“What I call the selfie-determination of nations is a digitally mediated, imagined community in which individual citizens, bots, and trolls exist side by side. It is at times difficult to know who is real and who is a digital creation” (Edwards 39).
I was shocked, though I shouldn’t have been, to learn that a large amount of Trump’s twitter followers are paid bots. They aren’t real. Or are they? The running theme in all of this week’s readings was survival. The afterlife of a political figure, movement and collective have been radically transformed in the digital age. “But still, he lives on – sur-vives – as a hashtag (#maga)” (Edwards 31). The digital platform comes in all shapes and sizes, but space itself is intangible. The survival is in spite of, or perhaps even due to, the lack of form and tangibility in the sphere of appearance, which is also akin to the lack of form required in wild, passionate political responses. If “passion is the stuff for politics” as we discussed early on with Mouffe, then the digital age’s passionate afterlife, also extending to the form-less and perhaps “strategy”-less insurgencies discussed in the article, “Insurgencies don’t have a plan – they are the plan: Political performatives and vanishing mediators,” are working off of this intangible space of potentiality, harnessing and using emotional response from the larger people as their fuel. My question is: even as marketing analytics and surveys skyrocket, the question for me remains – who is going to be touched, affected, etc. by this afterlife? Who is affected by this survival in the digital age? Rather, is anyone’s opinion actually changed? If we know – or are to assume – that facts don’t change people’s minds, then can the rebel yell of “enough!” be the thing that sways?