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Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest
To understand a thwarted Turkish coup, an anti–Wall Street encampment, and a packed Tahrir Square, we must first comprehend the power and the weaknesses of using new technologies to mobilize large numbers of people. An incisive observer, writer, and participant in today’s social movements, Zeynep Tufekci explains in this accessible and compelling book the nuanced trajectories of modern protests—how they form, how they operate differently from past protests, and why they have difficulty persisting in their long-term quests for change.
Tufekci speaks from direct experience, combining on-the-ground interviews with insightful analysis. She describes how the internet helped the Zapatista uprisings in Mexico, the necessity of remote Twitter users to organize medical supplies during Arab Spring, the refusal to use bullhorns in the Occupy Movement that started in New York, and the empowering effect of tear gas in Istanbul’s Gezi Park. These details from life inside social movements complete a moving investigation of authority, technology, and culture—and offer essential insights into the future of governance.
From New York Times opinion columnist Zeynep Tufekci, an firsthand account and incisive analysis of the role of social media in modern protest
“[Tufekci’s] personal experience in the squares and streets, melded with her scholarly insights on technology and communication platforms, makes [this] such an unusual and illuminating work.”—Carlos Lozada, Washington Post
“Twitter and Tear Gas is packed with evidence on how social media has changed social movements, based on rigorous research and placed in historical context.”—Hannah Kuchler, Financial Times
Tufekci speaks from direct experience, combining on-the-ground interviews with insightful analysis. She describes how the internet helped the Zapatista uprisings in Mexico, the necessity of remote Twitter users to organize medical supplies during Arab Spring, the refusal to use bullhorns in the Occupy Movement that started in New York, and the empowering effect of tear gas in Istanbul’s Gezi Park. These details from life inside social movements complete a moving investigation of authority, technology, and culture—and offer essential insights into the future of governance.
From New York Times opinion columnist Zeynep Tufekci, an firsthand account and incisive analysis of the role of social media in modern protest
“[Tufekci’s] personal experience in the squares and streets, melded with her scholarly insights on technology and communication platforms, makes [this] such an unusual and illuminating work.”—Carlos Lozada, Washington Post
“Twitter and Tear Gas is packed with evidence on how social media has changed social movements, based on rigorous research and placed in historical context.”—Hannah Kuchler, Financial Times
326 pages, Hardcover
First published May 16, 2017
382 people are currently reading
6614 people want to read
About the author
Zeynep Tufekci
5 books150 followersZeynep Tufekci is a sociologist and a writer, and a columnist for The New York Times. Her work focuses on the social implications of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and big data, as well as societal challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic using complex and systems-based thinking.
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April 17, 2018
Most of this book is a mixture of shallow "I was there" commentary and wishy-washy academic gobbledygook, e.g. "Throughout this chapter I have noted how the trajectory and the impact of the movement depend on the complex, mutual, and multilayered interactions and signals of capacity between those in power and those who seek to challenge them." How does this kind of conclusion help you change the world?
Based on a published review, I expected a thoughtful discussion of lessons learned from various social change movements going back to the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1960s. Unfortunately, the little bit on MLK was so superficial as to be misleading.
Even on the most recent stuff, the book is off the mark. For example, it's mysterious to the author how the Tea Party people are ignorant about basic objective facts that should be common knowledge to all citizens, but somehow they are super-informed on arcane rules of political procedure. Actually, there's a perfectly good explanation for that: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.
Based on a published review, I expected a thoughtful discussion of lessons learned from various social change movements going back to the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1960s. Unfortunately, the little bit on MLK was so superficial as to be misleading.
Even on the most recent stuff, the book is off the mark. For example, it's mysterious to the author how the Tea Party people are ignorant about basic objective facts that should be common knowledge to all citizens, but somehow they are super-informed on arcane rules of political procedure. Actually, there's a perfectly good explanation for that: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.
November 3, 2022
The Publisher Says: From New York Times opinion columnist Zeynep Tufekci, a firsthand account and incisive analysis of the role of social media in modern protest
To understand a thwarted Turkish coup, an anti–Wall Street encampment, and a packed Tahrir Square, we must first comprehend the power and the weaknesses of using new technologies to mobilize large numbers of people. An incisive observer, writer, and participant in today’s social movements, Zeynep Tufekci explains in this accessible and compelling book the nuanced trajectories of modern protests—how they form, how they operate differently from past protests, and why they have difficulty persisting in their long-term quests for change.
