Jack Bratich

Jack Bratich

https://comminfo.rutgers.edu/bratich-jack   jbratich@rutgers.edu

Jack Bratich is researching the intersection of social movements and social media. This project has resulted in two published pieces, one on the institutional power bases of Facebook’s role in the Egyptian uprising of 2011: “Kyber-Revolts: Egypt, State-friended Media, and Secret Sovereign Networks” in The New Everyday: A Media Commons Project (2011). The second examines Occupy Wall Street as a flashmob and platform for meme and media production: “Occupy All the Dispositifs,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, (11:1, 2014, pp. 64-73). Most recently, Prof. Bratich organized a panel for the International Communication Association called Mediating the Life Span of Uprisings: Ferguson, Social Movement Media, and Protest Ecologies. His paper examined Ferguson and Baltimore as a laboratory for counterinsurgency-inspired police media management, including counter-social media war tactics such as spatial corralling, arrests and violent threats against media makers, blackouts, no fly zones, contradictory street commands, equipment disassembling, sonic cannons, and personnel blockades. He will be developing this project further at an invited presentation at the Media Interventions workshop in Barcelona in June 2015.