Continued from “Media as resistance: Disrupting and shifting power” by Isabel McIntosh, University of Tasmania
Media networks
Social media and mobile technology has expanded access to share content and participate in public discussion for grassroots activists. No longer is ‘media’ the domain of media manager in an activist or non-government organisation.
Grassroots actors form their own direct relationships on Twitter with news journalists and power-brokers. On Facebook they become the digital producers of frames and scripts (Bird, 2011).
Activism becomes a series of personal action frames generated through social media that act as both reports on the ground and a collaborative story-telling of event.
I saw the reference to Santos’ sponsorship early on and was one of the disbelievers, ignoring it as an exaggeration.
Only when it appeared again and again on my feed did I finally delve in to the substance and realise it was true. This repetition is a characteristic of activist commitment manifesting as grassroots media practice.
It wasn’t until three days after Anning’s first tweet that the movement actor Lock the Gate Alliance shared the media object on its Facebook page with the post shared 500 times, the reach from this alone more than 57,000 people.
It was after this that online media site Crikey became the first media outlet to comment in its ‘Tips and Rumours’ section, referencing the noise on social media and asking, “Protesters against coal-seam gas developments in New South Wales in particular have got to be asking themselves: just what exactly has Santos bought?”.
Lock the Gate Alliance tweets a link to the Crikey story repeating the line “Just what has Santos bought”.
Multiple media outlets reference the extensive circulation on social media.
The Guardian reports “opponents of CSG circulated images at the weekend showing police vehicles bearing Santos’s name” (Safi, ‘Queensland police defend use of vehicles branded with Santos logo’, 2014).
Twitter is the source for a quote in the Sunshine Coast Daily: “Stop Brisbane Coal Trains spokesman John Gordon said on Twitter it was “a bloody disgrace” and called for all Santos logos to be removed” (Egan, ‘Santos sponsorship above board: Minister’, 2014).
The Brisbane Times attributes the photo credit for the photo first used by Mark Anning to @NoCSGCoonabarabran, a sign its source of news to develop the story came via social media.
Media as a numbers game
Achieving success against a powerful regime is a numbers game. If the campaign is nonviolent more citizens are likely to participate, and the greater the participation the greater the chance of success (Chenoweth and Stephan, 2011, p. 11).
A diverse set of actors publicly challenging a regime increases the confidence for more and more people to participate.
Widespread participation makes it difficult for a regime to differentiate between movement and non-movement participants creating resilience against an aggressive government response (Schock, 2015, p. 109).
Media nodes and media practice become a contribution to all these metrics.
A blunt count of media nodes generating and propelling media objects across digital platforms can also be used a quantitative count of resistance.
As networks expand and the strategy moves from grievance to intent, media texts start proliferating from new nodes: first person blogs, community group newsletters, social media, news stories with local voices, photos, gonzo journalism, videos and film uploaded and distributed across the virtual world.
These are shared, carried by social media users – activist or bystander public – into new networks, layered with local frames and personal comment.
Each new generative media node becomes another actor in the networks of activism, expanding the count of participation and everyday reach for content and ideas.
In comparison, the elite narrative often stays relatively static: government and industry speeches at business conference, statements from government ministers, a repetition of key messages.
Like the impetus for numbers against an authoratarian regime, the mobilisation of grassroots media voices expands the discourse into a wild-fire strategy of frames, facts and connections that elite power can’t pick off one by one.
Sustaining it
Critical to strategic civil resistance is sustaining momentum and media objects of resistance become a way to achieve this.
The Santos Police Cars media object continued to circulate on the mediatized public stage for three more months, both for its imbued symbolic meaning but also the rhizomes of new angles.
As part of his 2014 early investigation ABC journalist Josh Bavas had asked the Queensland police for a list of sponsors and sponsorship amounts.
Four months later in April 2015 the information arrived: twenty-three corporate donations totalling $475,000 given to Queensland police in the past financial year.
ABC’s flagship program World at Noon queries why each sponsor’s name is blacked out, the frame shifting from Santos-specific to the breadth of companies sponsoring the Queensland Police.
Bavis interviews the Queensland Police Commissioner along with Drew Hutton from Lock the Gate and Terry O’Gorman from the Australian Council for Civil Liberties (Bavas, ‘Queensland Police Service refuses to name sponsors’, 2015a).
The Police Commissioner says it is unnecessary to release the details of Queensland police sponsorships. O’Gorman demands better openness and transparency in government, a message backed up by Hutton who reiterates the democratic conflict of interest.
In Bavas’ online story Santos is only mentioned twice in the 980 words, yet in three separate places there is a hyperlink to ABC’s December story.
The image from the December is also used, only its caption referencing the original story. (The photo captions reads: “The Santos logos visible on Queensland Police cars raised the ire of environmental groups earlier this year”.