Tufekci speaks from direct experience, combining on-the-ground interviews with insightful analysis. She describes how the internet helped the Zapatista uprisings in Mexico, the necessity of remote Twitter users to organize medical supplies during Arab Spring, the refusal to use bullhorns in the Occupy Movement that started in New York, and the empowering effect of tear gas in Istanbul’s Gezi Park. These details from life inside social movements complete a moving investigation of authority, technology, and culture—and offer essential insights into the future of governance.
I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM THE LIBRARY. USE THEM OFTEN, OUR PATRONAGE IS THEIR JOB SECURITY.
My Review: What with #MuskyTwitter becoming a real thing and then "reassuring" advertisers that "Twitter cannot become a free-for-all hellscape" while then saying that "Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise," all of which pretty much add up to something just like a hellscape to me, minus the "free" part.
What went right about this read for me as a reader was its blend of "I-was-there" anecdotal reports and a sociologist's academic assessment of what leads the riled-up masses to fail in achieving their aim. As they are not conflated, as in attributing to her eyewitness statements the weight and force of academic analysis, I found them mutually enriching to my read. I was equally convinced that the author was, in openly acknowledging her left-leaning bias and explaining why it informed her analysis, transparent in reaching her conclusions.
Since the advent of social media in the Aughties, we've undergone a startling tectonic shift in the public conversation about politics and current events. Loud voices (eg Alex Jones) predominate; their usually right-wing extremism (save the both-sides and what-about crap, it's more effort than I care to spend to debunk their fundamental wrongness politely) echoes and echoes while picking up force without ever gaining any meaning or truth. Alex Jones's lies about Sandy Hook are going to cost him nearly a billion bucks which he doesn't have, and is proof that Author Tufekci's central thesis is correct: Attention is the main currency of social-media movements, not information which was at the heart of previous propaganda drives. If Jones's grip on the attention of millions hadn't been so finely tuned and thus successful, the bogus information he was peddling would've vanished in its own ripples. Revolutionaries using social media to spread their word have succeeded insofar as they've grabbed attention and even inspired action based on it...but have failed to make consolidatable gains in opposition to their enemies because that step requires information to reach people ill-equipped to comprehend or act on it.
This last fact, evidenced by the failures of many current social-media-driven movements, are failures to create systems and get buy-in from the protestors. There are no "network internalities," a term I learned from reading the book that's basically the opposite of the well-known term "network externalities", derived from the easy and showy online "organizing" that barely outlasts the social media post. In olden days, when organizing was a rough and effortful slog of meeting after meeting after committee upon speech-giving bloviation, the fact that 500 people showed up to a protest said something very loud about how this message they organized around resonated with them. Now that the message is reduced to an attention-grabbing snippet to get your engagement to it in place of simply doomscrolling on, there's very little investment on the consumer's part.
Another signal failure on the reliance of protests on social media is the interruptibility of attention-based engagement as opposed to information-based buy-in. The model she uses for this is the Tea Party...an online scattering of loudly outraged racist scum (my term, not the author's) whose "movement" (in the same sense as "bowel" in my never-humble opinion) transcended the attention-based group's ephemerality by embracing older techniques of protest: accepting hierarchical thinking, coalescing their ideas into clearly stated goals, etc. They've been stunningly successful in fomenting their ignorant, evil, putrid "ideas" and getting mainstream buy-in for them. More's the pity. The strength they rely on for their success is pounding away at the attention-grabbing "messaging" while accepting the behind-the-scenes scaffolding of disciplined application of information-based knowledge.
It's a model for success against the effective countering of the attention-grabbing social media rebellion: Drown the attention out in a flood of irrelevant, often false, and designed to distract "information." It is a very effective technique, as current political tragedies have shown again and again. Records, as in "lists of factual things," are judged fake insofar as they disagree with the hearer's agenda, and thus require time and effort to deny, explain, or simply distract from in return. That's time not spent doing the real job. And that is he entire plan for success of the right-wing nightmare machine.
