:  video  activism  as  auto-­‐communication.  In:  Cammaerts,  B.,  McCurdy,  P.,  &  Mattoni,  A.  (Eds)  Mediation  and  Protest  Movements.  Bristol:  Intellect  

<cn>Chapter 8</cn>

<ct>Calling for confrontational action in online social media:

video activism as auto-communication</ct>

<au>Julie Uldam and Tina Askanius</au>

‘Climate change is the symptom, Capitalism is the crisis’, and

‘System change not climate change!’ – these and similar slogans

reverberated in the streets of Copenhagen in 2009 as the 15th

United Nations Climate Conference (COP15)1 addressed issues of

transnational climate change governance. The protest slogans

reflect how protesters tried to inscribe climate change into a larger

narrative of anti-capitalism.

In this narrative, rising water levels and average temperatures

around the world might be feasible testimony to the heavily

industrialized mode of production in western societies. However,

the very root of the problem is not so much a particular set of

polluting practices, but rather the underlying logic of the capitalist

system, which values short-term profit and economic growth above

all else. The main concern of the activists voicing their protest,

then, is that the market-based solutions proposed by western

governments rest upon the very same capitalist logic that originally

  2  

caused the problems. To these factions of the activists mobilized in

Copenhagen, the efforts of the COP15 summit represent nothing

but a ‘greener’ version of capitalism and serve to legitimize and

‘greenwash’ an ultimately neoliberal position on climate change.

The COP15 mobilization thus inscribes itself into a larger narrative

of popular resistance towards market fundamentalism. A

movement of movements whose coming-out party (at least to the

broader public) was held at the shutdown of the World Trade

Organization (WTO) ministry meeting in 1999 and became known

notoriously as the ‘Battle of Seattle’ (Kavada, 2010; Kahn and

Kellner, 2004). Observers have drawn parallels between the Seattle

and Copenhagen popular movements: the COP15 has been

described as a Seattle-like moment because of the presence of a

wide range of groups and the diverse tactics and action forms on

display, but also because developing-country governments were

ready to bring activist demands to the summit (Mueller, 2009).

However, prior to some 100,000 people marching the streets of

Copenhagen, a great deal of effort had been put into mobilizing

activists to take up the climate agenda as part of the struggle

against neoliberalism and neoimperialism, and to come to Denmark

to demonstrate. The online arena played a key part, conjuring up

memories of the successes of alternative online media, such as

Indymedia, in mobilizing large-scale civic protest around previous

  3  

WTO, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and G8 (Group of

Eight) counter-summits. However, the COP15 saw a change

towards the use among activists of what can be termed mainstream

– often corporate – online sites. It has been argued that ‘popular

media … are the public domain, the place where and the means by

which the public is created’ (Hartley, 1992: 1). However, the uses

made of popular online spaces in non-institutional politics and their

role as intra-movement media remain under-researched. In this

chapter, we begin to address these issues by focusing on the use of

YouTube as an intra-movement platform and asking how the use of

video activism to promote a radical agenda is understood by the

activist community. We examine also what are the rationales

behind using YouTube for calls for confrontational action.

This chapter draws on a case study of the ‘Never Trust a Cop’

(NTAC) network and analyses the COP15 ‘mobilization video’,

War on Capitalism, promoted on YouTube and interviews with key

actors affiliated with or knowledgeable about the radical end of the

Global Justice Movement (GJM) and the protests organized around

the COP15. Recognizing gaps in social movement and media

literature discussed in the Introduction, this chapter examines the

interplay between activism, representation and practices of

resistance.

  4  

We use the term ‘mobilization video’ to describe the short videos

produced and disseminated prior to a pre-scheduled protest event.

Within the YouTube community, videos that fall within this

category are sometimes referred to as ‘protest trailers’ (for

empirical examples, see e.g. g8 2007 protest-trailer and

Undercurrents – protest trailer).2 Mobilization videos and protest

trailers are characterized by explicit calls for action, urging viewers

to engage by joining protest actions in the streets or to take action

online by redistributing the call for offline action in personal

networks. The genre of mobilization videos follows a certain set of

dramaturgic rules that bring together discursive resources and

historical events to set up a number of given spaces of action for

the viewer/user. In the present context, we approach mobilization

videos as a specific genre within the broader practice of activism

concerned with video for social and political change.

We begin by locating our study within a theoretical framework that

draws on discourse theory and the notion of mediation. We

introduce our case and data and then provide a mapping of the

contested terrain around the COP15. Against this backdrop, we

present our analysis of the War on Capitalism video followed by

our analysis of interviews with activists and Social Movement

Organization (SMO) actors, focusing on their accounts of their

online media practices and the role of videos in facilitating political

engagement and direct action.

