Critical Perspectives on Social Media and Protest: Between Control and Emancipation
248
Critical Perspectives on Social Media and Protest: Between Control and Emancipation
248eBook
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Overview
This book takes a much-needed critical approach to the relationship between social media and protest. Highlighting key issues and concerns in contemporary forms of social media activism, including questions of censorship, surveillance, individualism, and temporality, the book combines contributions from some of the most active scholars in the field today. Advancing both conceptual and empirical work on social media and protest, and with a range of different angles, the book provides a fresh and challenging outlook on a very topical debate.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783483372 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 10/06/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 648 KB |
About the Author
Oliver Leistert is a postdoctoral researcher at the DFG Research Training Group “Automatisms” at University Paderborn, Germany.
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Critical Perspectives on Social Media and Protest
Between Control and Emancipation
By Lina Dencik, Oliver Leistert
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Lina Dencik, Oliver Leistert and contributorsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-337-2
CHAPTER 1
Promise and Practice in Studies of Social Media and Movements
Sebastian Haunss
The recent protests during the 'Arab Spring' and in the wave of 'Occupy' movements have renewed interest in the use of the internet and especially social media by social movements. Digital social media technologies offer a low-cost way to reach out to large constituencies and to communicate in many-to-many settings. In addition, with the spread of mobile- and smartphones, this technology is ubiquitously available. These characteristics have led to a widespread adoption of social media in protest mobilizations. Social movements now regularly use social media to communicate and to mobilize for their actions. Are social media, when it comes to social movements and protest, thus the leaflets and political posters of the early twenty-first century? Or do they, as some authors have claimed, fundamentally alter the conditions for the emergence of protest and social movements? May they even cause social movements, as the notion of 'Twitter' or 'Facebook' revolutions suggests?
In this chapter I address these questions by discussing the findings of existing studies on social movements and social media. I assess to which extent some authors' claims about the fundamental importance of social media technologies in recent protests and uprisings (e.g., Howard and Hussain 2013) can be substantiated in empirical studies of protest mobilizations or whether the results lend more support for the claim that social media did not fundamentally influence the mobilization dynamics (e.g., Brym et al. 2014). The aim is not to explore all aspects of the quickly growing research literature, but to discuss some of the more prominent recurring findings along with the literature questioning them, and to offer some structuring elements for relating the various studies to each other.
To do this, this chapter starts with a quick overview over the use of internet technologies by social movements since the 1990s, and discusses four general claims about the relationship between the internet and social media on the one hand, and social movements and protest on the other. It then proceeds to a closer look at recent empirical studies of protest and social media, closing with an evaluation of the current knowledge and remaining research gaps in this field. Special attention is paid to the question how current digital communication tools interact with more established elements in social movements' repertoires of action.
A VERY SHORT HISTORY OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THE INTERNET
Social movements have been quick to adopt digital computer networks as communication tools for internal planning and deliberation and to reach out to the general public. Long before the invention of the World Wide Web led to the development of the internet as we know it today, already by the end of the 1980s social movement activists created — linked through the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) — mailbox-based computer networks to facilitate communication and information exchange among geographically dispersed activists (Harasim 1993; Lokk 2008). But these early uses of computer networks among movement activists have hardly been noticed by social scientists, and within their movements those activists who were using the networks were clearly a small minority.
This has changed dramatically when the Zapatistas on 1 January 1994 began their struggle against neoliberalism and for the rights of indigenous people in the Mexican state of Chiapas. The Zapatistas, with their charismatic leader Subcommandante Marcos, skillfully used the internet to spread their message across the world. Their 'insurrection by internet' (Knudson 1998) led for the first time to speculations that the internet would facilitate new forms of transnational or even global mobilization, provide social movements with 'historically new organizational capabilities' (Cleaver 1998, 631) and provide the tools and a virtual public sphere for wide participation in direct democratic processes.
