Macková, A., & Macek, J. (2014). ‘Žít Brno’: Czech online political activism from jokes and tactics to

politics and strategies. Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 8(3), article

5. doi: 10.5817/CP2014-3-5

‘Žít Brno’: Czech online political activism from jokes and tactics to politics and strategies

Alena Macková1, Jakub Macek2

1 Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic & Charles University, Prague, Czech

Republic 2 Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Abstract

The paper presents a case study of the Czech online activist group Žít Brno. The group

that challenges local representatives and employs tactics of political satire, parody and

culture jamming, evolved from a spontaneous one-off event to an ongoing political

project and eventually became an institutionalized political actor. The case study, based

on interviews with group members, content analysis of the project website, longitudinal

observation of the group's activities and other additional material, enables us to

research the limits and the potential of online tactics and the way online practices are

intertwined with a more traditional repertoire of collective action. Building on debates

about online political participation and the broadening concept of the political, we

interpret the group's protest as a reaction to the crisis of institutionalized local politics

and we discuss the actual role of new media in such a protest. The conclusion is that

online protest and new media, despite their criticized action-less character, could enable

a functional bridge to “real” politics but at the same time they do not play an exclusive

role in successful protest politics and have to be interpreted within the context of a

particular political action.

Keywords: online activism; political participation; culture jamming; electronic repertoire of contention

Introduction

Current studies on political engagement indicate that twenty five years after the so-called Velvet

Revolution that marked the beginning of transition from a communist to a democratic political regime,

Czech citizens – similarly to citizens of many other democratic countries – experience a crisis of trust in

institutionalized politics (Linek, 2013). In the Western context this trend has been discussed since the

1980s (e.g. Beck, 1992 [1986]). As political parties seem not to offer “real options” and traditional

political participation declines, active Czech citizens look for new routes to engagement – the erosion of

some aspects of democracy evidently comes with the emergence of alternative democratic paths and new

civic agencies. In parallel, since the 1990s new media and computer mediated communication enable a stimulation and enhancement of political communication and participation.

This potential of new media has been examined, as we show below, in numerous theoretical and empirical

studies of institutionalized polity as well as non-institutionalized political actors. As the debate suggests,

the reality of changing political and civic participatory life does not follow the ideal-typical distinction

between institutionalized and non-institutionalized politics. Therefore, we consider it important to focus on

the challenges that non-institutionalized actors using new media as tools of and platforms for political

action and expression pose to institutionalized politics and how such actors use new media in the process

of their own institutionalization.

This study deals with Czech online political activism and specific new modes of political and public agency.

In particular, we focus on the tactics of political (culture) jamming and satire that have spread over the

Czech internet in the last four years due to the increasing discontent with local political representation.

The article explores such new online practices in the case of the local activist group Žít Brno1 and it

demonstrates how non-institutionalized actors pursuing social and political change use new media as part of their repertoire of collective action.

More specifically, we focus on an internet-based, participatory-oriented and satirical protest group and

show the transformation of their purely activist collective into an institutional political one. The group’s

relative success (at the time of writing they launched a local election campaign) illustrates the role of

expert knowledge and professionalization in activism. And last but not least – the fact that the analysed

group decided to challenge their political counterparts in the 2014 municipal elections enables us to trace the continuous transformation of media-based activism into institutionalized political action.

The case is particularly instructive in that it demonstrates the interplay between institutionalized and non-

institutionalized politics and to highlight this we employ Michel de Certeau’s (1984) distinction between

strategies and tactics describing the two types of relation to formative political power: While strategies

are typical for strong players (typically governments or corporations) controlling and formulating the

physical and legal rules structuring the social spaces and agency appearing within, the weak players

(typically the individual social actors) employ their tactics to use the strategically structured world for

their own purposes and, eventually, to resist or escape the intentions of the strong players. In these

terms, the activists gradually intended to become strategic rather than tactical. They started their

protests as tactics, as a reaction to existing structures of power and also because they acted within the

environment produced by strategic players. However, in the end they aimed for strategies as they became

an institutionalized political stakeholder and thus claimed for strategic power: for control over the production of rules forming the municipal public and political space.

Changing Politics and New Political Actors

Impacts of new (digital and networked) media on politics have been theorized and empirically studied for

more than two decades – while the first considerations of the possible influence of computer mediated

communication on the political sphere have been formulated even earlier (De Sola Pool, 1983; Hiltz &

Turoff, 1993; Rice, 1984) and followed older general debates on media and politics (Dahlberg, 2001).

Those centred mainly on topics related to institutionalized politics and its crisis on the one hand and the

relation between the Habermasian deliberative public sphere and new media on the other (Dahlberg,

2007; Dahlgren, 2005; Kellner, 1998; Papacharissi, 2009). However, these studies, as Bentivegna (2006)

noted, arrived at ambiguous conclusions and did not reveal – to use Feenberg’s and Bakardjieva’s (2004)

term – any killer implications of new media. Why? According to Bentivegna, the prevalent focus on

institutionalized politics (and therefore mainly on strategies) could be blamed as well as the apparent

nostalgia for the golden age of party-centred polity that is at the beginning of the 21st century rather detached from actual political reality.