Academics aren't going to like this abbreviated treatment of the topics the author covers, or appreciate the absence in-book of notes and a bibliography. Lay readers aren't going to be thrilled that the author doesn't spoon-feed them conclusions that agree with their established prejudices. But if you invest in the author's central thesis, the revolution that can be televised is doomed to co-opting and failure, there is a lot to be learned from discovering why and why you should care. That's the point of the book. It makes its point very well indeed. And, as #Midterms2022 approach, it behooves us all as voters to learn what our manipulators want us *not* to see, to attend to.
NB there are hyperlinks to citations and definitions on my blog page.
To understand a thwarted Turkish coup, an anti–Wall Street encampment, and a packed Tahrir Square, we must first comprehend the power and the weaknesses of using new technologies to mobilize large numbers of people. An incisive observer, writer, and participant in today’s social movements, Zeynep Tufekci explains in this accessible and compelling book the nuanced trajectories of modern protests—how they form, how they operate differently from past protests, and why they have difficulty persisting in their long-term quests for change.
Tufekci speaks from direct experience, combining on-the-ground interviews with insightful analysis. She describes how the internet helped the Zapatista uprisings in Mexico, the necessity of remote Twitter users to organize medical supplies during Arab Spring, the refusal to use bullhorns in the Occupy Movement that started in New York, and the empowering effect of tear gas in Istanbul’s Gezi Park. These details from life inside social movements complete a moving investigation of authority, technology, and culture—and offer essential insights into the future of governance.
I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM THE LIBRARY. USE THEM OFTEN, OUR PATRONAGE IS THEIR JOB SECURITY.
My Review: What with #MuskyTwitter becoming a real thing and then "reassuring" advertisers that "Twitter cannot become a free-for-all hellscape" while then saying that "Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise," all of which pretty much add up to something just like a hellscape to me, minus the "free" part.
What went right about this read for me as a reader was its blend of "I-was-there" anecdotal reports and a sociologist's academic assessment of what leads the riled-up masses to fail in achieving their aim. As they are not conflated, as in attributing to her eyewitness statements the weight and force of academic analysis, I found them mutually enriching to my read. I was equally convinced that the author was, in openly acknowledging her left-leaning bias and explaining why it informed her analysis, transparent in reaching her conclusions.
Since the advent of social media in the Aughties, we've undergone a startling tectonic shift in the public conversation about politics and current events. Loud voices (eg Alex Jones) predominate; their usually right-wing extremism (save the both-sides and what-about crap, it's more effort than I care to spend to debunk their fundamental wrongness politely) echoes and echoes while picking up force without ever gaining any meaning or truth. Alex Jones's lies about Sandy Hook are going to cost him nearly a billion bucks which he doesn't have, and is proof that Author Tufekci's central thesis is correct: Attention is the main currency of social-media movements, not information which was at the heart of previous propaganda drives. If Jones's grip on the attention of millions hadn't been so finely tuned and thus successful, the bogus information he was peddling would've vanished in its own ripples. Revolutionaries using social media to spread their word have succeeded insofar as they've grabbed attention and even inspired action based on it...but have failed to make consolidatable gains in opposition to their enemies because that step requires information to reach people ill-equipped to comprehend or act on it.
This last fact, evidenced by the failures of many current social-media-driven movements, are failures to create systems and get buy-in from the protestors. There are no "network internalities," a term I learned from reading the book that's basically the opposite of the well-known term "network externalities", derived from the easy and showy online "organizing" that barely outlasts the social media post. In olden days, when organizing was a rough and effortful slog of meeting after meeting after committee upon speech-giving bloviation, the fact that 500 people showed up to a protest said something very loud about how this message they organized around resonated with them. Now that the message is reduced to an attention-grabbing snippet to get your engagement to it in place of simply doomscrolling on, there's very little investment on the consumer's part.