After this initial euphoria about the potential the internet would offer to social movements, the protests against the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999 sparked the next round of scholarly interest in the relation between social movements, protest and the internet (Van Aelst and Walgrave 2002; della Porta and Mosca 2005; Juris 2005). The internet seemed to perfectly fit to this 'movement of movements' with its nonhierarchical, dispersed and global structure. Special attention was paid to the creation of Indymedia, a network of independent media centres where everybody was able to publish news and commentary (Kidd 2003). During the protests in Seattle, and during subsequent protests and mobilizations of various social movements, Indymedia has provided a partisan news channel where activists publish their interpretation of the events while the events are happening. To some degree, Indymedia was the digital pendant to the foundation of alternative leftist newspapers in the early (Libération, France 1973) or late (die tageszeitung, Germany 1978) 1970s. In both cases, movement activists or sympathizers saw a need to create an alternative to the established mainstream press that — in the eyes of the activists — disregarded or misinterpreted the movement and its activities. For the traditional paper-based newspapers, the notorious problem was running them as profitable enterprises and over time they evolved into moderately left daily newspapers written by professional journalists. For Indymedia, financial sustainability also emerged as a problem and resulted in the closure of several Indymedia sites (Giraud 2014), even though the costs for running the web servers on open source software are extremely low in comparison to the production of a traditional newspaper. But in hindsight, Indymedia's more serious problem is that it never managed to reach a similarly broad audience beyond the movements that are using it. Many Indymedia sites have evolved into websites where movement activities are announced and discussed among activists. This has led some authors to claim that Indymedia has failed (Ippolita, Lovink and Rossiter 2009), whereas others interpret the prevalence of debates as a positive sign for the development of alternative democratic online counterpublics (Milioni 2009).
With internet use becoming an integral part of everyday life, its use in protest campaigns and by social movements has meanwhile lost the air of the spectacular. And consequently, since the early 2000s research has branched out and now covers a broad variety of online activism. In an overview of research findings, Jennifer Earl and her collaborators have categorized social movements' internet use into four types of usage patterns: brochure-ware, online facilitation of offline activism, online participation and online organizing(Earl et al. 2010, 428), where brochure-ware stands for internet use that basically replaces flyers, leaflets and brochures with websites and mailing lists. Online facilitation of offline activism adds simple interactive elements to facilitate coordination between activists, online participation provides tools to interact with the addressees of the protest (e.g., online petitions) and online organizing shifts the main mobilizing activities to the internet.
More recently, a new series of massive protest mobilizations that began with the Arab Spring in December 2010 and included the 15-M protests in Spain (March 2011), the Occupy protests in the United States and in several European countries (September 2011), and the protests in Istanbul's Taksim Gezi Park (May 2013) has refocused public and scholarly attention on the specific interaction between large-scale mass protests and social media (Castañeda 2012; Costanza-Chock 2012; Tufekci and Wilson 2012; Gamson and Sifry 2013; Howard and Hussain 2013; Tremayne 2014). This last wave of scholarly interest concentrated heavily on social movements' use of commercial global social networking and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, thus shifting the attention from social movements' attempts to create alternative online publics with their own tools and technologies, to social movements' use of existing corporate-provided and corporate-controlled social media tools to facilitate or enable mobilization.
Looking back on twenty years of research on social movements and social media, we can see public and scholarly attention shifting with the evolution of the technology, focusing always on social movements' and protesters' adoption of the most recent technological tools. This focus on the newest internet technologies goes along with the recurring question whether these new technological tools may offer new opportunities for collective action unavailable to previous generations of activists. In addition, this dynamic is also driven by the various social movements' ability to mobilize large-scale protests which have again and again surprised established news media and many social scientists. For most pundits, the insurrection of the Zapatistas, the Global Justice Movement's protests in Seattle, the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street were completely unexpected events in times where social movements were often seen as relatively weak and marginal political actors. In this pessimist frame, technology seemed to offer an explanation for the surprise about these unforeseen mobilizations, leading then to a rather optimistic interpretation of the role of technology.
CYBER-OPTIMISTS, PESSIMISTS AND REALISTS?
These technology-focused and often enthusiastic interpretations of recent social movements have usually been complemented by more pessimistic or even dystopian interpretations of the new technological developments. Previous overviews on research about social movements and the internet have identified three general perspectives which have been labeled cyber-optimists and cyber-pessimists, with a large group of realists in between (Earl et al. 2010; Gerbaudo 2012; Torres Soriano 2013; Lutz and Hoffmann 2014). Cyber-optimists assume that the new technology would not only facilitate, but genuinely enable, protest. Cyber-pessimists, on the other hand, either argue that the internet would not have a substantial effect on social movements' ability to mobilize, or that it would even have a negative effect. Between these poles, the largest group of scholars acknowledges effects of new internet technologies but argues that these effects 'tend to be in degree and do not require new theoretical explanations, or even substantial alteration to existing theories' (Earl et al. 2010, 427).