  5  

<h1>Online media and social movement

communication</h1>

The history of the relationship between social movements and

mainstream media is conflict-ridden and long-standing (Bailey et

al., 2008). With the rise of the Internet, scholars eagerly greeted

this new media technology as a groundbreaking vehicle for

democratic processes and an inclusive public sphere (Castells,

2008). Optimistic rhetoric about the advantages of the Internet as

such a vehicle focuses on its opportunities for editorial control and,

thus, for making available new terrains for visibility for groups that

tend to attract negative coverage in or be excluded from the

mainstream media (Kellner, 2003; Barassi, 2010). In this view,

social movement actors gain new possibilities to promote self-

representations that bypass mass media filters.

However, it is argued that fragmentation and increasing dispersion

have been brought about by the Internet’s affordances as a ‘pull-

medium’. A lot of the online information that we receive presents

only one aspect of an issue. Thus, the Internet can be argued to

connect like-minded users but to fail to challenge presumptions or

offer new perspectives (Dahlgren, 2005; Dahlberg, 2007). Only

users with prior knowledge and interest tend to seek information

about social movements and their causes (Cammaerts, 2007: 138–

  6  

9). In this view, YouTube’s own promises of providing ‘ordinary’

people with possibilities for ‘broadcasting yourself’ may fall short

of mediating activist self-representations beyond the activist

hardcore. Nonetheless, spectacular activist videos uploaded to

YouTube can be picked up by the mass media (Wilson and

Serisier, 2010), as the case of the War on Capitalism video

demonstrates. Popular online spaces, thus, potentially provide

social movements with possibilities for reaching wider publics

(Graham, 2008). This function is important if an activist group is

relatively unknown, and even more so if its agenda (in this case,

highlighting anti-capitalism as a root cause of climate change)

receives little attention in mainstream media (Gamson and

Wolfsfeld, 1993).

Dovetailing on this view, van Zoonen et al. (2010) argue that

studies of online civic participation focus on politically oriented

fora rather than including the abundance of non-political online

spaces, and propose that it is precisely in non-political spaces, such

as online discussion fora and blogs (Myspace, YouTube, etc.) that

individuals start ‘to form the public’ and engage in political

activity (see also Hartley, 2010).

In response to these conditions of possibility, the non-institutional

political environment is argued to be abandoning the online social

movement media. These are variously described as alternative

  7  

media (Atton, 2001), radical media (Downing, 2001) and citizens’

media (Rodriguez, 2001) and, initially, were vested with hopes that

they would provide platforms for the proliferation of counter-

discourses that the market principles of ‘mainstream’ online and

mass media systems marginalize (Fenton, 2010; Mattoni and

Doerr, 2011; Askanius and Gustafsson, 2010). The increasing use

of popular online spaces by institutional as well as non-institutional

politics has brought about the term ‘YouTube-ification of Politics’

(Turnsek and Jankowski, 2008), suggesting that the video platform

has become an important arena for political communication.

In the enthusiastic rhetoric of user-generated content and the Web

2.0 participatory culture, YouTube has been described as jump-

starting a visual revolution and spurring a new era of digital video

clip culture. When YouTube was launched in 2005 it filled a gap

by facilitating user-generated video production and distribution in

an online environment where video sharing previously had been

quite difficult (Wesch, 2009). The site was heralded as a significant

contribution to the transformation of political discourse and an

egalitarian platform that facilitated free expression without elitist

gatekeepers (Gillespie, 2010: 352; Wasko and Erickson, 2009).

However, a number of different factors collide with the inherent

potential of free expression and equity for all. First, the direct

appeal to the amateur and grassroots user – most obviously present

  8  

in the semantic markers ‘You’ and ‘Community’, but also the

intrinsic promise of the ‘platform’ – elides the obvious tensions

between the cultural and commercial dimensions of its service,

between user-generated content and commercially produced

content, between ambitions of cultivating community and catering

to industry. Keeping in mind that YouTube is funded almost

entirely by advertising and looks to profit from all cultural

productions, the fact that the users generating the videos usually do

not enjoy any revenue return seems not in keeping with the ethos

and philosophy behind the participatory web (Cammaerts, 2008).

In these more critical accounts, YouTube’s abstract promise of

providing ‘ordinary’ people with possibilities for ‘broadcasting

themselves’ not only falls short of bringing activist self-

representations beyond the activist hardcore, but also claims to do

so within a pseudo-democratic model of participation and

community.

<h1>Conceptualizing conflictual activism: discourse theory

and mediation as auto-communication</h1>

In this study, we draw on the concept of mediation and on

discourse theory as a conceptual basis for exploring activist self-

representations in YouTube videos. We approach mediation as the

processes of discontinuous and asymmetric dialectic dynamics of

production, circulation, interpretation and recirculation of media

  9  

representations (Couldry, 2008; see also Chouliaraki and Morsing,

2009).

