Non-activist participation. Most previous big demonstrations before #occupy- gezi in Turkey were attended by experienced protesters. In contrast, the 2013 protests in Turkey are being attended by large numbers of people who have probably never been in a protest before. It has induded participation from residents in their homes (banging pots and pans, turning lights on and off) on a scale that is unprecedented in Turkey in the post 1980 coup era. Tahrir protests 2011, Tunisia December 2010, Gezi 2013 drew large numbers of non-activists. My own study of Tahrir participants (a non-random sample) similarly found a great many who had never attended a protest before.
Occupy, too, attracted a mix of seasoned activists as well as many participants who seemed drawn to the action partly because it was seen as "more than politics."
External attention. Social media allows for bypassing domestic choke-points 20 of censorship and reach for global attention. This was crucial in the Arab Spring (and we know many people tweeting about it were outside the region which, in my view, makes Twitter more powerful in its effects, not less).
In fact, just as in the Arab Spring, there have been moments in Turkey where international coverage of the protests was better than the domestic counterparts.
In all these cases, social media sources provided more comprehensive and more timely coverage of the events. Of course, the lack of institutional media reporting inside the country also had insidious effects in that it was difficult to keep in check unfounded and inflammatory rumors that ricocheted around online social networks.
Social media as structuring the narrative. In all these protests, we see that social media allows a crowd-sourced, participatory, but also often social media-savvy, activist-led structuring of the meta-narrative, as well as the shaping of the collective grievances. Stories we tell about politics are incredibly important in shaping that very politics, and social media has opened a new, complicated path in which meta- narratives3 about political actions emerge and coalesce.
3. meta-narrative: a comprehensive way of describing something that accounts for all of the smaller narratives comprised by it.
Many of the "network analyses" based on social network analyses methods have missed this crucial aspect of the narrative shaping power of social media as it cannot be seen merely by scraping a billion tweets and making a colorful "spaghetti" map[109] of the network. What has emerged is that Twitter, Facebook and online social networks are the new mass, participatory, open, but also unflat spaces of uneven influence where narratives conflict, coalesce and then are rebroadcast and recirculated by mass media.
In short, Twitter is the new spin room for the 21st century. 25
Breaking of pluralistic ignorance and altering of collective action dynamics.
Revolutions, political upheavals, and large movements are quite hard to predict, but once they happen, they seem inevitable. Then there is a lot of hand-wringing on why they weren't predicted before by analysts and observers. (A classic case is the 1979 Iranian revolution which everyone should have seen coming but nobody did).
This is not because all analysts and political observers are idiots but because of a particular characteristic of large-scale social upheaval, especially in repressive environments. Many such events break through when "pluralistic ignorance"—i.e., the idea that you are the only one, or one of few, with a particular view—is broken. This can happen via a public mass action which can be a street demonstration or a Facebook page proclaiming "we are all Khaled Saeed."[110]
In other words, many people keep their true preferences private, or speak only with a few trusted people, thinking either that they are a minority or that if they speak up, they will be one of only a few and thus meet with massive repression. Once this dam breaks, however, the dissent explodes. Thus, it's easy to predict that there is a lot of pressure on this dam; however, it is hard to predict when and where it will break.
The key conceptual issue here is not digital versus non-digital but visibility, accessibility and signaling power. Street demonstrations, in that regard, are a form of social media in that they are powerful to the degree that they allow citizens to signal a plurality to their fellow citizens, and to help break pluralist ignorance. Overall, social media are altering mechanisms of collective action in societies and we have just begun to understand this fundamental shift.
Not easily steerable towards complex, strategic political action. The com- 30 bination of the above factors makes social media-fueled protests very powerful and consequential in some dimensions and somewhat ephemeral and weak in others.
While social media-fueled collective action lacks the affordances of politics and the institutional capital that political parties and NGOs can provide, they can be very
The Facebook page "We Are All Khaled Saeed" was a major precursor to the 2011 protests in Egypt.
good at drawing red lines and organizing and gathering attention to a loud "NO!" (i.e., Mubarak, SOPA/PIPA, Gezi Parki demolition). However, such movements seem usually unable to translate their power into a next step which directly impacts policy, law or regulation through elections or parliament.
This partly stems from the lack of representative power within the movement. During Occupy, for example, the protests were almost shut down at one point not because of police, or Zuccotti Park's owners' actions but because the protesters were unable to contain a few people among them who wanted to continue drumming around the clock. The neighborhood almost evicted them themselves—the crisis was averted at the last minute. Lack of representational power has meant that movements have little capacity to direct their own participants towards any tactical steps or strategic steps.
Whether there will emerge new platforms and ways of organizing enabled by online media remains to be seen; however, as of now, this is where this nascent phenomenon stands.
UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT
According to Tufekci what are the primary benefits of social media as it relates to political protests? What does she see as social media's drawbacks?
Tufekci identifies Wikipedia as the best example of a "mass participatory online environment that tries to negotiate complex outcomes." What does she say makes Wikipedia work? Is this something that protest organizers can duplicate?
Why does Tufekci believe that protests organized through social media outlets attract non-activist participants? Why are people who are not otherwise politically active motivated to attend demonstrations that they read about on social media sites?
How do social media sites shape the narrative of a protest event? Do social media sites have the same kind of opinion-shaping influence today that mainstream news sites do?
What does Tufekci mean by the term "pluralistic ignorance"? How do social media sites help people overcome this problem?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
Compare the mass movements that Tufekci talks about with the Green Belt movement in Kenya described by Wangari Mathaai (p. 363) or the democracy movement in Burma described by Aung San Suu Kyi (p. 442). What does the presence of social media add to a political protest movement?
How does Tufekci's understanding of social connectedness compare with Nicholas Carr's in "A Thing Like Me" (p. 123)? Are the two writers equally skeptical of some aspects of internet culture?
WRITING ABOUT THE TEXT
Explore your own reactions to political and social discussions on social media. Discuss any ways that you have, or could imagine, engaging in political discourse over the internet.