Current politics and citizenship are, as Bentivegna (2006) or Dahlgren (2013) note, far more diverse than

in the past and the role of new media in politics and civic engagement has to be analysed in a broader

context. They go on to argue that changes related to new media actually do emerge, however, they do so

in the sphere of tactics, outside strategic, institutionalized politics. Moreover, new media could hardly be

clearly separated from other factors influencing the political. To understand the tenuous and arguably new

aspects of the transformation of tactical civic activities, we have to be more sensitive to more general social and political changes.

The broader transformative trends could be framed as an expansion of the political. The prominent

sociologists Ulrich Beck (1992, 1996) and Anthony Giddens (1991) reflected on emerging forms of political

agency and expression and the decline of established forms of participation (such as party membership or

engagement in formally organized civic associations). They emphasise the everyday-level of political

agency: Giddens coined the term life-politics – politics of lifestyle linked to reflexivity and to the ongoing

reflexive construction of the self. And Beck introduced the concept of subpolitics connecting the political

world with everyday practices – subpolitics includes external actors (professional groups, organizations,

social movements) as well as individual actors as legitimate stakeholders of the political. Obviously, these

authors consider the political in a much broader sense and include areas that were previously not

understood as political.

Maria Bakardjieva (2009) goes even further with her concept of subactivism focusing explicitly on small-

scale, “invisible” everyday political and civic practices of individual actors. According to her, subactivism

“is a kind of politics that unfolds at the level of subjective experience and is submerged in the flow of

everyday life” (Bakardjieva, 2009, p. 92). Bakardjieva argues that deliberation, election voting,

participation in a movement and other activities usually treated as indicators of civic participation should

be studied along with even very subtle, everyday expressions of civic engagement. And specifically in

these everyday practices new media could play a substantial role as they can bring the political into everyday contexts in new ways.

The crisis of institutionalized politics is, according to Dahlgren (2013), linked to a distrust of politics and

the system of political institutions, both perceived as detached from the lived experience and unable to

solve “small but real” issues directly affecting people’s lives. It is worth noting that this explanation seems

to be plausible even for the realities of the Czech Republic. Despite its post-transformation character, the

Czech political sphere is characterized by similar difficulties as politics in Western countries – a high rate

of dissatisfaction with institutionalized politics and a reluctance to engage with it. The initial period of

democratization in the late 1990s was followed by disillusionment due to early political crises and

corruption scandals related to the political and economic transformation. Emerging forms of participatory

and political practices (and attempts to research and theorize these) should thus even in the Czech

Republic be understood as reactions to the crisis of legitimacy of party-centred institutionalized polity and

its elites: Czech citizens, too, employ – as Dahlgren (2013) suggests in relation to Western countries – new and alternative tactics to engage in political decision-making and to express their opinions.

Such new, more broadly conceived, forms of civic engagement can be characterized by the multiplication

and atomization of actions, by increased personalization and individualization of agency, by the

emergence or revival of subversive activities or by the rise of specialized, single-issue oriented activism

(Dahlgren, 2001; Papacharissi, 2010). On the organizational level, these changes appear through

decentralization, informality and grassroots and networked (rather than hierarchical) activist movements

and groups (Coleman & Blumler, 2009).

As suggested, all of the above applies to political engagement in the Czech Republic and thus provides a

suitable background for the exploration of the Žít Brno case. This activist project is one of the typical

reactions to an unsatisfactory state of institutionalized local politics and is in line with the broadened

notion of the political and of new forms of political agency.

Cyberactivism and New Repertoires of Tactics

As politics in general, cyberactivism – a wide range of particular online political and activist practices

(McCaughey & Ayers, 2003) – is researched with an emphasis on the more or less institutionalized

sphere: on formally organized collective actions (on social movements, large-scale protest groups and

NGOs) and their capability to spread information, mobilize and organize supporters, fundraise or claim

public support through petitions (cf. Ward & Gibson, 2009). New media are thus often studied as tools

enabling and supporting the organized activists’ effective tactics (Postmes & Brunstig, 2002; Van Laer & Van Aelst, 2010).

Nevertheless, other civic stakeholders also employ internet-supported tactics and besides a

technologically “upgraded” version of conventional practices they even employ those enabled specifically

by the online environment, such as hacking (Vegh, Ayers, & McCaughey, 2003) or data-activism (e.g. the

case of WikiLeaks) etc. This internet-based activism – described as online direct action, virtual activism or

hacktivism (Rolfe, 2005) – and internet-supported activism bring us back to the topic of broadening of the

political, here at the level of agency. With the adoption of new media and the transformation of the

political sphere, the traditional repertoire of collective action as described in the 1980s (McAdam, Tarrow, & Tilly, 2001; Tilly, 1984) is broadening as well.2

Tilly (1984) argues that from a historical perspective the repertoire of collective action usually transforms

rather slowly and that for certain historical and political contexts we can find typical repertoires (local

rebellions in the 18th century, mass demonstrations and strikes in the 19th century). Changes of

repertoires are decelerated by the character of the repertoire (based on established routines) which

proved tactics are used as long as they are effective within a certain context. Indeed, some evolution can

be traced. Tactics considered acceptable and standard change in time, mostly in relation to shifts in the

wider social, political and technological contexts.

