This paper explores how socio-political and economic aspects of neoliberalism (Mignolo 2011; Wacquant 2012) determine structures and functions of digital media and its corresponding discourse of netizenry (i.e. online civil activism), and how the rise of the latter can be related to the experience of neoliberalism.
After critically exploring the politico-anthropological, geopolitical and politico-economic aspects of neoliberalism's broader historical and socio-political context, this paper seeks to understand its current implications. Its primary aim is to discover related motivations and mechanisms manifested in practical experiences of the ZunZuneo Case in Cuba, discursive tendencies reflected by Wael Ghoneim's Revolution 2.0 (2012) and recent expressions of a mission civilisatrice by the transnational state's elite (Robinson 2004).
This paper offers a social and postcolonial (Massad 2015) critique of netizenry, which is a subjectivity constructed in accordance with intertwined neoliberal politico-economic (transnational) and imperial (national) strategies. This is to demonstrate how relations of transnational corporations on the one hand and US hegemony on the other vis-a-vis digital media constitute two facets of one and the same neoliberal reality. By deconstructing the concept of netizenry, a dualsystem of signifying functions unfolds. Thus netizenry comprises, constructs and promotes subjectivities favourable to both the Americanisation of the world and to consumerism (cf. Amin 2000; Grewal 2003) inherent in digital media.