Taking this a step further and still following Couldry (2008), we

approach activist mobilization videos in YouTube as a form of

digital storytelling, that is, the ability to construct undistorted self-

representations using a shared infrastructure of appearance.

YouTube’s multimodal formats and possibilities provide a platform

that potentially facilitates dual practices of self-expression and

political contestation and the wider circulation of activist voices

(Chouliaraki, 2010). We suggest that we can understand these

practices of self-mediation in the context of confrontational

activism as auto-communication – as having both outbound and

inbound implications. Christensen (1997) draws on anthropology

and symbolic interactionism to develop the notion of outbound

organizational communication as auto-communication (see also

Morsing, 2006). Christensen (1997) argues that while

organizations’ external communicative material, such as

advertising and branding information, serves the purpose of

projecting the organization and gaining legitimacy in its

surroundings, external communication also plays a central role – in

fostering ‘an esprit de corps around an organization’s preferred

self-image’ (Christensen, 1997: 204).

  10  

Our approach to auto-communication, however, departs from

Christensen’s focus on organizations’ strive for legitimacy: in a

radical activist context where antagonism is vital for the

preservation of political identities, activists’ outbound

communication may not serve the purpose of gaining resonance

and legitimacy among broader publics. Instead, wider audiences’

reactions of dismay may serve to reinforce the antagonistic

sensibilities that underpin the political identities that are

constitutive of political engagement in radical forms of activism –

‘ordinary’ people work as a constitutive outside to the oppositional

identities of NTAC.

This ties in with Gamson and Wolfsfeld’s (1993) argument that

mass media coverage serves three major purposes for social

movements: mobilization, validation and scope enlargement. While

Gamson and Wolfsfeld’s analysis is concerned with the interplay

between movements and the mass media, it can be extended to

activists’ uses of online social media, such as YouTube, as

platforms for reaching (a) their own constituencies directly, but

also (b) broader publics via the mass media attention that

spectacular videos on YouTube can generate.

We turn to Laclau and Mouffe (1985) for a theoretical and

analytical grasp for addressing the role of antagonistic sensibilities

in reinforcing political identities. In Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse

  11  

theory, antagonism pays attention to the importance of the

identification of enemies for the construction of counter-hegemonic

political identities. In this view, a constitutive outside is important,

because mobilizing and sustaining political engagement requires

antagonism and conflict, and identification of an enemy (Mouffe,

2000; Dahlberg, 2007; Dahlgren, 2007). Mouffe (2005) argues

about the importance of turning enemies into adversaries: an

adversary is a ‘friendly enemy’, somebody whose ideas we contest

while acknowledging her right to defend those ideas. However, for

some social movement actors, antagonism and the identification of

an enemy to be eliminated rather than respected are crucial to

sustain their political identities (Žižek, 1992: 71; Griggs and

Howarth, 2004; Juris, 2005). Turning antagonism into the

respectful and pluralist tensions of agonism is brought to a head

precisely in the context of confrontational civil disobedience,

where anger and the rejection of all forms of domination are seen

as key to political tactics and expression (Juris, 2005).

Thus, we approach YouTube mobilization videos as mediated,

auto-communicational appeals – intended and unintended – that do

not simply represent pre-existing political identities, but play a role

in the formation of such identities in the very process of

representing them (Chouliaraki, 2010). Operationalizing Laclau

and Mouffe’s discourse theory within a framework of self-

mediation as auto-communication and radical democracy, this

  12  

chapter builds on an analytical framework that foregrounds two

selected concepts from the theory: antagonism/agonism and chains

of equivalence (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Laclau, 1990).

<h2>Antagonism/agonism</h2>

As an analytical construct antagonism pays attention to textual (in

its broadest sense) identifications of an ‘us’ against an external

‘them’. Agonism reminds us that it is important that an inclusive,

democratic politics requires that we turn antagonists into agonists.

While the relationship between antagonism and agonism should

not be seen as a duality, in radical activist discourse it is often

articulated as such, to draw a clear political frontier (Uldam, 2010).

<h2>Chains of equivalence</h2>

The concept of chains of equivalence provides an analytical lens

for exploring activists’ constructions of alliances. On a textual

level chains of equivalence are discursive constructs that link

signifiers semantically (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: Ch. 2). At the

level of radical democracy, chains of equivalence work to create

equivalential linkages among different social struggles, among

demands, interests and identities, among SMOs, activist groups and

networks (Howarth, 2008; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: Ch. 4). These

two levels are interconnected: the equivalential linking together of

signifiers works to connect counter-hegemonic issues as activist

groups enter into network coalitions in order to help the

  13  

proliferation of their agenda against a political frontier constructed

in relation to an antagonistic outside (Cammaerts, 2009).