Nevertheless, the changes of repertoire can be, according to Brett Rolfe (2005), accelerated by less

formalized groups that attract public attention by distinguishing themselves from other political actors

exactly through employing non-conventional political expressions and actions. And – to refer back to

cyberactivism – we witness a rapid increase of new practices within the electronic repertoire of contention,

a term that Rolfe (2005) uses to describe the online-based segment of the repertoire of collective action:

the agency that is situated in online, non-physical environments and uses online tools as a means of political action.

Rolfe links the fast evolution of the electronic repertoire of contention to technological developments:

firstly, the innovative practices spread over the internet are applied, tested and adopted faster; and

secondly, the internet enables a direct connection between technological innovators upholding new ideas

and activists adopting these innovations. And we can even add a third possible explanation: cyberactivism

tends to be practiced by more flexible, more decentralized, organizationally less formalized and smaller movements and groups than were those originally mentioned by Tilly.

The inevitable general question emerging from the debate on politics and new media relates to actual

implications: How does the electronic repertoire of contention actually influence activism and changing

politics? Although we focus on a specific aspect of the problem, it is possible to formulate two general

positions that we consider useful starting points for our inquiry. The first can be described as reflexively

optimistic, although we do not see a radical transformation of institutionalized politics or the emergence of

a new online public sphere, new media bring new opportunities as they help enrich the repertoire of

tactics and broaden the field of civic engagement (e.g. Bakardjieva, 2009; Dahlgren, 2013; Papacharissi,

2010). The second position is more sceptical. The actual potential and efficiency of cyberactivism in

particular and also of solely online forms of civic participation should be approached with caution because they often replace real political action with an action-less simulation of the political (e.g. Morozov, 2011).

To avoid confusion, we consider it useful to briefly sum up the operational definitions of several terms

appearing throughout the paper: civic engagement, activism, political participation and political and civic

practices. Civic engagement is an umbrella term that covers a wide range of practices (from election vote

and party membership through activism to membership in local or public associations and expressions of

subactivism) through which citizens actively engage with the polity. We then understand activism as a

specific form of civic engagement – as non-institutionalized political agency, both individual and collective

– that seeks for participation in the political (cyberactivism thus refers to activism dominantly based on

the electronic repertoire of contention). We understand political participation – in line with Carpentier's

(2011) notion of participation – as active demand for control over decision-making processes in the

political sphere. And as political or civic practices we conceive particular agency constituting the civic

engagement.

Goals and Methods

In our analysis we build on the tension between reflexively optimistic and sceptical arguments and

illustrate the ambiguous potential of the electronic repertoire of contention both for political tactics and

strategies. The case of the Žít Brno group illustrates the gradual transformation of online-based activism

into a political movement employing a more conventional repertoire.

Our research questions were:

What was the development of the activist group in terms of a thematic agenda, objectives and level of institutionalization?

What electronic repertoire of contention did the group employ and what was the role of the repertoire in particular stages of the group’s development?

For this case study, we chose the group behind Žít Brno for reasons already mentioned in the

introduction: currently it is one of the most visible and influential internet-based activist groups in the

Czech Republic and it is linked to a larger number of other domestic civic projects which makes it

illustrative of current Czech online activism. The group resides in Brno, the second largest Czech city with

a large number of university students and university employees with a cultural and public scene that has

been significantly revitalized in the past decade. Members of the Žít Brno group belong to this local social

milieu (as we show below) and so does their audience.

We mapped the development of the group and its activities over the course of three years (August 2011 –

May 2014). At the beginning, we considered the case a short-term satirical event. However, the group has

developed ongoing activities and thus we decided to capture the overall diachronic picture and to cover its

most important changes. We collected additional data (quantitative and qualitative) and retrospectively

we focused on the milestones (and evidence) in the group’s development. Our approach, based on

analyses of multiple data sources, is close to Richard Fenno’s soaking and poking method (Fenno, 1977).

A significant amount of data (especially for content analysis) was collected in the first year (2011–2012)

of the group’s existence as we needed to understand the basic tendencies in the group: we identified the

topics and observed the group with an emphasis on their statements in media and public activities. We

were simultaneously observing the group’s and its members’ activities on SNS (mainly on Facebook) and

conducted a content analysis of the group’s website, all the 138 articles and press releases published

between August 2011 and July 2012 yielded data for analysis. The analysis was intended to identify the

structure of communicated topics and its changes during the formative period of existence of the group.

Consequently, in the autumn of 2012, one year into the existence of the project, we conducted qualitative

interviews with two founding members of the group (M1 and M2) in order to reconstruct the process of

group formation, its personnel structure and the members' motivations for participation in the project.

After the initial identification of topics, aims and functioning of the group, we focused more on its public

appearance in media, on its members' individual activities and on changes in the group's agenda. The

group’s public and political roles were central for the latter multi-sited observation (including observation

of the group on Facebook – its prominent tool of public communication, on blogs, in mass media as well

as in public events organized or co-organized by group members) and reflected shifts in its repertoire of

contention and the group's relationship to Brno city municipality. In addition, we analyzed interviews

published with other members and their public statements available in mass and online media and we

collected data from readers and Facebook fans of the group (focusing on readers’ reception of the group’s activities).

