Wired Citizenship

Youth Learning and Activism in the Middle East

Linda Herrera

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135011888
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Wired Citizenship examines the evolving patterns of youth learning and activism in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). In today's digital age, in which formal schooling often competes with the peer-driven outlets provided by social media, youth all over the globe have forged new models of civic engagement, rewriting the script of what it means to live in a democratic society. As a result, state-society relationships have shifted—never more clearly than in the MENA region, where recent uprisings were spurred by the mobilization of tech-savvy and politicized youth.

Combining original research with a thorough exploration of theories of democracy, communications, and critical pedagogy, this edited collection describes how youth are performing citizenship, innovating systems of learning, and re-imagining the practices of activism in the information age. Recent case studies illustrate the context-specific effects of these revolutionary new forms of learning and social engagement in the MENA region.

1
Introduction

Wired and Revolutionary in the Middle East and North Africa

Linda Herrera and Rehab Sakr

When news surfaced during Tunisia’s uprising in December 2010 that Facebook served as the headquarters of the revolution (Pollock, 2011), and that the date for Egypt’s 25 January Revolution was set by the Facebook page “We are all Khaled Said” (Kulina Khaled Said) (Herrera, 2013), analysts scrambled to understand what exactly had been emerging online in virtual spaces. It soon transpired that the younger generation had been experiencing novel forms of “wired citizenship” and in the process had been reimagining the very terms of the social contract and rewriting the script of what it means to live in a democratic society.

After Tunisia’s uprising the new government attempted to tap into the sensibilities of its young wired citizens by developing “e-government” and “e-citizenship” programs. It opened an online portal where citizens could report incidents of government corruption, and it set up Facebook pages to allow citizens to write their ideas for administrative reforms (Republic of Tunisia, 2012). Citizens could also go online to obtain official documents, register for school, and vote. Similar programs had already been initiated in Morocco, Turkey, and Egypt, largely funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). These programs take a view of digital citizens as “those who use technology frequently, who use technology for political information to fulfill their civic duty, and who use technology at work for economic gain” (Mossberger, Tolbert, & McNeil, 2008, p. 2). It may come as little surprise that with minor exceptions, these programs are less than robust and the people show scant interest in being molded into the government’s view of a digital citizen.

E-government is a mere instrumental means to ensure more bureaucratic efficiency, rather than a way for citizens to participate in a genuinely critical and unscripted way with their governments and each other. Citizens in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) do not primarily view the internet as a place to obtain services, but as a space to congregate. In contrast to “e-government,” people in the region are organically developing their own model of e-democracy. They may go online to express their voice as citizens by way of criticizing the government, occupying virtual spaces, performing e-strikes and e-demonstrations (see Sakr, Chapter 11). They also go online to build right-wing nationalist communities. As Christou and Ioannidou highlight in their chapter, “At the same time as online networking is used for social justice causes on a global scale, the internet is also used by groups that mobilize transnationally in order to connect on a variety of issues, including racist ideology” (Chapter 8). Whatever the people’s prerogative, their digital society is a networking society, a place where they meet in virtual spaces to communicate with each other away from the heavy hand of government interference and institutional constraints.

The societies throughout MENA, southern Europe, and western Asia provide an especially compelling vantage point from which to understand the condition of growing up in the digital age and in virtual spaces. This region constitutes a geopolitical hotspot with no dearth of youth triggered popular mobilizations. From Iran’s Green Movement, which erupted in 2009 in response to a disputed presidential election, to the Arab uprisings, followed by the anti-austerity demonstrations around southern Europe in 2012, and in the following year the Taksim Square protests in Turkey, young citizens have been challenging the state and the status quo on the streets and in virtual spaces.