<h1>Studying NTAC: YouTube videos as mediation of

discursive contestation</h1>

We approach practices of contestation in YouTube from the

perspective of mediation, addressing media practices – the things

people do with media – as processes enabled and conditioned by

the multiple and complex interfaces between technology,

institutions and representations (Couldry, 2008; Chouliaraki and

Morsing, 2009). NTAC is a pertinent case because, as a high-

profile political event, the United Nations Climate Summit

mattered both as a site of political contestation and as a site of

media attention (Couldry, 1999). The plethora of online platforms

that have come to form a staple of many social movement actors’

media repertoires adds to the significance of multimodality of

mediation3 (mixes of sound and images, still or moving) in

activism and protest practices. The case of NTAC has come to

demonstrate how the mediation of multimodal self-representations

that YouTube enables serves both outbound and inbound purposes

for political engagement in the extra-parliamentarian realm. It

serves an outbound purpose of mediating self-representations

undistorted by mass media gatekeepers to wider publics; it serves

an inbound purpose as a self-referential act of communication that

  14  

can reinforce intra-movement commitment and political identities.

In this way, self-mediation becomes a form of auto-communication

whereby mediation originally produced for an external audience

may be transformed into self-reinforcing representations

(Christensen, 1997). We return to the notion of outbound

communication as auto-communication when we describe our

conceptual framework.

This chapter draws on interviews with activists from the networks

around NTAC, and actors from the radical media environment in

Copenhagen, analysing their accounts of the perceptions and

intentions that motivate the use of video activism in contestatory

politics more generally, and their reflections on NTAC’s War on

Capitalism video and its dissemination on YouTube more

specifically.

Following the appearance of the War on Capitalism video on

YouTube, NTAC have been not just hurled into the mass media

limelight, they have been investigated by the Danish intelligence

services. As a result, Copenhagen-based activists are reluctant, on

the record, to expose their ties with the NTAC network. The

respondents cited in this chapter are affiliated with the Copenhagen

‘autonomous’ activist community, but their specific affiliations

with NTAC are anonymized. The chapter draws mainly on semi-

structured, in-depth interviews with social movement actors

  15  

involved in the COP15 counter-summits. Respondents were

recruited on the basis of participant observation at Klimaforum09

and the Global Day of Action and Reclaim Power demonstrations

in December 2009. The interviews are used for two purposes. First,

we draw on respondents’ accounts of the planning and execution of

counter-summit events around COP15 to paint a picture of

NTAC’s role in this context. Second, following an analysis of the

War on Capitalism video, we analyse motivations for using

YouTube as a platform for mobilizing collective action as

articulated by respondents. In analysing these data we employ an

analytical framework that draws on core concepts from discourse

theory.

<h1>Mapping political contestation around Cop15:

NTAC and alliances</h1>

The demonstrations around the COP15 summit were organized and

attended by a diverse and broad range of interests. Political activist

groups from all over the world convened to voice their views and

stakes in climate change issues, through large-scale protest, civil

disobedience actions, creative happenings and counter-summits.

The diverse agenda of the major actors, which can be seen as

representing three main factions of the protests around the COP15,

testify to the wide range of these voices.

  16  

The mainstream end of the spectrum includes established non-

governmental organizations (NGO) with climate-centred agenda,

such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Friends of the Earth.

WWF adopted a lobbying approach that involved participation and

peaceful stunts inside the conference centre, and demonstrators on

bicycles, wearing panda costumes, at the popular demonstration

outside the venue. In the middle is the Climate Justice Action

(CJA) network. CJA tried to bridge between the reformist and

radical approaches by rejecting the use of violence and calling for

wider publics to participate in the protests. At the radical end,

NTAC was calling for a conflictual approach, planning street riots

with burning cars and confrontational demonstrations.

The activist network NTAC was an international network formed

to mobilize the radical left across Europe, prior to the COP15, and

dissolved shortly after the conference, thus illustrating the often

provisional and single issue-based nature of contemporary activist

networks. The network came into being in the run-up to the climate

demonstrations; it was formed at a meeting in the social centre, the

Youth House, in the aftermath of a much larger mobilization

meeting held by a wide range of actors involved in the organization

of COP15 demonstrations, including well-established NGO such as

Friends of the Earth and CJA. The meeting resulted in an internal

dispute over how aggressive the tactics to be used should be, and

the question of how to respond to the clampdown on civil

  17  

disobedience by the Danish authorities. Subsequently, NTAC was

formed, by activists who felt that the actions envisioned by the

majority of the participants conformed to the rules of an

undemocratic system. In this sense, NTAC can be understood as

‘dissenters’ of this more formal mobilization meeting and as what

was to become a rally ground for activists keen to break with the

philosophy and strategies of more consensus-oriented or reformist

fractions.

