Politics of Visibility

Definition: "Exacerbates the centrality of the subjective and private experience of the individual in contemporary mobilizations, and has partially replaced the politics of identity typical of social movements. The politics of visibility creates individuals-in-the-group, whereby the 'collective' is experienced through the 'individual' and the group is the means of collective action, rather than its end," (Milan 887).


Example: Milan mentions "experience stories" (Milan 896) in conjunction with the term politics of visibility. One example that is used is the 'We are the 99 Percent," which a movement on Tumblr that allows people to direct there frustrations with society towards the 1 percent. This is their mission statement:


"We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent," ("We are the 99 Percent").


The posts use individual stories of people to collectively raise awareness to the problems that we as a society face on an economic level. Thus the "individual" becomes the "collective."


From the Text: "The peculiar way in which social media boost the materiality of social exchanges translates into the practice of visibility, where visibility indicates the virtual embodiment and online manifestation of groups and individuals and of the associated meanings, which are (and ought to be) relentlessly negotiated, bolstered and updated. This emerging 'politics of visibility' has flanked, rather than replaced, the 'politics of identity', so prominent in post 1960s understandings of social movements," (Milan 895).





Citation:


"We Are the 99 Percent." We Are the 99 Percent. Web. 01 Apr. 2016. http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/.


Milan, Stefania. “From social movements to cloud protesting: the evolution of collective identity.” Information, Communication & Society, 18.1, no. 8 (2015). 887-900.