The internet penetration rate in the Middle East is 40%. Social media use is increasing at a rapid pace. In 2012 Facebook subscription from the MENA region grew 29% to a total of 44 million users, 77% of whom are in the 16 to 34 age group, and 35% of whom are female. The growth rates for Iraq, Libya, and Qatar are even steeper, at 81%, 86%, and 115% respectively (Socialbakers, 2012). Users of social media gain a Web 2.0 sensibility. They learn that they have a choice to be not merely the recipients of prepackaged information and ideological messages, whether from school textbooks or state media. Through practice they develop ways of being the producers, aggregators, and scrutinizers of content. Living and learning on social media fosters certain virtual citizenship values that are related to these nine core principles of social media, as elaborated by Herrera and Peters, who draw on Bradley’s new definition of social media (2010):

1. Participation: user participation taps mass collaboration.
2. Collective wisdom: users ‘collect’, share and modify user-generated content.
3. Transparency: each participant gets to see, “use, reuse, augment, validate, critique and evaluate each other’s contributions” (Bradley, 2010) leading to collective self-improvement.
4. Decentralization: from “one to many” to “many to many”—interactive anytime, anyplace collaboration independently of other contributors.
5. Virtual community: sociality based on “conversations” that are relationship-seeking.
6. Design is politics: how a social media site is designed determines how people will use it.
7. Emergence: self-organizing social structures, expertise, work processes, content organization and information taxonomies that are not a product of any one person.
8. Revisability: social media can be altered, unlike industrial media.
9. Ownership: social media are accessible and available at little cost, unlike industrial media that government- or privately owned.

(Herrera & Peters, 2011, p. 364)¹

It is no coincidence that in addition to having high and growing rates of connectivity, this region, where up to 70% of the population is under 35, has also been witnessing escalating rates of youth poverty. Decades of structural adjustment, rule by corrupt oligarchies, and neoliberal economic and social policies have hit young citizens hard. Youth unemployment and underemployment rates in MENA and southern Europe are among the highest in the world at roughly 25%. That figure skyrockets in countries experiencing extreme austerity measures in the wake of economic crises, such as in Greece, where youth unemployment reached 64.9% in 2013. In places affected by military conflict and occupation like Palestine, Syria, and Iraq, youth unemployment can exceed 70%. Youth insecurity in the labor market has led the International Labour Organization to characterize this global generation as “a generation at risk” (International Labour Organization, 2013). We argue that the economic situation is much more insidious; it has led to a condition where youth are the new poor.

A major difference between the old disenfranchised and marginalized poor of laborers, peasants, and members of the urban underclasses, and new youthful poor, however, is that youth constitute a highly schooled and tech-savvy cohort. As they work out ways to live outside the system and to construct alternatives, the young devise their own methods and spaces to engage politically. To a greater extent these spaces are online and virtual. The communication tools and virtual platforms on which youth challenge the system and forge alternatives are no “weapons of the weak,” to use James Scott’s term (1985). These are the tools of commerce, the weapons of power, but they are also the weapons of the people. Generational fault lines are widening at ever-larger proportions as youth use connection tools and virtual spaces to pursue their own trajectories of learning, socializing, working, playing, networking, doing politics, and exercising citizenship.

We are aware that youth do not make up a monolithic and homogeneous category, and that inequality around connectivity, class, gender, region, religion, and any number of areas of difference persists. We argue, nevertheless, that it is valid to conceptualize youth as a generational cohort who carry features of a “wired generation” (Herrera, Chapter 2). Users of digital media seamlessly move between online and offline spaces. They carry virtual attitudes, values, and behaviors to their peers in schools, on streets, and in popular culture. They transform society and social relations in their wake, even among people who do not participate directly in virtual spaces.

The young citizens who have been coming of age on social media have been the instigators of mass mobilizations and revolutions. This observation may seem unremarkable; after all, “Revolutions are the empire of the young,” as Simon Schama writes in his magisterial work on the French Revolution, Citizens (1989, p. 8). Young and determined citizens who took part in the major revolutions of the last two and a half centuries—from the American, French, Russian, Iranian, and Egyptian revolutions—share a common political genealogy. They have sought emancipation from the institutions of the ruling class, and liberation from the ideological frames by which the oligarchies perpetuate their rule and justify taking the lion’s share of wealth and resources.

In the past, revolutionaries cultivated a political culture that tended to glorify violence and justify the purging of what Schama calls “uncitizens.” During the many stages of the French Revolution, the youth popular culture was complicit in normalizing the reign of violence:

While it would be grotesque to implicate the generation of 1789 in the kind of hideous atrocities perpetrated under the Terror, it would be equally naïve not to recognize that the former made the latter possible. All the newspapers, the revolutionary festivals, the painted plates; the songs and street theater; the regiments of little boys waving their right arms in the air swearing patriotic oaths in piping voices—all these features of what historians have come to designate the ‘political culture of the Revolution’—were the products of the same morbid preoccupation with the just massacre and the heroic death.

