Sara Polak: 'I want to know if what social media is doing to the political game in the US is unique'
Political games have existed throughout history, but what is the role of 'play' in the way the American political world has developed? University lecturer Sara Polak has received an ERC Starting Grant to investigate this.
'Play and politics have always been intertwined,' Polak begins. ‘A political debate is a sort of tournament, with winners and losers. Just as in a game, in politics you're dealing with a social process that creates a world. If we agree now that we're sitting in a castle, this room becomes a castle from now on, even though we both know it isn't really one.'
The same conditions
In her research, Polak applies several conditions that are met both by play and by democratic politics: 'Both in politics and in play, there's an invitation to participate. In both cases, you're dealing with improvisation, a script that isn't entirely fixed. In both, you're also engaged with the imagination, with what kind of world could exist.'
A clear example of the interaction between politics and play is visible with Donald Trump, whom Polak has previously studied. 'In politics, you have very strict rules laid down in the constitution about how the castle should be built. Trump sets a different sort of game against this. He says odd things, to which everyone - supporters, opponents and journalists – “have to” react, often with memes or jokes. It all seems very light-hearted, but by doing this Trump is actually changing the rules of the political game.'
New media
'Many people have the idea that something entirely new is happening, but we don't really know that at all. The dynamics also changed with the introduction of other - then-new - media, such as newspapers, radio, and television. With radio, you can play the political game in a different way from with a speech in a large stadium. You can invite people to participate in a new way. President Franklin Roosevelt was the first real “radio president”, who was smart in how he played with this, but you see the same later on as well. Whenever a new medium becomes popular, people - both creators and consumers - always start playing with it and trying new things, and that often has political impact.'
Playing into existence
But is this always true? Has media play in the US always co-created the political world? Or is there something fundamentally new about how social media is changing politics? To find out, Polak is going back to the sixteenth century in her new ERC research. 'That's when Theodor de Bry from Liège used the invention of engraving to depict North America. He created a very vivid image of Native Americans with feathers on their heads, slaughtering and eating each other. Subsequently, all sorts of Europeans went to America, with the idea that they were going to play cowboys and Indians, as they saw in De Bry's work. De Bry himself had never actually been to America: he only knew what he read in travel accounts.’
‘The Europeans who went to realise his promised land thus had a largely non-existent world in their heads. The irony is that De Bry's iconography has, in a sense, been played into existence. The cowboys-and-Indians game of European colonists, and especially the idea that it was a great adventure, in part made the slaughter of Native Americans possible.'
New or not?
The introduction of the newspaper comic strip, television preachers and social media, according to Polak, all show a change in the political game as it had been played up until that point. 'At all these “new media” moments, the game becomes very messy for a while and there are real, new possibilities to shape the world; in the end the ruling order usually regains control of the game. Perhaps with social media and AI we're seeing something different for the first time, that the disruption is more fundamental, but I would also find it very interesting if I have to conclude at the end that it's actually not that different after all.'