The structure of the empirical part of our study is diachronic: we follow the continual development of the

group and focus on particular moments and events we consider crucial and illustrative for the analysis as well as for the general debate on politics and new media.

Results

Žít Brno: It All Began as a Joke

The group itself dates back to 2011 but it was essentially prompted by the publication of the Brno City

Municipality’s marketing strategy in the spring of 2010. The marketing strategy was to achieve a new

unified representation of the city and catchphrases like Žít Brno (To Live Brno) were introduced as part of

a communication strategy (Žít Brno, n.d.). So-called verbal priorities expressing the city’s preferred

values such as Bezpečí [Safety], Rozvoj [Development], Nápaditost [Creativity] and Otevřenost

[Opennes] formed key elements of the strategy. While the public and media immediately criticized the

study, the municipality accepted the branding strategy. However, from that moment on, the catchphrase and the strategy remained unused and the domain zitbrno.cz was not registered.

The domain was later registered by a young local journalist expecting that the city would have an interest

in obtaining it. However, the municipality contacted him after a year of inaction and at this moment he

decided to use the domain in his own way: to make fun of the catchphrase, the whole strategy and the

municipality’s inaction. In summer 2011, he assembled several friends and acquaintances known for their critical opinions on municipal politics and confronted them with a simple, open plan.

[...] then we all slowly started to understand that he [the journalist] really decided and that

he stood for it, that he was going to do it. And that the web he kind of has and that the city

wanted after one year, that he will not give it to them. And that he will parody it harshly and he assembled there [at the meeting] those guys who could help with it. (interview with M2)

So in August 2011 the new website was launched, claiming to be the “official portal of the Brno City identity” and promising “to fructify its verbal priorities”.

The group earned broader public attention a month later when it published an article entitled “Brno mění

své priority – Musí se kvůli tomu přejmenovat na Krno“ [“Brno changes its priorities. So it has to be

renamed Krno”] (Žít Brno, 2011, September 12). The municipality at the time announced a decision to

change the first of the verbal priorities from Bezpečnost [Safety] to Blízkost [Proximity]. And as the

municipality was, since the 1990s, repeatedly planning to move the main train station from its current

location in the city centre, the group argued that Blízkost [Proximity] is hardly a plausible priority; on the

contrary, the group noted that the missing Koncepce [Concept] would be a more accurate choice, and so it would be obviously better to replace B with K and rename the city to Krno.3

The public reaction was partly confused, as some did not get the joke, and partly amused. The Krno case

gained increased visibility when it was reported in national media and on TV channels. Krno was quickly

and widely accepted as a symbol of the group and it went viral in the online and even the physical space.

Picture 1: Krno on the road sign, September 2011

(source: http://www.blesk.cz/...).

Picture 2: Old Brno Street renamed Old Krno Street,

September 2011 (source: http://www.jaksebydli.cz/...).

Moreover, the group extended the Krno case by launching a functional mirror copy of the official municipal

web portal and of the portal of Brno public transport company, both consistently using Krno instead of

Brno. The Krno case earned the group visibility, the catchphrase Žít Brno unused by the city was

symbolically stolen and resurrected and the group was encouraged to further its activities. It all started as

a joke – and the joke was a protest.

Tactics: Parody and Satire as Protest

Political protest can be broadly defined as an expression of political disagreement with someone else’s

opinion or actions, and it can take many forms and have a wide range of objectives or scope. More specifically, protest politics

usually denotes the deliberate and public use of protest by groups or organizations [...] that

seek to influence a political decision or process, which they perceive as having negative

consequences for themselves, another group or society as a whole. (Rucht, 2007, p. 708)

The group’s initial joke is an example of using parody and satire4 as local political protest (that eventually

became protest politics). As their basic tool, the group used the website http://zitbrno.cz to replicate and

exaggerate the official communication style of the municipality. At the same time their electronic

repertoire of contention included several particular practices: press releases, news and interviews, usually

partly fictional and partly based on actual texts and statements of the municipality. Through that satire

the group was pointing at certain steps, decisions and inactivity of the municipality and, later, of the

regional assembly and the governor. However, from its beginning the protest extended beyond a purely

symbolic expression – the registration of the domain zitbrno.cz and the creation of a Facebook page with

the name Žít Brno could be seen as a virtual version of a sit-in tactic, as the municipality was not able to

use the domain or Facebook page for its own purposes. And the tactic was enhanced by the symbolic

takeover of the catchphrase: the group successfully relabelled its meaning by recirculating its articles on

SNS and getting it into the mass media agenda. The catchphrase became a symbol of protest against municipal politics rather than of the intended official unified city identity.

