The Public Space of Social Media

Therese Tierney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136203589
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

Social media is restructuring urban practices–through ad-hoc experimentation, commercial software development, and communities of participation. This book is the first to consider how practices contained within social media are situated within a larger genealogy of public space, including theories of communal identity, civitas and democracy, the fete, and self-expression. Through empirical research, the actual social practices of participants of networked publics are described and analyzed.

Documenting how online counterpublics use the Internet to transmit classified photos, mobilize activists, and challenge the status quo, Tierney argues that online activities do not stop in online conversations; they are physically grounded through mobile GPS coordinates which are then transformed into activities in physical space—the street, the plaza, the places where people have traditionally gathered to demonstrate and express their opinions publicly.

1 Reappropriating Social Media

Positive changes in the life of the country, including pro-democratic regime change, follow, rather than proceed, the development of a strong public sphere.

—Clay Shirky, “The Political Power of Social Media,” Foreign Affairs Journal, Jan/Feb 2011

In late 2010 global events began to demonstrate that social media could support and empower marginalized groups. As has occurred with previous revolutions, associated technologies were championed as the impetus for social change, reflecting a technological determinist standpoint on the liberatory potential of Western technology, a position that sets up critical cultural binaries, such as modernity/tradition or the West/Middle East. These binaries presuppose a colonialist perspective harkening back to fictional narratives regarding the gifts of the West, building on such tropes as equating Christianity to progress, or in this case, technology to progress. While technology is clearly instrumental in Internet activism, the core issues are social, not technical.¹ For example, setting up a blog in Burma is helpful only if people dare to post, despite fears of arrest. Technological innovation tends to overcast the actions of the people on the ground who are protesting, as well as enables new methods of surveillance to emerge. While media outlets cover hot topics relating to the prowess and impact of technology, their attention to the long-term efforts and painstakingly slow progress of reform usually wanes quickly after a revolutionary moment.

What might be the motivations for playing up the role of technology in the recent Arab uprisings and in other revolutions? One answer Foreign Affairs editor Evgeny Morozov provides is that “by emphasizing the liberating role of the tools and downplaying the role of human agency, such accounts make Americans feel proud of their own contribution to events in the Middle East.”² The very label of social media overestimates technology’s importance and ignores the contribution of offline social networks.³ This question has then arisen among academic and popular media: To what extent do social media influence political activism and change?

Some cultural commentators credit social media with catalyzing the North African and Middle East uprisings, proposing that together the social media constitute an open forum. In one camp, media theorist Clay Shirky credits social media. He argues that the unique affordances of social media—the ease and speed combined with many-to-many communication—allows for a more efficient method of disseminating information than before.⁴ His claim suggests that social media have now expanded the democratic public sphere.

Others disagree, arguing that social media is not democratic. The moral suasion generated by the coming together of protesters in physical spaces triggered change, they say. Morozov falls into this camp, along with journalist Malcolm Gladwell. They both downplay the role of social media in the outbreak and organization of the uprisings. Morozov contends that underlying social and economic conditions, coupled with rising prices and unemployment, political repression, lack of political freedoms, and corruption prompted the uprisings.⁵ Gladwell argues that strong local bonds were the primary determinant of political activism: The closer one was with those who were critical of the regime, the more likely one would be committed to the protest.⁶ Strong bonds, whether created and strengthened through soccer clubs or other affiliations, were instrumental in creating solidarity between diverse groups.⁷

By analyzing the nature and function of social media in relation to the Arab uprisings and Internet activism more generally, we see that the two positions advanced by those camps are not totally antithetical; indeed, they complement each other. Spatial publics and networked publics are neither separate nor competing spheres. They are bound into a complex assemblage of human actants, media platforms, and transmission devices. Consequently, an explication of the positions held by both camps could produce

Figure 1.1 Mohandiseen, Cairo. Internet and mobile services had been effectively terminated as tens of thousands of Egyptians took to the streets calling for the resignation of Mubarak (1/28/2011).

