Nervous System: Media, Communications and the Fight for the City

As urban communities confront the specter of austerity budgets, growing inequality and a diminishing public sector, the question that organizers encounter is how to shift from multiple autonomous movements in a city to one movement for the city.  This paper details and analyzes the role of media and communications in the process of developing a united front of people and organizations fighting for urban social change. Specifically, we look at the practices of the Media Mobilizing Project (MMP) in Philadelphia. MMP is both a community-based media and communications infrastructure and a network of organizations across the Philadelphia region that aim to “build a movement to end poverty led by the poor and working class, united across color lines.” Through MMP’s use of media and communications we argue that communication technologies can be reimagined as a nervous system that connects different parts of the urban social body, brining students together with janitors, teachers, and community members fighting displacement.

In this paper we use the concept of the nervous system to analyze the manner through which media conjoins people across the fragmented political topography of the region. In this sense at the core we argue MMP utilizes an independent media and communications infrastructure to collapse isolation between groups throughout the city. The concept of a communications nervous system that serves to build a united front politics, challenges the long held assumption that media is the arm of an already pre-existing movement, instead showing how through specific media and communication practices (social media, radio, video) new organizational forms and collective identity processes can emerge. In this sense, the paper provides a conceptual framework of how to study and understand the relationship between social movements and media in a contemporary urban setting.