WikiLeaks and Communicative Counterpower

Abstract

WikiLeaks’ rise to prominence in 2010, with its release of classified U.S. government and military documents, polarised opinion worldwide; some viewed it as a cyber-terrorist group, others saw it as journalism’s saviour. WikiLeaks and Communicative Counterpower investigates why the organisation has been such a contentious cultural and political phenomenon, via a study of its capacity to exercise networked communicative counterpower. The thesis analyses WikiLeaks’ exercise of ideational, cultural and mediated political counterpower, providing a unique mixed methods, critical media studies account of its significance. Drawing largely on hermeneutic approaches the thesis presents a cultural history of WikiLeaks philosophical underpinnings, a cultural production analysis of its claim to journalism, and a news framing analysis of its mediated political counterpower. It argues that WikiLeaks is founded on a hybrid theory of political change, which unites computing technology with the possibility for achieving personal freedom, social agency and more open government. It then demonstrates how WikiLeaks’ operation as a globally networked, radical media organisation challenges the operation of institutional media power and the norms and practices of liberal-pluralist journalism, even as it has appropriated those norms to legitimate its work. Finally the thesis illustrates how WikiLeaks’ perceived challenges to media and political power manifested in critical coverage by elite mainstream media, which framed its activities as transgressive and dismissed its impact, delegitimising it as a political and cultural actor. WikiLeaks is bound into existing circuits of power, which shape and constrain its ability to function as a locus for change. At the same time however the multi-method research design of this work reveals that WikiLeaks evidences signs of counterpower effect in its promotion of information and communication transparency. It provides a particular form of networked social agency to whistleblowers and hence enhances the communicative freedom of individuals to motivate them to pursue change to institutionalised political power relations.