Credit: Gigi Ibrahim with a RIM BlackBerry 9700

new insights that might begin to contribute to a more robust theory of publicness. Understanding both viewpoints can be useful in articulating some of the complex ways social media recasts public space into new, performative configurations. That transition from digital to nondigital political participation presents a significant intervention and sociospatial formation in an era where online and offline possession of space and spatial presence are increasingly critical.

While the main focus of the chapter is Arab online activism, I have included similar concerns raised by Internet activists from other parts of the world, such as China, New York, Thailand, and Iran.

Background

In the Middle East, social media is promoting new social, cultural, and political agendas. In authoritarian countries with government censorship (e.g., China, Russia, Iran, and more recently Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria)⁸ social media—particularly Facebook and Twitter—have been increasingly enlisted as counterpublic forums, defined as “as an explicitly articulated alternative to wider publics that exclude the interests of potential participants.”⁹ The ease of uploading real-time information enables organization and ad-hoc reporting of events. While most scholars accept that social media can address political inequalities and injustices by uniting a given population, is this phenomenon something new? Not if one considers that the use of the Internet for activism goes back more than two decades. In 1989 Tiananmen Square was one of the first demonstrations to use electronic technologies to organize and mobilize large groups of people in physical space; the information was transmitted by simple e-mail.¹⁰ In 1999 the Seattle World Trade Organization demonstrations were organized through a website maintained by the Independent Media Center (Indymedia or IMC), an Internet news/ events bulletin board system (BBS) with 150 individual and autonomous centers globally. Simple text messages were effectively used to coordinate the French and Algerian diaspora during their protests in 2005.¹¹

Recent protests used Facebook, Twitter, and Short Message Service (SMS or text messages) to oppose government corruption, voter intimidation, and electoral fraud. The public demonstrations were not only purposeful in their respective localities, but they also brought national media attention to political causes vis-à-vis the Internet.¹² Events continue to suggest that it is no longer possible to understand the notion of public space without concurrently understanding its entanglement with social media and ubiquitous computing. Social networking sites have been used to facilitate social and sexual freedom in conservative societies. In 2007 the Revolutionary Association of Women’s Rights (RAWA) in Afghanistan posted photos of Taliban oppression that were later accessed and instrumentalized by the U.S. army during their occupation.¹³ Later that year, Burmese protest images and videos were posted on the Facebook group Support the Monks Protest in Burma. A highly coordinated use of social media occurred during the 2008–9 Israel-Gaza conflict, whereby amateur journalists reported developments over Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. To disseminate warnings, residents also tagged online satellite maps of the Gaza district via a social software application.¹⁴ In Palestine, Twitter was used along with a new software platform, Ushahidi, to report protests and rocket attacks in real time by linking Twitter’s application to Facebook and Google Maps.¹⁵ Even simple technology can still be effective, as when the fax machine was enlisted in 2011 in response to the Egyptian government’s clampdown on Internet services.¹⁶ In such examples, where the free press is limited or nonexistent, everyday social media, as networked publics, served as effective methods to organize groups in order to redress political inequalities and injustices.¹⁷

Furthermore, information and communication tools can be used to develop new methods of distributed grassroots decision making. By enabling practices of assembly, alternative online publics can organize as if their constituents are gathered in virtual public spaces. Open-source protest (or in Egyptian nomenclature, wiki-revolution) was operative within Internet groups, leading to direct action in Tunisia (2011), Egypt (2011), Syria (2011), and New York (Occupy Wall Street, 2011).