Another signal failure on the reliance of protests on social media is the interruptibility of attention-based engagement as opposed to information-based buy-in. The model she uses for this is the Tea Party...an online scattering of loudly outraged racist scum (my term, not the author's) whose "movement" (in the same sense as "bowel" in my never-humble opinion) transcended the attention-based group's ephemerality by embracing older techniques of protest: accepting hierarchical thinking, coalescing their ideas into clearly stated goals, etc. They've been stunningly successful in fomenting their ignorant, evil, putrid "ideas" and getting mainstream buy-in for them. More's the pity. The strength they rely on for their success is pounding away at the attention-grabbing "messaging" while accepting the behind-the-scenes scaffolding of disciplined application of information-based knowledge.
It's a model for success against the effective countering of the attention-grabbing social media rebellion: Drown the attention out in a flood of irrelevant, often false, and designed to distract "information." It is a very effective technique, as current political tragedies have shown again and again. Records, as in "lists of factual things," are judged fake insofar as they disagree with the hearer's agenda, and thus require time and effort to deny, explain, or simply distract from in return. That's time not spent doing the real job. And that is he entire plan for success of the right-wing nightmare machine.
Academics aren't going to like this abbreviated treatment of the topics the author covers, or appreciate the absence in-book of notes and a bibliography. Lay readers aren't going to be thrilled that the author doesn't spoon-feed them conclusions that agree with their established prejudices. But if you invest in the author's central thesis, the revolution that can be televised is doomed to co-opting and failure, there is a lot to be learned from discovering why and why you should care. That's the point of the book. It makes its point very well indeed. And, as #Midterms2022 approach, it behooves us all as voters to learn what our manipulators want us *not* to see, to attend to.
NB there are hyperlinks to citations and definitions on my blog page.
December 25, 2018
Our online book club read this in late 2018. We were very impressed, overall.
You can find our reactions and conversations through these links:
Preface, Introduction, and chapter 1, “A Networked Public.”
Chapters 2: “Censorship and Attention” and 3: “Leading the Leaderless.”
Chapters 4: “Movement Cultures” and 5: “Technology and People.”
Chapters 6: “Platforms and Algorithms” and 7: “Names and Connections.”
Chapters 8, “Signaling Power and Signaling to Power” and 9, “Governments Strike Back.”
Epilogue, “The Uncertain Climb.”
You can find our reactions and conversations through these links:
Preface, Introduction, and chapter 1, “A Networked Public.”
Chapters 2: “Censorship and Attention” and 3: “Leading the Leaderless.”
Chapters 4: “Movement Cultures” and 5: “Technology and People.”
Chapters 6: “Platforms and Algorithms” and 7: “Names and Connections.”
Chapters 8, “Signaling Power and Signaling to Power” and 9, “Governments Strike Back.”
Epilogue, “The Uncertain Climb.”
December 20, 2017
A very interesting subject treated in a very uninteresting way. The author lurches between personal memoir, third-person history, and academic treatise in ways that are jarring and sometimes burdensome to follow.
This might be one of the first book-length treatments of social media and revolution, but it won’t be the last. And it will probably be heavily referenced by the book that eventually tells the definitive history of the subject.
This might be one of the first book-length treatments of social media and revolution, but it won’t be the last. And it will probably be heavily referenced by the book that eventually tells the definitive history of the subject.
August 25, 2017
This should be mandatory reading for everyone in order to better understand how Social Media is affecting our lives for better and for worse.
July 12, 2023
this book was ambitious and certainly thought-provoking. Tufekci aims to unpack the complex relationship between social media, social movements, and governments: topics that frequently hit newspaper opinion sections, but are rarely synthesized and grounded in academic theory and history.
as such, the scope of this work sprawls across both continents and disciplines. her case studies emphasize the Gezi Park protests in Turkey (due to Tufekci's on-the-ground experiences there), but also allude substantially to Occupy and the Arab Spring. additionally, to keep the book accessible to readers of all stripes, Tufekci attempts to define concepts from sociology, UX design, STS, and more - explaining terms from pluralistic ignorance to technological determinism.