During the COP15, the network was somewhat isolated and

gradually was marginalized among the broader spectrum of

organizations and movements present in Copenhagen. Whereas

many climate activists struggled to get air time, NTAC achieved

the media spotlight unwillingly, and chose not to speak to the press

before, during or after the summit. Several journalists made

unsuccessful attempts to get interviews, and NTAC’s silence gave

free vent to interpretation and condemnation, without anyone

contradicting these spins on the story.

<h1>NTAC’s call for action on YouTube: discourses

of war</h1>

In its attempt to mobilize for protests against the COP15, NTAC

used YouTube to promote a call for radical action. In what follows,

we provide a brief analysis of the video as a prelude to our analysis

  18  

of activists’ motivations for and perceptions of using YouTube for

calls for confrontational action, because the way that NTAC’s call

was articulated and aestheticized in the video is precisely what

generated mass media attention and caused a split in the COP15

protest networks.

<h2>Declaring war on capitalism</h2>

On 24 October 2009, some two months prior to COP15, a

mobilization video declaring war on capitalism was put on

YouTube by a Swedish user, ‘civilspan’. War on Capitalism was

uploaded with a short appurtenant text reading: ‘Capitalism is

stumbling – let’s make sure it falls. Get prepared with your friends

and come to Copenhagen 7th-18th of December. Direct action

against the COP15. Read more at: www.nevertrustacop.org’. The

NTAC video was framed by the Danish press as a commercial

selling violence. On 22 November, some two weeks before the

COP15 summit, it made the six o’clock news and attracted

headlines in almost every Danish newspaper. The NTAC network

was labelled criminal vandals and became the centre of attention in

the mass media (Søgaard, 2009; Kjærulff, 2009).

The video shows masked activists wielding bricks and gas

canisters. Molotov cocktails, black balaclavas and scarves and

overturned police vehicles feature as iconographic signs of protest

  19  

that feed into a counter-discourse in which the power of visual

imagery is used to mobilize and sustain dissent.

<fgn>Figure 8.1:</fgn> <fgc>Stills from War on

Capitalism.</fgc>

Within the text, the constituent outside is structured around two

agonistic poles and an us/them dichotomy. ‘They talk about green

capitalism […]’ and opposed to this ‘they’ is articulated a ‘we’:

‘We will go to Copenhagen to show a dead system how to die’.

The discursive construction of this antagonistic relation is explicit

in both text and images. It construes the capitalist system and its

representatives as the enemy. However, another and more subtle

‘they’ is at play. There are two different implicit positions at play

here: that of the activist who wants to keep the protest within the

boundaries of legal demonstration, and that of the radical activist

who acknowledges the need to resort to violence. There is a

complete absence of images of cheerful crowds of people filling

the streets with colourful and creative happenings. The absence of

images of peaceful demonstrations constructs protesters advocating

  20  

reformist and peaceful initiatives, as a constitutive outside to the

NTAC as a radical faction.

In similar vein, the discourse of ‘war’, including images of the

burning city as its visual representation, breaks the chain of

equivalence – the alignment of environment-centred activist

agendas – that the broader movement had tried to create. In other

words, it breaks up the unified image of the COP15 protests and

points to the heterogeneity of the groups that form the movement.

This attempt at an antagonization of the protest was picked up

quickly by the Danish media and political opponents of the radical

Left, and used to project an image of the GJM as incapable of

bringing together its different factions in a broad coalition.

<h1>Why video activism on YouTube?</h1>

This section argues that video activism in the context of online

possibilities for disrupting neoliberal discourses on climate change

serves a dual purpose in mediation: it can be seen as a media

strategy promoting a critique of capitalism towards broader

publics, and an auto-communicative appeal promoting NTAC as an

agent of resistance within a specific collective action field, working

to sustain intra-movement support. As we explore this duality, two

interrelated dualities emerge from the interviews with activists and

  21  

other social movement actors involved in the civil society activities

around the COP15: (1) the role of riots as a strategy for accessing

the mass media and articulating a non-reformist political agenda;

and (2) the role of mobilization videos for sustaining political

identification and commitment. Activists regard the promotion of

mobilization videos on YouTube as infused with both obstacles

and possibilities.

<h2>COP15 – an ambiguous enemy</h2>

Another aspect relayed as an impediment to the riots promoted by

NTAC is related to COP15 as an event that does not present a

straightforward enemy. Unlike the WTO and G20 summits whose

agenda are trade and economic policy oriented, COP15 was

orchestrated around the goal of minimizing climate change. Goals

can vary in their level of ambition and the underlying motives of

different participants, although the War on Capitalism video does

articulate the purpose of the summit as ‘green capitalism’.

