The New Social Movements

Chapter 3 made an attempt to establish a normative model for a digital-media-infused politics in liberal democratic societies. While this theoretical framework can be used for most types of political activity — in this sense it can be used for the types of activity that will be discussed in this chapter — it is most credibly applied to electoral politics in liberal democratic societies. In order to extend some of the ideas in Chapter 3 to a study of extra-parliamentary political activities, the work of theorists like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri will be used to augment my normative model. In doing so, the chapter focuses mainly on political activities and social campaigns that take place largely outside the mainstream political arena. These will be mainly associated with the new social movements, but will also include Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign; this was chosen as a case study here precisely because of its difference from most campaigns in formal elections. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.