I appreciated Tufekci's comfort with contingency and change: e.g. showing how the same forces that grab headlines and fill streets can collapse decision-making, or tracing how information overload has replaced information scarcity in recent years. she avoids taking firm stances on technology, while describing how specific design choices or movement structures can tip the scales for organizers. while a lot of this book was spent in anecdotes, I found her frameworks easy to cross-apply to today's movements.
while I got a lot out of this read, the book's organization suffered a little from complexity. some arguments were repeated and others skimmed over, all readers will find themselves skimming when the book explains social platforms or phenomena they already know, and I'm not sure there was a clear progression of ideas from beginning to end.
could these hiccups have been avoided? maybe not - after all, Tufekci's only consistent message might be that movements (and histories) no longer hold a narrative core, arising instead from shifting networks of people and ideas in endless tactical and circumstantial rearrangements.
"...a rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organisations of power and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles..."
~Deleuze & Guattari
as such, the scope of this work sprawls across both continents and disciplines. her case studies emphasize the Gezi Park protests in Turkey (due to Tufekci's on-the-ground experiences there), but also allude substantially to Occupy and the Arab Spring. additionally, to keep the book accessible to readers of all stripes, Tufekci attempts to define concepts from sociology, UX design, STS, and more - explaining terms from pluralistic ignorance to technological determinism.
I appreciated Tufekci's comfort with contingency and change: e.g. showing how the same forces that grab headlines and fill streets can collapse decision-making, or tracing how information overload has replaced information scarcity in recent years. she avoids taking firm stances on technology, while describing how specific design choices or movement structures can tip the scales for organizers. while a lot of this book was spent in anecdotes, I found her frameworks easy to cross-apply to today's movements.
while I got a lot out of this read, the book's organization suffered a little from complexity. some arguments were repeated and others skimmed over, all readers will find themselves skimming when the book explains social platforms or phenomena they already know, and I'm not sure there was a clear progression of ideas from beginning to end.
could these hiccups have been avoided? maybe not - after all, Tufekci's only consistent message might be that movements (and histories) no longer hold a narrative core, arising instead from shifting networks of people and ideas in endless tactical and circumstantial rearrangements.
"...a rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organisations of power and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles..."
~Deleuze & Guattari
February 3, 2019
اصبحنا نعيش في فترة حتمية الفضاءات الاسفيرية، هذه العوالم البديلة لا تغير من طبيعة ونسق الفرد فحسب وإنما من نسق المجتمع بكامله ، من عصر السياسة للساسة إلى عصر السياسة للجميع
تنجلي حقائق عبر هذا الإعلام البديل والتي يتم تزييفها عبر قنوات وشاشات الأنظمة ، لكنها نفسها لا تسلم من التوجيه الممنهج لصانعي المنصات التي قد تتحكم فيها مصالح معينة
عبر هذه الشبكات أصبح حشد الاحتجاج يأتي اولا ثم يتم التنظيم بصورة سهلة على عكس ما كان يحدث سابقا وبصعوبات لوجستية و مخاطر اكبر، لكن كما تطورت الحشود تطورت طرق مناورتها و مجابهتها من قبل الحكومات
كنت ابحث بين دفات الكتاب عن نجاح ثورتنا الحالية ، تلك التي يدفعها الامل بعالم جديد هذا الفعل الذي سمته توفيق " الجنة في الجحيم " حيث ارواح الشباب رخيصة أمام رصاص النظام لكنها في مخيلتها امل بعالم جديد وسط جحيم الثورة ، كنت ابحث عن خطوات سحرية يمكن عبرها إزالة الخناق عن الوطن الحبيب مثل وصفة طعام جاهزة لكن كما ذكرت توفيقي لا تشبه ثورة ثورة أخرى الحياة هكذا مبنية في الأسئلة التي تواجهنا يوما بيوم
توفيقي ناشطة وأكاديمية، تكتب بحرية بدون صرامة شديدة في الأفكار والاصطلاحات ، تحكي من داخل تجاربها الشخصية ومن خلال قراءاتها الكثيرة
April 13, 2018
This book is asking the most important social questions of the moment: How technology is and isn't changing the political process and resistance to it. The quote she keeps repeating is that technology is neither good or bad, but it is also not neutral. Like Neil Postman and Marshall McLellan have observed before, the medium is the message. Just as print changed everything and then Television changed everything, we need to grapple with how social media has changed everything. There are a lot of books yet to be written in this genre, but this is a very good and thoughtful one.
Read
April 12, 2018A must-read article by Zeynep Tufekci about Facebook.