Protest websites are a typical example of the electronic repertoire of contention, using a webpage for

mobilization, engagement and spreading information is a tactic with a relatively low participatory

threshold and costs. However, the success of the protest depends on its public visibility and a website

potentially receives low attention and generates low impact. The group solved this problem not only by

occupying the catchphrase but also through continuous synergic work with SNS and mass media: group

members used a Facebook page, a Twitter account and their individual profiles to recirculate content

among their online connected social peers and at the same time they utilized journalistic contacts. It was,

however, mainly the Facebook page that played a crucial role also in reaching the mainstream mass media.5

The content of the website and its increasing public visibility soon attracted the attention of the

municipality. The representatives of the city first rejected any criticism claiming that the group’s activities

were destructive and they merely intended “to break down and destroy”. Characteristically, the group

immediately used the phrase as their motto. City officials also accused the group of copyright

infringement in relation to the use of the city logo and images on the website. A lawsuit never

materialized though. On the other hand, the municipality successfully erased the Krno versions of the

official municipal and public transport company websites.

The ‘Žít Brno’ Group: Its Structure, Motivations and Objectives

The group was established spontaneously as a one-off event without detailed objectives. Some of the

members first met at the initial meeting. And the group, as it evolved, was not formally organized, it had

a rather loose organizational structure (which is one of the symptomatic features of current internet-

related activism, see Dahlgren, 2001; Papacharissi, 2010). The core of the group consisted of about ten

individuals – a journalist, a sociologist, a graphic designer, PR specialists etc. – connected through cultural

capital as well as a shared interest in local politics and the shared social milieu of the city’s cafe and pub

culture, on the one hand, and the dense network of diverse NGOs and academic and independent cultural institutions, on the other.

This shared cultural, professional and political milieu and its importance in a city with six public

universities seems to be one of the specific factors that influenced the success of the group’s tactics. And the group members reflect on it:

Prague [the capital] is too big for something like that. [...] Smaller cities probably don’t have

enough people and topics. [...] Brno is of ideal size. We have enough space and topics here

and still everybody knows each other and people meet. Then consider that four hundred

thousand people live in Brno but a hundred thousand students come here. That affects the atmosphere a lot. (čilichilli, 2014)

The way the group members formulated their common objectives is as symptomatic as the loose

organization and the character of its milieu: the objectives crystallized gradually in time and they never actually took a solid form.

What did we expect? I don’t know, for me it was just fun. I was just there with extremely

funny and interesting people. [...] These guys were well informed about their stuff and at the

same time they were quite social because although they didn’t know each other, they very

quickly found a shared language. [...] The decisions were made very fast. [...] Because they understood each other. (interview with M2)

An agreement on the objectives was then formulated retrospectively: “I think that when talking about the

idea, it was not like we had a concept and four points we wanted to achieve. But retrospectively we checked it. What happened did somehow happen spontaneously.” (interview with M1)

The first of these retrospectively formulated objectives was to make the public aware of those cases and

of information that could have been overlooked in mass media or that could have been quickly forgotten

(Žít Brno, 2011, September 22). In this respect the protest meets civic journalism with its accent on

complementing the mass media in setting a public agenda (Allan & Thorsen, 2009). The second general

aim was to give the city’s identity back to the people, to let them experience identity formation as a

grassroots activity, not as a top-down passively accepted concept (Žít Brno, 2011, September 22).

Specific objectives, however, were formulated rather ad hoc and they differed among group members. At

the beginning the group simply agreed on mocking and upsetting the officials and politicians whom it

found irritating and a consensus was negotiated gradually. The group considered itself an oppositional

voice motivated by unsatisfactory local politics, it launched the protest at a time when the two strongest

political parties formed a coalition and effectively marginalized other elected representatives. In an

interview for the national weekly Respekt (Kavanová, 2011) a group member characterized the situation

as “the big coalition rules Brno and the opposition doesn’t exist”. The group thus aimed – as one among

others – to speak out on behalf of the local civil society and it stylized itself as a tactical counterbalance to

the municipality’s strategic power. The initial critical focus on a missing strategic plan remained one of the leitmotivs of the project’s agenda but it eventually gave way to more general topics.

And what were the individual motivations of group members? The group members present their

participation and interest in public and political issues as obvious and natural. However, it would be naive

to take the inclination to democratic or participatory agency for granted. We suspect that this is where the

participatory potential of the already mentioned pro-active social milieu manifests itself. In another article

focusing specifically on the motivations for participation, we argue that these are closely linked to

activists’ cultural and social capital (Macek, 2013). Moreover, participation is also motivated by the need

for performative self-expression. As one of the group members (M2) noted: “I just never expressed

myself about it before. And here with this medium I realized that I actually like to express myself about

it.” And in this particular case, self-expression along with the aim to inform citizens finds an obvious

adversary. “To attack the idiocy of power satirically” – the most general objective of the group as defined

by one of its members (M1).

Development of the Group: A Repeated Joke is More than Fun

In the next two years the group further developed the topics considered important and also evolved its

electronic repertoire of contention. The content analysis of the group’s articles published between August

2011 and July 2012 shows some deflection from the initial position, i.e. from the simple ad hominem

critique of the politicians. The group started to address other topics more systematically: widespread

availability of gambling, planned move of the main train station away from the city centre, political

clientelism, the city’s Comprehensive Plan or the municipality’s information disclosure practices. The

overarching topic then was transparency and the municipality’s attitude to citizens (the municipality was

depicted as unresponsive and supercilious, as despising and ignoring the unelected citizens).