One day later the new Queensland Police Minister Jo-Ann Miller overrides the Police Commissioner explaining “it’s very important that any sponsorship with the Queensland Police Service should be available for everyone to see. So, every quarter, any sponsorships will be put on the QPS website for anyone to see – it’s about being open” (Bavas, 2015b).
It must be noted that a search for “Santos” in a media database would not reveal its relationship to this shift in donations policy by the Queensland government.
Media as resistance
Industry regimes and political actors invest significant resources in media assets and expertise recognising its ability to influence and negotiate power.
Grassroots media as power becomes a way to contest this influence.
Santos’ sponsorship of the Queensland Police escalated to become a syndicated news story, crossing from social media into national news and expanding the legitimacy for the coal seam gas movement into new networks.
From a clearly defined entry point Santos’ sponsorship as a media object crossed from social media into national news through a star-shaped web of connections that increased legibility and shifted power from Santos to create horizontal ties that added and expanded networks.
It wasn’t just information or content or protest action, the media object was a mediator for the coal seam gas protest narrative taking it into the public discourse of democracy and legitimacy of the mining regime, a lever to interrogate government’s relationship with mining, its conflict of interest, the connection between corporate donations and influence.
Activist media practice of activists made the story act: facilitated its appearance to a broad audience, linked it to the broader campaign and ensured that the story’s purpose, to spotlight the mining industry’s close relationship with government, would leave a trace.
Grassroots media practice created a media object and made it act: contesting government legitimacy, linking it to the broader campaign and ensured that the story’s purpose, to spotlight the mining industry’s close relationship with government, would leave a trace.
Grassroots media practice and activist commitment facilitated the connections that disrupted elite power and escalated the movement and added new frames to add both legitimacy and legibility to activist movement.
This research is a new cleavage in the applied study of strategic civil resistance to industry regimes that in a globalised world cross international boundaries and exert power facilitated by the policy and laws of democratic government.
This structural violence embedded in the ‘peaceful’ democratic state can’t be ignored when its contribution to global warming threatens the peace of the world. Footnote: The Queensland Police used police and kids dancing in front of a sponsor-branded caravan in a new video to promote its ‘Stay on Track’ program in May 2015. However, only two of the three original logos still remained with Santos no longer there.
Neither is Santos listed in the multitude of sponsors later that year on the Stay on Track’ website, this absence another trace of the strategic resistance that can be sourced back to a single tweet.
Queensland Police Force … proudly brought to you by Santos
— Mark Anning (@1EarthMedia) December 6, 2014
coal seam gas#AusPol #QldPol #CSG #NSWpol #QldInc pic.twitter.com/rLAUXVgCc8
References
@1earthmedia. (2014a). Queensland Police Force … proudly brought to you by Santos [tweet].
Bavas, J. (2015a, April 7). Queensland Police Service refuses to name sponsors, Radio. The World Today. Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2015/s4211658.htm
Bavas, J. (2015b, April 8). Queensland Police Minister Jo-Ann Miller orders sponsorship details be made public, Radio. ABC News. Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-08/minister-orders-queensland-policesponsorship-details-be-made-p/6379048
Bird, S. E. (2011). Are we all produsers now? Convergence and media audience practices. Cultural Studies, 25(4-5), 502-516.
° Continued from Part One: “Media as resistance: Disrupting and shifting power” by Isabel McIntosh, University of Tasmania
Media as resistance: Disrupting and shifting power
by Isabel McIntosh, University of Tasmania
The anti-coal seam gas (fracking) movement in Australia’s most populated state of New South Wales (2011-2015) built broad public support for a disruptive nonviolent campaign that confronted the mining industry in situ and eroded financial, political and social legitimacy for the powerful fossil fuel regime.
From fragmented grievance in 2011 the movement escalated to tens of thousands of active participants.
As well as blockades at mine sites grassroots activists used strategic media practice to successfully disrupt elite power and remove pillars of support for the fossil fuel regime’s pro-coal seam gas narrative. McCarthy et al. (2013) define nonviolence as wielding influence through the “active process of bringing pressure to bear (even if it is emotional or moral pressure)” (p. xix).
While there is no shortage of research into the communications opportunity of today’s hybrid media system (Chadwick, 2013) to make visible protest and dissent, its ontology as strategic resistance is largely unexplored.
Indeed, strategic civil resistance scholars emphasise that ‘media’ should not be overexaggerated as a tool for movements and that “struggles for freedom, social justice and democracy can only really be won in the real world, not the virtual one” (Popovic and Alvarez, 2015, pp. 98-99).
This paper investigates how grassroots activist media practice wielded influence to confront and shift power during NSW’s resistance against the coal seam gas industry and fossil fuel regime.
I explore this influence on public narrative through the concepts of media practice as a form of activist commitment, media as networks and media jujutsu, the strategy of media as a process to turn opponents’ own power against them.
As well as the influence on public narrative this research uses a methodology that rethinks how media can be measured as a tangible count in the numbers game necessary for movement success (Chenoweth and Stephan, 2011).
