Aulich, J., 2011.

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

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