Animated Video: Digital Rebellion – The Birth of the Cyber Left

Published on Jun 27, 2015
Rutgers SC&I Social Media & Society Cluster
Melding virtual and traditional ethnographic practice to explore the Cyber Left’s cultural logic, Todd Wolfson maps the social, spatial and communicative structure of the Indymedia network and details its operations on the local, national and global level. He looks at the participatory democracy that governs global social movements and the ways democracy and decentralization have come into tension, and how “the switchboard of struggle” conducts stories from the hyper-local and disperses them worldwide. As he shows, understanding the intersection of Indymedia and the Global Social Justice Movement illuminates their foundational role in the Occupy struggle and other emergent movements that have re-energized radical politics.