ICTs and political movements

Communication technologies, despite their huge corporate, military, and surveillance applications, also afford opportunities within political movements to debate, mobilize, reflect, imagine, fantasize, critique, archive, and inform, and will be pivotal to developing a future for humans rather than for capital. This article focuses on some possibilities offered by three such technologies, radio, the Internet and the mobile phone, to political movements. It provides a variety of illustrations of their uses and applications in social struggles, large and small. First, however, it dwells briefly on some of the issues and concepts in the air at the time of writing, which may help to frame and thus interpret the specifics.