December 5, 2017
This book is a must read for whomever even slightly interested in the idea of changing public sphere with collective action.
Author starts with an in-depth analysis of networked movements (social movements using internet and social media as organizing tools and a medium to express dissent) and explores their differences with pre-internet era movements. The evident advantage of networked movements is fast and easy organization on a large scale. But with this power also comes the movements' weakness. Because of bypassing pain staking process of organization, there are almost no widely accepted leadership and even no effective decision making system which results in tactical freeze after the initial stage of protests and makes any fruitful negotiations very hard to achieve. Author also mentions that this weakness is not just a by product of using internet but has deep cultural roots in protesters' worldview and their lack of confidence in representative politics.
Second part of the book is devoted to the analysis of different social media outlets. Tufekci explores how different features, algorithms, terms of use, popularity of outlets and even market forces works for or against the activists.
At last author gives a more detailed analysis of the reaction of the powerful to the networked movements challenging their power. Her main thesis is that in attention is the main resource for a movement, not the information and governments gradually have learned to limit the attention and distract or confuse the public instead of naively blocking the information which is almost impossible and could backfire since it attracts more attention to the issue.
What I mentioned is just a small part of Tufekci's deep insights in this book. I have a feeling that I will come back to this book so many times.
Author starts with an in-depth analysis of networked movements (social movements using internet and social media as organizing tools and a medium to express dissent) and explores their differences with pre-internet era movements. The evident advantage of networked movements is fast and easy organization on a large scale. But with this power also comes the movements' weakness. Because of bypassing pain staking process of organization, there are almost no widely accepted leadership and even no effective decision making system which results in tactical freeze after the initial stage of protests and makes any fruitful negotiations very hard to achieve. Author also mentions that this weakness is not just a by product of using internet but has deep cultural roots in protesters' worldview and their lack of confidence in representative politics.
Second part of the book is devoted to the analysis of different social media outlets. Tufekci explores how different features, algorithms, terms of use, popularity of outlets and even market forces works for or against the activists.
At last author gives a more detailed analysis of the reaction of the powerful to the networked movements challenging their power. Her main thesis is that in attention is the main resource for a movement, not the information and governments gradually have learned to limit the attention and distract or confuse the public instead of naively blocking the information which is almost impossible and could backfire since it attracts more attention to the issue.
What I mentioned is just a small part of Tufekci's deep insights in this book. I have a feeling that I will come back to this book so many times.
November 30, 2019
As a sociologist attempting to analyze social movements of the 21st century, I was looking for a book like this as it is absolutely necessary to understand the role social media is playing and has played for the past 20 years. The work of Frances-Fox Piven, Doug McAdam, Jim Jasper, Charles Tilly, and others on social movement theory leaves out important technological developments and how these influence claims-making, organization, and so forth.
Twitter and Tear Gas will definitely be a much-referenced book by sociologists in this regard--it attempts to provide some theoretical scaffolding for the way in which social media impacts social movements, using primarily examples from the Arab Spring, Turkish coup of 2016, Occupy, and BLM movements.
I thought the book could have been more analytical and theoretical--she tells us she leaves out a lot of the scholarly references and provides them as an appendix on her website--, she also spends a bit too much time on a memoir-like reminiscing on lunches she had with activists and what the scenery was like, and injecting how popular she is on Twitter and a blow-by-blow account of her witnessing the 2016 coup in Turkey. She also doesn't question how the very definition of a social movement may have changed in a more digital era than the 60s, and spends a large amount of time with left-leaning non-hierarchical movements. . However overall it's a very valuable book. I think the most important theoretical contributions are when she discusses the capabilities of social movements: narrative, disruptive, electoral and institutional capacities and how these are affected (or not) by the internet. Another key concept she puts forward is 'network internalities'--the benefits and collective capabilities attained during the process of forming durable networks.
Twitter and Tear Gas will definitely be a much-referenced book by sociologists in this regard--it attempts to provide some theoretical scaffolding for the way in which social media impacts social movements, using primarily examples from the Arab Spring, Turkish coup of 2016, Occupy, and BLM movements.
