The Democratic Delusion: New Media, Resistance and Revolution in Serbia 1995-2000

Aulich, James (2011) The Democratic Delusion: New Media, Resistance and Revolution in Serbia 1995-2000. Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media, 5. pp. 1-21. ISSN 2043-7633

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Abstract

The article analyses the use of new media by the resistance to Slobodan Milošević’s regime in Serbia in 1995-2000. It focuses on the early use of the internet by the independent radio station B92 and the oppositional organisation Otpor. The article challenges the techno-logical determinism of the Google Doctrine that suggests digital revolutions should lead to li-beral democracy. This insight is significant in the light of the failure of the opposition to Mi-lošević and the so-called ‘Bulldozer Revolution’ as well as other so-called ‘colour revolutions’ in the former communist states to establish viable democratic institutions at the end of the 20th century. The opposition, for all the richness of its cultural manifestations, its over-identifications with dominant ideologies, its creativity, instantaneity and performativity, essentially lacked a thorough modernist programme of political emancipation. New media opened up an ideological space that accommodated neo-liberal and anti-authoritarian values instead of those of liberal democracy.