Unfortunately, this neat categorization obscures more than it reveals, because it at least implicitly suggests that the group labeled cyber-optimists and the cyber-pessimists each share a distinct set of assumptions and convictions about the internet and social movements. But a closer look at the writings of authors associated with these groups shows that neither camp is in any way homogenous. The optimism of the first group is based on differing and partially competing assumptions, as is the pessimism of the second. Moreover, optimists do not necessarily answer to the qualms of the pessimists and vice versa.
In order to assess the existing research, it is more helpful not to start from the authors' overall evaluations of the internet or of specific internet technologies but to focus on their assumptions about the relationship between internet technologies and social movements. Following this perspective the existing literature on internet and social movements revolves around four general claims about this relationship. Some of these claims are specific to individual authors, some are shared by several. For the sake of convenience, I phrase these claims here as positive relationships, but obviously the pessimists formulate the inverse claims to denote a negative relationship. The four general claims are:
• Claim 1: The internet solves the problem of transaction costs
• Claim 2: The internet solves the (rational choice) problem of collective action
• Claim 3: The internet corresponds to the conflicts of the network society
• Claim 4: The internet enables new form of protest/organizing
In the following sections, I discuss each of these claims and evaluate their empirical and theoretical foundations.
The Internet Solves the Problem of Transaction Costs
Clay Shirky, the US writer and academic, and 'king of the techno-optimists' (Gerbaudo 2012, 7), builds his argument about the benefits of modern internet technologies for social movements on the idea of diminishing transaction costs. In his book about organizations and group formation (Shirky 2008), he argues that the key contribution of social media tools is their ability to radically reduce — if not completely remove — transaction costs for collective action. Shirky writes that social media allow ordinary citizens to share information and coordinate their activities on a previously unknown level. Before the internet, it was hard and relatively costly (in terms of time and resources) to inform people about a perceived injustice and to organize them in a collective action against it. Now, Shirky argues, ordinary people can arrange events 'without much advance planning' (Shirky 2008, 175) because they no longer have to rely on slow and costly traditional means of contacting and coordinating dispersed individuals. As a result, '[t]he collapse of transaction costs makes it easier for people to get together — so much easier, in fact, that it is changing the world' (Shirky 2008, 48).
In his argumentation, Shirky draws on Yochai Benkler, who, in his book The Wealth of Networks (Benkler 2006), had developed a somewhat similar thesis. Benkler argues that the internet offers the possibility to coordinate distributed collaboration on a previously unknown scale and with minimal costs. It enables what Benkler calls peer production, that is 'effective, large-scale cooperative efforts' (Benkler 2006, 5), on a global scale and under conditions of abundance, by rapidly reducing the transaction costs of creating knowledge. Under these conditions the likelihood of dispersed individuals to cooperate would increase significantly (for a more detailed discussion, see Haunss 2013, 230).
While the argument that the internet would have the potential to radically reduce transaction costs and thus enable forms of collaboration that were previously almost impossible is compelling, it offers a solution for a problem with at least dubious relevancy for social movements. Shirky argues that the most serious obstacle to the 'basic human instinct' (Shirky 2008, 60) to be part of a group was until now too high transaction costs. But social movements are not simply the result of group formation. While Wikipedia — the prime example of peer production — is certainly impressive in terms of enabling cooperation among otherwise unconnected and geographically dispersed individuals, it is not such a good example for a powerful social movement. Precisely because, in order to act collectively as a political actor, social movements have to define a problem, create a shared interpretation, engage in continued interaction with an opponent, find allies and create a collective identity. Radically lowering transaction costs will facilitate some of these tasks, but it will not help much with others. Consequently, in existing social movement research, high transaction costs have usually not been identified as the most pressing problem social movements face. High transaction costs have been acknowledged to pose a significant problem for transnational movements (Tarrow 1998, 235), but even for them the internet lowers only the costs for communication, not the costs for protesting in distant places (Van Laer and Van Aelst 2010, 1161).
While the observation of diminishing transaction costs is in itself convincing, it helps to explain only some forms of internet-based and internet-enabled activism. Low transaction costs promote, for example, mass participation in online petitions and similar forms of 'clicktivism' that reach a very broad audience and require only minimal individual investments in terms of time and resources.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Critical Perspectives on Social Media and Protest by Lina Dencik, Oliver Leistert. Copyright © 2015 Lina Dencik, Oliver Leistert and contributors. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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