New Criticals


Given that the blogosphere and its circulating content, which now includes an ecology of media forms and innovations (video, images, pod casts, Tweets, Vines, etc.), has claimed to reignite feminism or, as Nina Power recently suggested, produce “feminism at the speed of light,” we might flip the question and ask: what role did the ethos of feminist media production play in the development and embrace of Web 2.0 platforms? Rather than seeing these platforms “give” new space to feminist work, we might ask: how did the DIY feminist ethos of increasing access to media and “participation” fuel both the vibrant potential of the early Web 2.0 promises of a “democratized” web and its economic value? What historical and material understandings of feminism must we adopt in order to take account of the ways in which it became critically entangled in platforms that are evolving into a deeply obscured and alienating data economy and shadow surveillance state?