However, COP15 does not provide an unambiguous enemy that

speaks to the antagonistic dimension of the political. This absence

of an antagonist as a constitutive outside is captured by a comment

from an activist:

<ext>COP15 was fuzzy to many people, ‘what is it all

about? Are we protesting against the summit? It’s not

G20, it’s a UN summit. Is it an enemy? Do we have

  22  

certain demands in relation to CO2 emissions, or do we

want to show that these things can’t be trusted’.</ext>

<ext_source>(Rene, Interview, March

2010)</ext_source>

Proponents of non-violent civil disobedience modes of action and

proponents of more confrontational direct action negotiated and

struggled over this ambiguity of COP15 as an antagonist during the

planning leading up to the event, and there were discussions about

whether a demand for tangible steps to counter climate change was

compatible with a politics of delegitimizing the COP15 summit.

<h2>Antagonism and non-reformist political identities</h2>

It is precisely the role of antagonism and the identification of an

enemy that can work as a constitutive outside, which are central to

the NTAC network’s political identity: ‘the Network has a distinct

identity which is a distinct negative identity. Negativity is a key

word to NTAC’ (Niels, Interview, February 2010). Within a social

movement field, other groupings, fractions and blocs work as the

constitutive outside to a specific group’s political identity. The

political identity of the NTAC network is based on negativity, on a

concern with not appearing reformist. This feeds into the network’s

repertoires for action: ‘Civil disobedience is about somehow

avoiding conforming to unreasonable state control … creating riots

– reclaiming public space – is a wet dream’ (Niels, Interview,

  23  

February 2010). Here, the role of riots as a key part of NTAC’s

repertoire for action can be seen as serving a dual purpose:

enacting the insurgency that underpins the movement’s political

identity and, at the same time, evoking passion and antagonism to

motivate political engagement within the network.

In protesting against climate change, it becomes key for the radical

wing of the GJM to articulate the underlying causes as systemic

and political, and to connect them to capitalist production. Without

this articulation and the antagonism entailed, the movement risks

advocating an individualist approach to a green movement,

grounded in consumers engaging in banal and easy, green, belt

tightening as a part of the individual image management projects

(Chatterton, 2009). This cooptation of the eco-consumer is seen as

sustaining profit-driven growth and facilitating corporate social

responsibility practices that replace a regulatory framework that

holds corporations accountable for their operations rather than

allowing them to frame selected schemes as environmentally

responsible as a part of their marketing initiatives. From this angle,

confrontational protests – or the enactment of performative

violence (Juris, 2005) – are seen as particularly important to

rejecting and destabilizing the market-based discourses that are

seen as underpinning institutional politics. This ties in with

articulating COP15 as an example of ‘green capitalism’.

  24  

<h1>Activist videos on YouTube: perceived possibilities

and challenges</h1>

Respondents articulate their understandings of mobilization videos

in terms of outbound and inbound possibilities and challenges.

<h2>Outbound self-representations: accessing the mass

media</h2>

Filming protest events and uploading these films to the Internet is

seen as a possibility to access the mass media. Here, alternative

spaces such as Indymedia are seen as insufficient. In contrast,

YouTube is seen as more likely to generate these flows.

Interviewees demonstrate an understanding of the mainstream mass

media as operating along profit-driven logics by which the

spectacular is privileged in terms of visibility: ‘You can’t have a

demonstration without filming it. That makes it pointless … If

there are riots in Copenhagen, they’ll only go global if there’s

video footage. Otherwise it’s pointless; you may as well not

bother’ (Thomas, Interview, February 2010).

What ‘counts’ as political action, therefore, is influenced by mass

media logics and the constraints of media formats that privilege the

visual and multimodal: the interviewees all regarded multimodal

representations of political action as crucial for facilitating their

dissemination to wider publics. This helped to broaden the scope of

  25  

climate change to an anti-capitalist issue (Gamson and Wolfsfeld,

1993). Importantly, it is the juxtaposition of riots and their

multimodal representations that activists regard as interesting the

mass media: ‘It reaches other activist communities around the

world, but it doesn’t reach CNN unless there’s trouble, and unless

the trouble has been filmed’ (Thomas, Interview, February 2010).

Similar to social and institutional events, such as weddings or other

ceremonies that adopt features that facilitate their remediation, via

digital cameras (Couldry, 2008), protest riots are staged around

cameras. Also, cameras are arranged to facilitate ensuing

remediation of selective self-representations. This is captured by

Thomas’s reference to constructing reality through filming:

<ext>Being able to show reality is really cool. And

manipulate reality. You’re the one who decides where the

camera points. So somebody may have hit somebody, and

somebody hit back, and then that’s the part that gets

filmed. And then that becomes the truth. You’ve got to

film the truth, you want people to see.</ext>

<ext_source>(Thomas, Interview, February

2010)</ext_source>

Thomas’s comment reflects an understanding of the power of

videos for circulating specific representations of ‘reality’ as an

  26  

important part of political action. This points to the inbound

purpose of activist videos on YouTube: building political identities.