(Schama, 1989, p. 856)

We hypothesize that the political culture of those growing ranks of protesters who make up the backbone of the current uprisings do not seem to be valorizing a dogma of unbridled violence as in past revolutions. This does not mean that violence is absent in the revolting societies. On the contrary, violence has spiraled to devastating depths in Syria, Libya, and Egypt, to name but a few of the countries. However, if one looks closely at the “problem of evil,” to borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendt (1945), it is evident that it is being perpetrated by groups from among the Old Order, namely the army, the Muslim Brotherhood, members of the ousted regimes, the police, the US military, and their proxies. The harrowing episodes of torture, killings, kidnapping, mob sexual assaults (in Egypt), bombings—including by drones in Pakistan—are meant to subdue and co-opt peoples’ struggles for freedom and thwart their march towards a New Order.

Without romanticizing or homogenizing the multi-faceted culture of this revolutionary generation, it can be observed that growing numbers of youth in the MENA are pursuing a more civil, inclusive, and liberatory form of democracy. Their culture is playing out on the streets and in virtual communities. These are complex spaces where the old dogmas mix and comingle with the new. As the chapters in this volume attest, youth who make up the political and cultural vanguard often carry both tendencies of liberation and oppression within themselves. As Ali and El-Sharnouby astutely show in their sensitive investigative portrait of Khaled Said, the namesake of the path-breaking Facebook page that issued the call for Egypt’s 25 January Revolution, revolutionaries can also be unaware of the ways in which they reinforce reactionary dogmas around class and culture to the detriment of their own emancipation (Chapter 6). What is certain is that large swaths of youthful populations are struggling to realize a more just and liberatory form of democracy, but they have a steep learning curve ahead of them. Pertinent questions to pose at this juncture are: How are concepts and practices of democracy and citizenship changing in this digital revolutionary age? More importantly, what do rebelling youth understand by political and social change?

Democracy in the Age of Revolution and Networks

The Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Rancière is a figure with whom to think about democracy during times of revolutionary hope and despair. He came of age during the 1968 student movement, and he looked deep into the French and American revolutions for ideas about how to achieve emancipatory democracy. In his book provocatively titled Hatred of democracy (2006), Rancière argues against the normalized conception of representative ballot box democracy as the gold standard that a society has reached the democracy apex. Ballot box democracy often—not always—reinforces rule by an elite oligarchy, a group that, by virtue of their very privilege and position, harbor a deep-seated disdain of the people’s politics. Rancière goes back in history to remind us that representative government and democracy have not always been conflated. He argues:

The self-evidence which assimilates democracy to a representative form of government resulting from an election is quite recent in history. Originally representation was the exact contrary of democracy. None ignored this at the time of the French and American revolutions. The Founding Fathers and a number of their French emulators saw in it precisely the means for the elite to exercise power de facto, and to do so in the name of the people that representation is obliged to recognize but that could not exercise power without ruining the very principle of government. […] ‘Representative democracy’ might appear today as a pleonasm. But it was initially an oxymoron.

(Rancière, 2006, p. 53)

In the contemporary era participation in campaigning, party politics, and voting are often used as barometers to gage whether a citizenry is active or passive. Even when young voters turn out for elections in droves, as in Iran in 2009 or in post-Mubarak Egypt in 2012, they often quickly get disillusioned by a system they experience as being rigged or open to manipulation by powerful actors. When young citizens disengage with the formal political system they face accusations of being apolitical, lazy, and apathetic.

The large-scale withdrawal of young people from formal institutional life can be read as their indictment against the system. Lüküslü argues in her chapter about Turkey that young people are not apathetic; rather they refuse to participate in institutions they do not trust and that do not look out for their interests. In refusing to fulfill the expectations placed on them by the state, they are in fact saying that they “reject the definition of youth as a political category destined to save or advance the state” (Chapter 5). They sometimes need to work within the system, to abide by the rules and logic of the government and its bureaucracy, but they often do this reluctantly, with an attitude Lüküslü calls “necessary conformi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Series Editor Introduction
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: Wired and Revolutionary in the Middle East and North Africa
• SECTION I Virtual Learning for Critical Citizenship
• SECTION II Internet, Geopolitics, and Redefining the Political
• List of Contributors
• Index