The debate surrounding social media has been pushed to the forefront as the potential for a media-enabled democratic space intensifies.¹⁸ It is disconcerting, however, that media pundits rely on anecdotal evidence, while the critical implications of recent historical events remain understudied.¹⁹ Nearly three years before the demonstrations, the New York Times identified the El-Facebook group “6 April Youth Movement” as having dynamic debates among its 70,000 members. Their uncensored Facebook page, along with Twitter and Flickr, was used for ad-hoc organization and to disseminate information after workers’ strikes on April 6, 2008, in the Mahalla-al-Kubra textile mills that resulted in rioting and police repression.²⁰ The group was predominantly young and educated, although most had not been politically active before.²¹ Discussions focused on broad cultural topics, including religious and sexual freedom, nepotism in government, and the country’s stagnant economy, but not revolution.²² In 2010 another influential Facebook group, “We Are All Khaled Said,” moderated by Google marketing manager Wael Ghonim, brought attention to a young Egyptian’s death by police torture. Thus, well before the January 2011 demonstrations, an influential portion of the Egyptian population had already established a strong, vocal, and close-knit online community around heated political issues. Moreover, the new technological affordances of social media have changed the context of activism. Their ease of use makes for a more egalitarian method of information distribution—anyone with access to an Internet connection can freely post or upload images—which is significant.²³ These Internet communication tools designed to organize everyday mundane lives have been repurposed and appropriated for political causes. Thus, online communications and strong personal bonds, in addition to socioeconomic injustices, foster political activism.²⁴

This debate is a continual reminder of one of the difficulties of cross-disciplinary discussions. What we can take from this is that social media practices have changed the context of publicness—and thereby its meaning. Social media supports populist dispersion of information through simultaneous many-to-many communication. Mobile devices in particular are rapidly modifying and transforming practices and protocols. Social media emerges as an individually accessible platform for the distribution of speech and images, while concurrently allowing one to observe the participation of others, resulting in a semivisible public space of assembly.²⁵ The networked structure of social media and mobile technologies create an expanded public by connecting members and thus inspiring political agency vis-à-vis shared knowledge.

There is another important aspect to the debate that was brought to the fore during the Occupy Wall Street movement. On September 17, 2011, several hundred people marched to Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan. Their online conversations included concerns about the increasing economic inequality in the United States and the undue influence of the financial services sector and corporations on government policies.²⁶ Further, there were more general aims framed around social justice. When the same social technologies were applied in both cases, why was there political change in some countries and not in others? As was discussed with the case of Egypt, one theory advanced was that Egyptian society is formed around strong bonds, in other words, offline social networks, that allowed diverse groups and allegiances to put aside individual differences and collectively work together toward a common objective, the removal of Hosni Mubarak.²⁷ While it is clear that Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was comprised of highly committed individuals, the national broadcast media trivialized the objectives of the movement. Further, as a nondemand movement, the OWS goals were less easily achieved. In spite of its limitations, however, national surveys confirmed that the majority of Americans agreed that governance should represent the 99 percent rather than business interests.²⁸ Perhaps for OWS, their significance was in their internal organization, specifically, the way the movements experimented with new democratic practices and instigated a multitude form, characterized by frequent assemblies and participatory decision-making structures.

Whether mundane or revolutionary, social media creates a distributed community, not in its material culture, but in the creative practices of knowledge sharing and the acknowledgement of that collective awareness. Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker describes it this way: In isolation, individuals may know something (e.g., that a government is corrupt), but they do not know that others know it too. In public assembly, however, everyone knows that everyone knows.²⁹ Direct speech, whether face-to face or electronically transmitted, is an explicit language that leads to the acquisition of knowledge. That mutual awareness, according to Pinker, produces new shared knowledge along with an ideological amplification. It provides

Figure 1.2 Chicago, IL. Occupy Chicago protestors wearing Guy Fawkes masks (10/14/2011).

Credit: Michael Kappel

a collective mandate to challenge the authority of the status quo. Similar to direct speech and public assembly, social media information sharing within a distributed community creates a call for agency.

Social media, however, is not simply about connections between individuals in physical space, but also about maint...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1 Reappropriating Social Media
• 2 Assembling the Publics
• 3 Origins of Networked Publics
• 4 Networked Identity Making
• 5 Surveying Social Media
• 6 Technological Innovation: Public Implications
• Appendix A: Methodology for Online Research
• Appendix B: Online Research Survey
• Glossary
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index