The Eavesdropper and Onlooker as Proximate Agents of Social Change
The eavesdropper and the onlooker have become models of activist potential. Their proximity to enactments of racist and gendered social violence, and their abilities to witness, record and disseminate records of this violence via smartphones and social media networks, define some of the conditions...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Simon Dawes, Centre d’histoire culturelle des sociétés contemporaines (CHCSC), Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ)
2022-03-01
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| Series: | Media Theory |
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| Online Access: | https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/918 |
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| Summary: | The eavesdropper and the onlooker have become models of activist potential. Their proximity to enactments of racist and gendered social violence, and their abilities to witness, record and disseminate records of this violence via smartphones and social media networks, define some of the conditions for social change around the situations in which bystanders are located online. Drawing from John Peters’ analysis of eavesdropping as the transformation of private talk into public communication, this article examines the contemporary activist reclamation of eavesdropping and onlooking as small-scale, networked conditions of social transformation. Imagined as small acts of intervention tied to participation in contemporary social media environments, their models of social change leverage the positionality of the eavesdropper and the onlooker, transforming the “listening in” that people do on social media and elsewhere into acts of agentic response. In the process, they recode the conditions in which harm is enacted from being surveilled online into conditions that also enable activist intervention.
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| ISSN: | 2557-826X |