Though these mass protest movements had very different causes, motives, and outcomes, they were all made possible by social media networks, which informed people about the initial protests, alerted millions to the activities of the protesters, and helped to shape the publicity that the movements received. Exploring these developments, Tufekci addresses the rhetorical potential and limitations of social media outlets.
Protesters from one of the world's richest countries, one of the world's oldest autocracies, and one of the world's rising developing countries walk into . . . a public space, use Twitter extensively, and capture global attention to their movement and their hashtag.
From "#Occupy Wall Street" in the United States to the #M15 movement in Spain, from Tahrir Square and #Jan 25 in Egypt, to Taksim Square and #occupygezi in Turkey, there have been a variety of social movements that, while coming from strikingly different backgrounds and contexts, also share structural and stylistic elements. In this post, I'd like to offer some preliminary analyses of this emergent type of what I'm calling "networked movements."
To be clear, I am not attempting to analyze every aspect of these movements—no movement or revolution is simple or reducible to a single cause—nor is it identical to any other. Nor do I claim that this is an exhaustive or final list of their characteristics. However, we now have enough examples to try to make sense of common elements to these seemingly disparate social media-fueled movements.
There are also other interesting political commonalities to these movements, including their use of durable presence in public space as a form of protest, anti- authoritarianism as a uniting ideology, an "anti-political" stance among participants, the participation and key role played by "lumpen"1 elements such as soccer fans, the importance of anger towards cronyism, police repression as a spark and uniting theme, to name a few. Hence, this post is an attempt to take a bite out of a complex topic with a special focus on social media and organizational styles of networked movements:
1. Lack of organized, institutional leadership. None of these movements has 5 identifiable institutional leadership, either in institutional form or as spokespersons. This is quite a striking change from the traditional, common (though not exclusive) form of movements of the 20th century.
This is not to say that these movements are flat or lack prominent persons or a hierarchy of influence or attention. There are structures, hierarchy, informal leadership and other elements of leadership in all these movements. However, there is no NAACP or trade-union or political party that has control over, or the ability to speak for them and there is no formalized mechanism of representation—or decision making.
This, of course, creates advantages and disadvantages in terms of long-term politics. Since these movements have no recognized representation, they cannot be co-opted or negotiated away behind closed doors. (In his book, Revolution 2.0, Wael Ghonim2 recounts how Mubarak's top officials tried to negotiate an end to the demonstrations with him. He could only chuckle as he had no such power).
However, in the same vein, since these movements have no recognized representation, it is difficult for them to develop a coherent and delimited set of policies,
1. "lumpen": people who are alienated from 2. Wael Ghonim: Egyptian activist and com- their society and, often, from the social class to puter engineer who created the Facebook page which they would normally belong. "We Are All Khaled Saeed" (see note 5).
demands or make any significant gains that go beyond providing a strong refusal to a particular event, leader or framing. This leads to my next point.
Organized around a "no" not a "go." Existing social media structures allow for easier collective action around shared grievances to "stop" or "oppose" something (downfall of Mubarak, stopping a government's overreach, etc.) rather than strategic action geared towards obtaining and sustaining political power. This is probably why these movements don't make as much long-term impact as their size and power would suggest. (They do have impacts, of course, but often not proportional to their size.)
Not only has the world not moved towards more "participatory democracy" as 10 opposed to "representative democracy," the current trend globally has been otherwise. Even mere representative democracy has been eroding as moneyed interests have expanded their power over more and more areas of politics and the public sphere. Hence, we see an outburst of "participatory refusal," which does not necessarily expand into either addressing or opposing failing parts of representative democracy. Instead, these demonstrations seem to be unable to break out of a "no."
It is also easier to use social media to communicate a message or an image of refusal or dissent rather than convey complicated arguments. The closest example to a mass participatory online environment that tries to negotiate complex outcomes is Wikipedia. While wildly successful in some ways, research also shows Wikipedia to be run by relatively small numbers of highly influential people who are spectacularly good mostly at providing a certain, narrow outcome (eg., a summary of existing sources on a topic, the depth and quality of which varies, depending in part on the amount of conflict over the topic).
There needs to be a lot more "practical" research into what and how online platforms could contribute to positive civic outcomes through participation, negotiation, and solution generation, especially for complex problems. By research, I mean creation, trial, error and study rather than merely examining existing forms—as these are clearly not enough.
A feeling of lack of institutional outlet. In all these cases, there has been a failure of both oppositional politics as well as mainstream media. Protesters repeatedly state they have felt a lack of outlets to express their dissent. In the case of Egypt, this was because elections were rigged and politics banned.
In Turkey, the media has cowered and opposition parties are spectacularly incompetent. During the height of the most recent protests, CNN Turkey alternated between showing documentaries on penguins, and then a cooking show. At a particularly low moment, CNN Turkey was showing a documentary about a popular Turkish volunteer search and rescue team, AKUT, while AKUT members were out in the streets providing medical aid to protesters and AKUT founder Nasuk Masruhi lay in a hospital after both his legs were broken by police.
The failure of media and institutional outlet carries over to a country like the 15 United States as well. In the Occupy movement in the US, there also was a widespread feeling among #occupy participants that the government and the media
were at the hands of the moneyed interests and the corrupt. For example, look at this chart about mentions of the word "inequality" in major US media before and after Occupy:
Number of articles with the word "inequality" in U.S. newspapers— October 2010 through October 2011
Number of articles with phrase "richest one percent" in U.S. newspapers— October 2010 through October 2011
Source: Lexis/Nexis
At the time, the grave effects of the economic crisis could be seen in historically high unemployment and underemployment. Yet, most US media were covering economics mainly from the point of view of a very small minority of people who were concerned with inflation and levels of public debt and taxation on the rich—all of which are more of a concern to [the] wealthy and to bondholders rather than to the struggling middle and working classes.
The feeling of lack of institutional outlet also, crucially, includes political parties. In Turkey, Spain and the United States (representative democracies), opposition parties and parliaments have been seen as incompetent, corrupt or uninterested in issues that concerned broad swaths of the public. This failure and sense of non- representation, of course, varies according to context but is nonetheless shared in all these movements.