The group kept its sharply satirical style and employed a wider range of data-activism and civic journalism

practices when publishing leaked sensitive information about municipal politicians and officials. The

omnipresent humour then served not only as a carrier of the critique but indirectly also as a platform for the consolidation and eventual professionalization of the group.

The municipality’s initial reaction to the combination of humour and information forced the group to focus

more on the legal aspects of their tactics:

[...] and that sometimes something doesn’t work [...] leads to a kind of professionalism. [...]

That in months of rough jokes – and I don’t know where the limits are – it was just about the

first round of shots. So [...] as they [group members] were under increasing attacks from

official power, they rallied and handled some critical issues when they had to decide whether

to go for a lawsuit or not, you know, if we go on. (interview with M1)

In addition, activists had to negotiate more clearly not only the limits and the style of their humour but

also the purpose of the project as a whole. The humour attracted a growing online audience and made the

group visible enough to abandon older topics and focus on a new agenda. Yet, at the same time the group

understood that many people read them just as humour, not as a political protest. “One section [of the

audience] takes it as fun and then they don’t like that we write about one topic for the third time... They

expect another joke. But this is actually not our primary goal, the humour, I mean, so... and then there are others who understand it and understand it the way we mean it.” (interview with M2)

This raised a question about the efficiency of jokes which led to more sophisticated practices. After a while

the straightforward humour evolved into a more complex tactic described as culture jamming. Culture

jamming, based mainly on the satirical alteration of widely known content and messages such as

billboards, posters, ads or even TV formats, is usually linked with subversive symbolic attacks on

consumer culture and cultural industries (Bennett, 2003; Cammaerts, 2007; Lievrouw, 2011). As the Žít

Brno group illustrates, culture jamming has successfully found its place even in political activism and in

the online environment and it is not limited only to the sphere of cultural critique or anti-consumerism

activism. The politically oriented variant of culture jamming is focused rather on society, government or

other political groups, than on the corporate world, and it often strikes political opponents instead of

mainstream opinions or values (Cammaerts, 2007). Even NGO professionals, political parties and other

institutionalized stakeholders employ it in their campaigns, nevertheless, most commonly it is practiced by political activists – such as the Žít Brno group.

For political culture jamming the group mainly used a discursive bricolage of the municipality’s visual

materials, official documents (such as the official city website) and officials’ public statements. The group

reframed these within a new context or altered them to various degrees in order to underline the

formality, emptiness or meaninglessness of the communication. One such example is the online

application launched in September 2012 that targeted the mayor’s official promotional campaign for the

city. The campaign used posters containing the mayor, a city sight and the catchphrase “Brno is not just a

city, it is a lifestyle” (Picture 3). The application launched by the group enabled internet users to replace

the background of the poster with a picture of their own choice and thus to alter the meaning of the

poster (Picture 4). Such counter-campaigns trended on Facebook for days and engaged the audience in an

act of sabotage.

Picture 3: “Brno is not just a city, it is a lifestyle.”

The mayor’s official campaign.

(Source: http://www.romandonderka.cz).

Picture 4: One of the transformations.

(Source: http://www.zitbrno.cz).

Another tactic (partly extending beyond the electronic repertoire of contention, as it involved the

distribution of a material artefact) involved the Karta Krňana [Krno City Card]. In December 2012 the

municipality announced the intention to introduce a Brno City Card that would enable residents discounted

entry to publicly funded institutions. The group considered the idea an attempt to discriminate against

non-residents. Within a few days the group introduced and began distributing their own free plastic card,

they altered the design of the proposed official card and launched a website (http://kartakrnana.cz) and a

Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/KartaKrnana). During 2013, the group distributed more than 1,500 cards. In 2014, one of the group members commented:

A year and three months later many businesses applied on the website www.kartakrnana.cz,

they wanted to be involved and offer discounts on the card. In contrast, the [official] Brno City

Card doesn’t exist yet. And we don’t even comment upon the fact that the official card is

registered by a private person who is at the same time the mayor of one of the city’s districts. (čilichilli, 2014)

Picture 5: Karta Krňana [Krno City Card].

(Source: https://www.facebook.com/KartaKrnana/).

These two examples underline the group members’ focus on web technologies and graphics, these

members played the role of innovators as described by Rolfe (2005). Yet, while technological skills were

important, it would be rather short-sighted to understand them as an exclusive contributor to the group’s

success. It could be possibly illustrated on other projects directly inspired by Žít Brno which were

launched in several other Czech cities and which did not last for long. We suggest that these other

projects were, in the first place, not so accomplished in using satire as a coherent tactic, they did not deal

with explicit political issues and share the intentions of civic journalism, rather they focused solely on being funny.