I thought the book could have been more analytical and theoretical--she tells us she leaves out a lot of the scholarly references and provides them as an appendix on her website--, she also spends a bit too much time on a memoir-like reminiscing on lunches she had with activists and what the scenery was like, and injecting how popular she is on Twitter and a blow-by-blow account of her witnessing the 2016 coup in Turkey. She also doesn't question how the very definition of a social movement may have changed in a more digital era than the 60s, and spends a large amount of time with left-leaning non-hierarchical movements. . However overall it's a very valuable book. I think the most important theoretical contributions are when she discusses the capabilities of social movements: narrative, disruptive, electoral and institutional capacities and how these are affected (or not) by the internet. Another key concept she puts forward is 'network internalities'--the benefits and collective capabilities attained during the process of forming durable networks.
March 15, 2017
Zeynep Tufekci is the ideal author for this remarkable book. Her personal experience on the ground, online and talking to activists is the crowning jewel of this insightful book.
Tufekci is clearly a passionate activist and has been involved in the most important social movements of the past twenty years. However I found the criticisms most endearing about this work. Despite her obvious allegiances, Tufekci balances the strengths of digital technologies and inter connectivity with the often overlooked limitations.
This book is essential reading for anyone interested in activism, current affairs and politics more widely.
Tufekci is clearly a passionate activist and has been involved in the most important social movements of the past twenty years. However I found the criticisms most endearing about this work. Despite her obvious allegiances, Tufekci balances the strengths of digital technologies and inter connectivity with the often overlooked limitations.
This book is essential reading for anyone interested in activism, current affairs and politics more widely.
December 24, 2017
I have the feeling that this is going to be one of those books that stays in my head for a long time.
The author, Zeynep Tufekci, is a Turkish woman who has worked at the interface between academia, technology, and progressive movements for change for a few years now. She is the sort of person whose opinions of the Zapatista protest movement was formed in part by her personal visit to the Zapatista region in 1997, whose knowledge of the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt is formed by going to Egypt and personally interviewing many of the people who were there, and whose knowledge of the Turkish protests in Gezi park is formed by her presence there while they were happening. The dust cover of her book shows her wearing a helmet, smiling, and explains that the helmet was "essential for protesters facing tear gas canisters shot into the crowd".
She has also worked as a computer programmer (at IBM) in the early 1990's, and done a fair amount of academic publishing on the impact of technology on society. When she speaks about what the impact of social networks on the internet has been, and likely will be, on movements for change, she is not speaking from a few months' consideration of the topic. If you are looking for a book that will preach progressive Fire and Brimstone, but leave your assumptions peacefully unchallenged, this may not be your book. She is clearly a progressive, whereas I am not, but she is clear-eyed about her own bias, and is willing to turn her insight on sacred cows of her own part of the political spectrum.
In some ways, this reminded me of Micah White's "The End of Protest". White was attempting to convince progressives that the left's reliance on a single tactic (mass protest) was at a dead end and it was time to try something else. Tufekci, on the other hand, is looking at WHY mass protest isn't achieving what it once did, and also why the left is mostly incapable of trying something else. While Micah White's explanation centers on the fact that any tactic, if used again and again, is eventually adapted to by the opposition (in this case, the defenders of the status quo), Tufekci looks at why protest worked in the first place, as a means of explaining why it has largely stopped working. Along the way, she ends up explaining why the left continues to use it, even though it doesn't work very well any more.
Of course, she never exactly says that it has stopped working, but it is clear that mass protests in the U.S. against the War in Iraq and later Occupy Wall Street, in Egypt and elsewhere throughout the Arab world in 2011 in the Arab Spring, in Turkey in 2013 in Gezi Park, have not brought about the same successes that the mass protests of the 1960's did. Why not?
Before one can explain how social networks and other modern communication techniques have changed the nature of mass protest, though, she takes us back to look at the history of the mass protests in support of civil rights in America in the 1960's. The core concept of Tufekci's thesis is, that it was not the protests themselves that changed things, it was what they demonstrated. If you could, in the 1960's, organize a protest of hundreds of thousands of people, you could do a lot of organizing. The important thing about a mass protest, was what it demonstrated what you were capable of, because back then organizing a mass protest was really hard. If you could do that, you could support political candidates for elections, you could organize effective boycotts, you could create and distribute newsletters or newspapers, and you could even (if the crackdown was too harsh) organize violent resistance if it came to that.