<h2>Inbound self-representations: mediation as auto-

communication</h2>

As an intra-movement mobilization video, War on Capitalism

serves the purpose of visually articulating an antagonistic political

identity against a constitutive outside of relief-oriented and

reformist actors. This is seen typically as involving visual

representations of injustice brought about by capitalism, followed

by images from previous riots. As Niels explained: ‘That shift from

putting up with it to hitting back. There’s a transition in those

videos. First this and then [snaps his fingers] now they’re getting

what’s coming to them. It’s ejaculation’. (Niels, Interview, January

2010).

In this way, multimodal and visual representations of political

identities and possibilities for agency are seen as central to evoking

a sense of identification with the cause and motivating collective

action. These processes of identity formation and mobilization are

seen as important across the GJM and across movements

(Cammaerts, 2007; della Porta, 2005; Juris, 2005). But, in the

context of confrontational counter-summits such as the one

envisioned by NTAC, the importance of these processes is

augmented: the ‘emotional effervescence’ of enacting political

  27  

dissent amplifies anger, but also transforms it into affective

solidarity (Juris, 2005). ‘Pure riot porn!’ exclaimed respondent

when asked about the NTAC video (Per, Interview, March 2010).

In some regards, this spontaneous outcry reflects the importance

that many activists attach to affective aspects of direct action as

political engagement. By providing visual modes to mediate

affective aspects of political engagement through remediation of

the gratification of direct action, of the performance of desire and

fantasy (Carpentier, 2010), the video also has an auto-

communicative function: as the images of moments of heroic

revolution from previous anti-capitalist protests along with

responses of antipathy and indignation in the mass media were

remediated back to activists who were planning protests around the

United Nations Climate Summit, the oppositional political identity

of NTAC was reinforced (see Uldam and Askanius, 2012 for an

analysis of the YouTube debate on climate change): ‘It’s the future.

It can document stuff in a whole different way … it’s a cool way to

put a face to some of those people who share your beliefs ….

Video speaks to your feelings, much more than text’ (Per,

Interview, March 2010).

However, as Christensen (1997: 203) reminds us in his application

of auto-communication to organizations’ outbound

communication, organizations consist of disparate ‘voices’. The

GJM and its environmental constellations are extremely

  28  

heterogeneous, made up of a wide range of different actors ranging

from reformist NGOs to radical networks of activists (McCurdy,

2010). Therefore, the unequivocal antagonism of political identities

promoted in NTAC’s outbound communication may not reflect the

self-understandings other activists and groups hold of themselves

and of the GJM. Indeed, NTAC’s video provoked internal tensions

among groups and networks at the radical end of the GJM:

<ext>They [NTAC] hadn’t realized how much the video

would boomerang, because it got so much media

attention. I think they’d forgotten to consider how the

media attention wouldn’t be about the criticism of

capitalism at the beginning of the video. Instead the media

attention was all about the images of burning cars. It could

seem as though they’d only considered it as an internal

video … after that video it was as though everyone hated

them.</ext> <ext_source>(Thomas, Interview, February

2010)</ext_source>

The video’s use of mass media images produced a fetishization of

the protesters, which – coupled with the remediation of these

images in the mass media and the new surge of negative coverage

that this remediation triggered – provoked criticism from groups in

the activist community trying to link their protests through the

Climate Justice Action network. These groups were keen to

  29  

promote more universal self-representations that were intended to

bridge reformist and radical approaches by rejecting the use of

violence and calling for wider publics to participate, including

families and ‘green consumers’, while ‘holding on to something

radical, anti-capitalistic, semi-militant frame’ (Fastrup, Interview,

February 2010).

However, despite the abstention in the activist community to

fetishize the anti-capitalist moment of protest as a media strategy,

the multimodal juxtapositions of the video were recognized as

invoking powerful emotional memories of previous protests (see

e.g. Moffitt, 2010 for a discussion of the fetishization of the enemy

in political communication). In this respect, the auto-

communicative aspects of mediation and remediation of the video

did reinforce a sense of an antagonistic political identity among

radical activists, albeit not a sense of belonging that translated into

engagement in the protests around the COP15. Moreover, this

invokes Gamson and Wolfsfeld’s (1993) argument that mass media

coverage serves three major purposes for social movements:

mobilization, validation and scope enlargement. The War on

Capitalism video served both outbound and inbound purposes. This

is captured in part by the two other mass media purposes identified

by Gamson and Wolfsfeld: mass media can facilitate mobilization

because coverage helps to alert the activist community, and mass

media coverage plays a role in validating the movement’s

  30  

importance (Gamson and Wolfsfeld, 1993: 116). In both cases, the

auto-communicative purposes of social movement communication

serve to reinforce a sense of political identity and commitment.