The Municipality Strikes Back: From Tactics to Strategies

The group (although still often perceived as controversial) became one of the emblematic actors in Brno’s

local public sphere and its individual members were very active in a wide range of other public and

political activities, often involving a national context and mostly combining the electronic repertoire of

contention (mainly data activism) with more conventional tactical practices (advocacy, active attendance

of town-hall meetings, lobbying or organizing festivals etc.). Some members were involved in a long-term

campaign against gambling, in a movement for the transparent funding of independent culture in Brno, in

anti-corruption projects, in anti-Nazi blockades, in the 2013 presidential campaign, or, for example, in

projects involving socially excluded neighbourhoods in Brno. The website and the Žít Brno Facebook page

repeatedly served as a supportive platform for these projects and the group’s scope extended beyond its

original aims of delivering information, parodying and “attacking the idiocy of power satirically”. In 2013

the group began to move from a tactical position to strategies – from attacking the holders of strategic

power to aiming to change the formative settings, to gaining strategic power. As the group signalled via

the name of an anti-corruption festival Projektovat a stavět [To Design and Build] it organized in October

2013: the time “to break down and destroy” was over. Žít Brno embarked on the road to institutionalized politics.

The actual trigger for this change was a series of events leading to the vote on the city’s Comprehensive

Plan (CP). In the fall of 2013 the municipality initiated a public consultation on the CP. However, according

to the group, the CP was intentionally too complicated in its structure in order to discourage citizens from

participating in the consultation. Therefore, in cooperation with twenty NGOs and local initiatives and with

support from the local political opposition, the group members helped to launch a simple online

application Mám připomínky [I have suggestions, http://mampripominky.cz] enabling citizens to more

effectively evaluate the CP and easily deliver their comments to the municipality. Two months before the

council vote in February 2014, 2,351 emails containing 43,379 suggestions were submitted through the website (http://mampripominky.cz).

The municipality rejected this activity as unjustified, as a waste of time and resources and as non-

transparent and thus legislatively void (Urbanismus Brno, 2014). The actual motivations for the

municipality’s further actions remain rather unclear, nevertheless, the group as well as the majority of

media commentators unsurprisingly interpreted these as political censorship. On February 8, 2014,

Facebook, Inc. removed the Žít Brno Facebook page announcing that it was reported by the municipality’s lawyer as infringing the rights to the city’s logo (Taušová, 2014).

Without considering the case in its entirety, we would like to focus on the consequences. It attracted

enormous media attention5 and made the group more visible than ever before. Within days the group’s new Facebook page Žít Brno RIP had more followers than the original one.6

The conflict with the municipality and the public attention forced the group to a reconsideration of its

objectives and repertoire of action and the group publicly announced its decision to enter institutionalized

politics. Two days after the original Facebook page was removed, the group members organized a

happening in the town hall patio and the next day they announced that they would run in the October

2014 local elections. “We were thinking of it for a long time and the municipality brought an end to our

hesitation when it organized this fantastic campaign for us,” the media quoted the group (Černá, 2014).

In other words, the municipal politicians attacked critical activists and subsequently (and perhaps unwittingly) created a new political rival.

In March and April March 2014 the group collected one thousand signatures as required by the law and

officially applied to be registered as a political movement. At the same time it began organizing a series of

public pre-election meetings addressing local political issues, negotiations on candidates and the election

program and kept publishing satirical articles about their political opponents. However, the jokes were not

a protest anymore: the group kept its humour but the jokes became part of a political campaign and

hence of institutionalized politics.

Conclusion

It is yet unclear whether the group will follow the examples of the Italian Five-Star Movement or the

Icelandic The Best Party, both using humour and citizens’ political disappointment on their road to electoral success. But this is not the primary concern of this article.

In many aspects the case of the Žít Brno group could serve as a typical example of the new type of civic

engagement and activism as described by Dahlgren (2001, 2013), Papacharissi (2010) or Coleman and

Blumler (2009): the small, non-hierarchically organized group emerged as a single-issue oriented

movement that in its satirical and subversive protest expressed a significant distrust of institutionalized municipal politics.

The group is illustrative also in its general political motivations and objectives. Using satire it attacked the

municipality of Brno exactly for those flaws that, according to the scholarly debate (Dahlgren, 2013), are

at the core of the crisis of institutionalized politics. The municipality – a representative of party-based

politics – was blamed for its detachment from citizens and their needs, for avoiding deliberation and being

non-transparent, for privatizing the local political space and being corrupt. The group formed itself as a

critical, sarcastic and self-ironic counter-power that understands its opponents and at the same time is

not understandable for them.

More importantly, the case of Žít Brno suggests that the critical remarks on the efficiency of

cyberactivism, as expressed, for example, by Morozov (2011), should be viewed with some caution. When

an electronic repertoire of contention is employed in a more complex way, it does not replace “real” (non-

virtual) political action but it precedes and supports it. It thus seems more accurate to be reflexively

optimistic in line with the approach that stresses the potential opportunities of new media for civic

engagement (Bakardjieva, 2009; Dahlgren, 2013; Papacharissi, 2010). Žít Brno shows that initial, low-

threshold tactics open access to audiences and mass media and that practices based on the use of

webpages and SNS can work effectively. However, the actual efficiency of these practices is obviously

conditioned by the cultural, communication and technological skills of the actors, by the addressed public

and by the immediate as well as broader social and political contexts surrounding activism. From this point of view, new media play an important albeit fractional role as sources of particular tactics.

