Dissent and Social Media: The Role of Social Media in Facilitating Cultural Change

The book considers the role social media platforms play in facilitating dissent as a function of cultural, and associated hegemonic, transformation. In this context, social media is one of the locations of dissenting practices used to interrogate and potentially change the dominant cultural discourse, and, therefore, our experience of everyday life. Dominant cultural discourse is both created and maintained in established social institutions such as the linguistic, educational, legal, political, economic and religious institutions. The function of dissenting practices in this cultural structure is suggested in Raymond Williams’s model of culture that illuminates the dynamics of cultural formation. In his essay ＂The Analysis of Culture,＂ Williams examines the common thinking about culture, noting that we often use any of three categories when analyzing culture: the ＂ideal,＂ in ＂which culture is a state or process of human perfection in terms of certain actions or absolute values, ＂ the ＂documentary＂ in ＂which culture is the body of intellectual and imaginative work, in which . . . human thought and experience are variously recorded ＂ and the ＂social ＂ in ＂which culture is a description of a particular way of life, which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behavior.＂ He argues that the concept of dissent unifies these three categories revealing how the dynamics of culture actually function to establish the ＂affective, dominant culture.＂ Different social media platforms engage culture in these different ways.
Williams finds value in each of these categories, but when taken separately, as they often are, critiques tend to analyze culture as though it were static over time, providing a consistent discourse in regard to social values and normative behaviors. Instead of focusing on individual cultural phenomena, Williams argues that a more effective definition of culture would contain all three of these aspects of culture, thus indicating that culture is dynamic, always in the process of forming. In Marxism and Literature, he develops a framework that helps us perceive the dynamic interactions through which cultures change, revealing in these models the function of dissent, which this book argues is the mechanism by which this change is achieved. The contemporary use of social media is a mechanism by which dissent engages with cultural institutions and interrogates the discourses that define them.
The dynamics of a culture are informed by the interactions of three types of discourse, which are inhabited by social media. First is the dominant cultural form, which is defined by the discourse of established social institutions. This discourse is continually ruptured by competing cultural ideas: emergent ideas --＂new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships＂--and residual ideas--＂elements formed in the past.＂ A change in the dominant cultural discourse is accomplished through dissent, which represents the push and pull practices through which change is observed in our everyday lives. Social media is an increasingly important location to observe these push and pull practices that co-opt emergent and residual cultural discourse into that of the dominant social institutions.

Dr. Matthew T. Pifer is a full professor of English and the director of the Writing Center at Husson University. His research interests include cultural studies, composition and rhetoric, nineteenth- and twentieth-century American Literature, and creative writing.