Fijación de los cromosomas para microscopía electrónica

Overtime as marginalized groups have been repeatedly excluded from national

public debates and political power, a new space for civic engagement has emerged in

online spaces. Their individual and collective struggle for power served as resistance to a

larger superstructure, one in which was determined by the public sphere. According to

Habermas (1989), the ideal public sphere is one in which citizens, facilitated by the

media, are able to be a part of the social and political national issues. However, in

practice, those on the margins of society have been systematically excluded from the

public sphere by historically framed definitions of citizenship that exclude women,

people of color, immigrants, and other marginalized groups (Squires, 2007; Jackson and

Welles, 2016). Through the use of online social platforms, the Black community has

created separate communal spaces to discuss both personal and systemic issues in their

lives that are often left out of the media and the public sphere. Patricia Hill Collins (2000)

explains that structural racism, has facilitated the creation of these spaces, and that a

culture of resistance may exist apart from the dominant structures. This resistance has

been linked to counterpublics and counternarratives, which includes challenging “the

power embedded in the institutions of society for the purpose of claiming representation

for their own values and interests” (Castells, 2012). Challenging these ideologies can

occur outside the view of the dominant group through hidden groups or password

protected blogs, but also in ways that push their discourses into the mainstream on

platforms like Twitter and through the use of hashtags. The latter has been used

increasingly with activists online, specifically within the Black Lives Matter Movement

and following the deaths of Black citizens with hashtags like #Ferguson and

#SayHerName.

Habermas (1989) considered the interconnection between the working class,

the state, and the media as an integral part of a functioning democratic society, in which

citizens are able to contribute to social issues and state agendas, and used this as the

framing for an ideal public sphere. The Rodney King beating both encapsulated and

challenged this supposedly equal exchange and relationship. On March 3rd, 1991, George

Holiday, a man living in South Central LA woke up to loud noises outside of his

apartment and quickly picked up his new video camera to record from his balcony.

Initially, he tried to give the video to the LAPD but when they refused he sold the video

for $200 to KTLA news station. In Jill Swensons’s article, “Rodney King, Reginald

Denny, and TV News: Cultural (Re-)Construction of Racism”, she argues that the video

footage of the Rodney King beating threatened the logic and interests of social structures

in America that have imposed racial orders. The fact that the Rodney King video was

purchased by a local news station and given any recognition at all revealed that

marginalized groups have some power to shift mainstream narratives, and allows the

video to become an expression of the public sphere through its relationship to the news

media and the state. However, she also posits that the video of Reginald Denny acted to

challenge Holidays video through maintaining structures of racial inequality. Reginald

Denny, a white truck driver, was captured on live television being beat by four Black men

during the riots that ensued after the officers that beat King were acquitted, and the video

was then used by the mass media across the nation to represent the unrest in Los Angeles.

The cognitive dissonance between the two videos demonstrates how race became the

dominant framework in which the mass media was operating. Even though Holiday’s

video and the subsequent conversations on police brutality are emblematic of the ideal

public sphere at work, the continuous coverage of the videos of the uprisings and protests

worked to undo that counter-narrative.

Scholars have pointed to the public distrust of the government and media’s

re-telling of current events as motivations for the creations of counter-networks (Jackson

and Welles, 2016; Jenkins, 2008; Florini, 2014). In Ferguson, when protests began

activists on the ground were continuously fighting the narratives displayed in the news

through video and textual evidence on apps like Twitter, Periscope, and Facebook.

According to Jenkins (2008), these shifts in the communication design have brought

contradictory debates within our culture.

“On the one hand, this ‘democratization’ of media use signals a broadening of opportunities for individuals and grassroots communities to tell stories and access stories others are telling, to present arguments and listen to arguments made elsewhere, to share

information and learn more about the world from a multitude of other perspectives. On the other hand, the media companies seek to extend their reach by merging, co-opting, converging and synergizing their brands and intellectual properties across all of these channels.” (p.6)

The TV news coverage of Rodney King represents a stark display of a community being

able to tell their story to the world, however the reduplicated video of Reginald Denny

illustrates the ways in which TV news restores racial inequality as social order. Today,

citizen-generated videos of police brutality are fighting with the mainstream news in

similar ways.

Contemporary scholarship of counter publics and counter networks has

illustrated how marginalized groups have been forced to create their own alternative

publics in order to bring attention to the specific, and often overlooked issues that affect

their communities, and to put forward an agenda that challenges the mainstream one

(Jackson and Welles, 2016; 2014). Jenkins (2016) has utilized notions of counter publics

alongside contemporary instances of participatory politics to reveal how some

marginalized groups have been enabled by technology to create and broadcast their

stories or knowledge. Similarly, Bonilla (2015) argued that when most mainstream media

constructed the experiences of marginalized groups as stereotypical, social media

platforms such as Twitter offered sites where counterpublics could collectively create

their own narratives and reimagine group identities. This next section moves from groups

that are empowered to spread information and find community, to how the individual

develops political efficacy within these counter-networks.

The group identity of the protestors as portrayed through the media revealed

mixed performances of both rioting and peace, but but activists on the ground were able

to reveal truths about the Ferguson PD and other law enforcement members that were

portrayed more negatively in the media. Historically, the police have been able to

construct and maintain their public image through their relationship with the mainstream

mass media. However, the proliferation of citizen-journalists has the ability to create

counternarratives and to challenge this constructed façade.