Therefore, when summing up the case of the Žít Brno group, we suggest that its success should not be

interpreted as the result of the tactical power of new media. On the contrary, we see it as a result of a unique combination of several factors outlined in the article:

Firstly, the context of the local public milieu combined with the group’s ability to address municipal politics

in line with the expectations of the local public play a significant role. In other words, the group met and

at the same time challenged the demand for local public debate – and we can speculate that such demand

was conditioned by the size and the socio-cultural background of Brno with its universities and a

population of four hundred thousand. (Indeed, such speculation calls for comparisons of similar

expressions of activism emerging in different socio-cultural contexts.)

Secondly, the group efficiently employed its members’ symbolic and creative skills: their capabilities for satire and for explicit political critique.

Thirdly, they efficiently applied technological skills and innovation in their repertoire of tactics.

And fourthly, the group successfully applied its members’ professional knowledge in communication with

mainstream mass media especially in the course of events leading to the institutionalization of the

movement. In other words, as some group members were skilled in PR, marketing or journalism, the group employed communication practices typical of professional political and crisis communication.

As we see, only one of the factors is directly related to new media. To understand the role of new media

in such political activism and to understand the development from ad hoc protest through systematic

protest politics to institutionalized politics thus means that we have to admit that we are dealing with a

complex phenomenon and we should avoid any simplified assumptions about clear and identifiable effects of new media.

In general then, the case of Žít Brno indicates that at the core of the ongoing transformation and

broadening of the political remains the old problem of democracy: the struggle between the municipality

and the satirical protest group is a struggle over the concept of politics, the role of deliberation and the position of the unelected citizen.

Acknowledgement

The authors acknowledge the support of the VITOVIN project (CZ.1.07/2.3.00/20.0184), which is co-

financed by the European Social Fund and the state budget of Czech Republic, and of the project

“Proměna veřejné a politické participace v kontextu měnících se mediálních technologií a praxí”

[“Transformation of the Public and Political Participation in Context of Changing Media Technologies and Practices”] financed by Masaryk University (MUNI/A/0903/2013).

Notes

1. We refer to them as a group, which we think is less confusing than the term movement used by Czech

media as the group only became a movement – in terms of legal status – in May 2014. The most

appropriate term would probably be “a bunch of friends doing something fun” but that is too long and too

informal a description for the purposes of this article.

2. The repertoire of collective action can be understood as a set of possible tactics (Tilly, 1984).

3. Krno also refers to the verb krnět /zakrnět [stunt] and to the adjective zakrnělý [stunted].

4. Political satire is traditionally based on a humorous critique of power holders and of political opponents

(Bal, Pitt, Berthon, & Des Autels, 2009). The genre – quite variable in its particular expressions –

generally deals with stereotypes, simplifications and negative framing (Baumgartner, 2007). It is worth

noting that historically political satire has a specific place in Czech culture (usually it is linked to Jaroslav

Hašek’s novel Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války [The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier

Svejk During the World War, orig. publ. 1923] but through the five decades of Nazi and communist

regimes political satire largely disappeared from the public sphere and political humour was mainly in the

service of state propaganda. Political satire re-emerged in the 1990s and found a place in mainstream

media, dealing mainly with current political issues contrasting them to negative and positive national self-

stereotypes: “They [Czechs] see themselves as petty-minded, intellectually limited, and mediocre, and

yet consider the Czech nation highly cultured and well educated.” (Holý, 2006, p. 77) The decline of political satire in mass media in the 2000s went hand in hand with its migration to the internet.

5. An activist said in an interview that Facebook enabled him to bypass press releases and other formal

communication channels as the journalists themselves were actively tracing activists’ Facebook activities and used them in their reporting (Jelečková, 2012).

6. 26 articles in national newspapers, 17 in regional newspapers, 7 appearances on public service TV, 4

articles in national weeklies, 48 articles on online news websites within the first week.

7. In May 2014 the new page had more than 21,000 followers.

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Correspondence to:

Alena Macková

Department of Political Science

Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University

Joštova 10

60200 Brno

Czech Republic

Email: aja.mackova(at)gmail.com

About authors

Mgr. et Mgr. Alena Macková works as junior researcher at the International Institute

of Political Science and the Institute for Research on Children, Youth and Family at

Masaryk University in Brno. She also contributes to a research project at the Faculty of

Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague. She is a PhD student of political science

(Masaryk University) and her research focuses on new media and politics, especially on

political communication and cyberactivism.

Mgr. Jakub Macek, Ph.D, is a senior researcher at the Institute on Research of

Children, Youth and Family and an assistant professor in the Department of Media

Studies and Journalism, both at Masaryk University. His research focuses on the

sociology of new media. He currently works on a post-doctoral research project entitled

“New and old media in everyday life: media audiences at the time of transforming

media uses”. Full bio: http://is.muni.cz/osoba/14931?lang=en;setlang=en#cv

© 2008 Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace | ISSN: 1802-7962 | Faculty

of Social Studies, Masaryk University | Contact | Editor: David Smahel