Gamson and Wolfsfeld’s (1993) third mass media purpose, scope

enlargement, refers to the role of mass media coverage in

generating sympathy for the activists’ cause among broader publics

(Gamson and Wolfsfeld, 1993). The NTAC network’s use of

YouTube to upload the provocative War on Capitalism video was

aimed at attracting the attention of the mainstream media. This

opens up the space of the issue: capitalism as a root cause of

climate change. Prior to the 2009 United Nations Climate Summit,

this was important for NTAC, which was a new, unknown

network. Also, the anti-capitalist perspective on climate change is

at the margins of discourses on climate change (Routledge et al.,

2007). Therefore, the network had much to gain by getting its

agenda into the mainstream media (Gamson and Wolfsfeld, 1993).

However, as we have discussed, the coverage of the video on

YouTube was negative, pointing to the dilemma between

spectacular violent protest and negative media coverage (Kellner,

2003). This ties in with the auto-communicative aspects War on

Capitalism. While the video served an outbound purpose, which

included an attempt to access the mainstream media in order to

broaden the scope of climate change protests, it also served an

inbound purpose of reinforcing the antagonistic political identities

  31  

of the network. In other words, it served both strategic and

affective purposes.

<h1>Conclusions</h1>

The transformative impact of media on non-institutional politics

has moved performance and ‘image events’ to the centre of

contemporary politics (McCurdy, 2009; DeLuca and Peebles,

2002). Counter-summits and ‘performative violence’ can be seen

as a response to these conditions of possibility (McCurdy, 2009).

However, they serve a dual purpose: media strategy and the forging

of political identities (Juris, 2005) and this dual purpose permeated

the perceptions of the riots, among the study respondents.

This raises questions about how enactments of protest can become

a part of a political project that resonates with broader publics

beyond their highly localized spheres, without compromising the

antagonism that is fundamental to the political (Mouffe, 2000).

Dallmayr (1987: 289) argues that a ‘military conception of politics’

risks producing polarization, because ‘hostile camps tend to retreat

into the shells of their separate identities’. The enactment of

political antagonism in direct action should not be seen as

eliminating the legitimate place of opponents in the debate

(Mouffe, 2000). Rather, it should be about articulating a political

position that refutes a reformist approach. However,

  32  

confrontational protests often render protesters vulnerable to

negative mass media coverage (Juris, 2005).

The importance of constructing antagonisms in political practices

draws attention to the importance of intra-discursive contestation

within social movements (Mouffe, 2005). The antagonism

provoked by this much-disputed video amongst groups and

networks at both ends of the GJM spectrum should not necessarily

be reduced to a communicative slip-up. Instead, it should be seen

as an example of the ways in which activists use YouTube to

reinforce a sense of political identity and commitment among

themselves. The reactions of dismay that the War on Capitalism

video generated as it travelled from YouTube to the six o’clock

news serve to reinforce the antagonistic sensibilities of the activist

community for which it was produced. This is remediation as auto-

communication – the inbound impact of outbound social

movement communication.

Following Gamson and Wolfsfeld’s (1993) analysis of the

interplay between social movements and the mass media,

uploading the video on YouTube as a means to access the

mainstream media can be seen as an attempt at scope enlargement,

bringing attention to NTAC, and to capitalism as a root cause of

climate change. The auto-communicative aspects of the video can

be seen as mobilization (mass media coverage helps to alert the

activist community) and as validation (coverage validated the

  33  

importance of the NTAC network as a major player in the COP15

protests) enabled by its online presence on YouTube and

subsequent coverage in the mass media.

Taking the political contestation towards the COP15 as a case in

point, we have demonstrated that YouTube constitutes an

important platform for activist networks, such as NTAC, and

brings attention to the ever-important role of visual media to social

movement actors as a means to gain visibility in the broader

political landscape, but also to reinforce political commitment. As

YouTube has taken a lead position in online video sharing, this

chapter calls attention to the potentials and problems this

development holds in terms of self-representations of action that

may help to bring about system change, but not climate change.

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1  The  15th  Conference  of  the  Parties  to  the  United  Nations  

Framework  Convention  on  Climate  Change.  

2  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk-­‐MBWp4vh8,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSBoxEWx_1Y.  Accessed  1  

Nov.  2011.  

  42  

3  We  draw  on  Chouliaraki’s  (2006)  notion  of  multimodality  of  

mediation  as  an  analytical  approach  to  capturing  the  symbolic  

meaning-­‐making  of  verbal-­‐visual  juxtapositions.