This is why, while Twitter and Facebook and other modern technologies have made mass protest easier to achieve, they have also (by that very fact) made it less significant. Even before Facebook and Twitter, email and other electronic means of organizing on a massive scale allowed the anti-war movement in the U.S. turn out people in protests in huge numbers. But, so what? It didn't indicate any ability to do anything OTHER than hold mass protests, and so it was more or less ignored. The Iraq War went ahead, Wall Street's power was not diminished one whit, and so on. Moreover, once the initial protests are over (for example in the case of Occupy Wall Street), there was no mechanism for deciding what to do next.
There is also an extensive discussion of the issue of anonymity on Facebook. Here, we have seen the ability of hierarchical organizations (e.g. governments) to adapt to changing conditions by making changes in their tactics. Five years ago, the call was for Facebook to allow protesters to maintain anonymity, but with the rise of armies of anonymous trolls (either party operatives, paid hourly troll workers, or even automated bots) many progressives have found that they cannot use the internet for organizing or disseminating of information unless they are on a platform (such as Facebook) which requires real names.
One gets the impression that the (brief) section on the Tea Party was one of the hardest for Tufekci to write, but it is to her credit that she was nonetheless willing to write it. The typical response of progressives to the relative success of the Tea Party in influencing political events, is dismissive or flat-out denial that the Tea Party has done anything they haven't. Tufekci points out that the willingness of non-progressives to accept some hierarchy, organization, and conformity to the group, makes them better at choosing, and changing, tactics. The Tea Party started as a structureless protest, and then quickly morphed into enough of an organization to choose candidates, and get them elected, in some cases knocking incumbent Republicans out of office in order to do so.
In some ways, Tufekci's book is an update to Jo Freeman's essay from 1971, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness", and she does mention the essay as well. There is also a good analysis of how computer algorithms for what to show or not show online, can (without any programmer intending it) reflect the racism or sexism of the society they are embedded in. She talks about how the various governments targeted by online protests have moved from attempting to suppress information (the pre-Internet response) to drowning it out with a surplus of (bogus, hateful, or just frivolous) information. The keepers of the status quo, can change their tactics, in some cases better than the structureless resistance movements that one might have expected to be the more agile.
Another very interesting topic she brings up, is whether or not mass street protests have been difficult for progressives to move on from, because it is not the (stated, theoretical) goal that they are protesting for, but rather protest IS the goal. If the only real, gut-level reason for a progressive to join a protest is that the act of mass protest is satisfying in and of itself, then there will obviously be deep-rooted resistance to the idea of trying something else instead. The section on the presence of ad-hoc public libraries at street protests was particularly amusing (and enlightening) to me in this regard.
Like Tufekci, I think there is quite a bit that is unjust and unfair about the way the world is run, and wish that it were (and hope that in the future it will be) run differently. Unlike Tufekci, I don't think that the left holds very many of the answers on how to run it better. In large part, this is because much progressive ideology largely consists of a belief that loudly declaiming the desired outcome, will eventually result in someone providing it, and this is not an attitude that is normally conducive to reflection on tactics. Tufekci is a striking, and welcome, exception. The highest compliment one can pay a book (in my view), is that it makes you a bit smarter for having read it, by enabling you to understand what you are seeing in the world, a bit better. This is such a book.
The author, Zeynep Tufekci, is a Turkish woman who has worked at the interface between academia, technology, and progressive movements for change for a few years now. She is the sort of person whose opinions of the Zapatista protest movement was formed in part by her personal visit to the Zapatista region in 1997, whose knowledge of the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt is formed by going to Egypt and personally interviewing many of the people who were there, and whose knowledge of the Turkish protests in Gezi park is formed by her presence there while they were happening. The dust cover of her book shows her wearing a helmet, smiling, and explains that the helmet was "essential for protesters facing tear gas canisters shot into the crowd".
She has also worked as a computer programmer (at IBM) in the early 1990's, and done a fair amount of academic publishing on the impact of technology on society. When she speaks about what the impact of social networks on the internet has been, and likely will be, on movements for change, she is not speaking from a few months' consideration of the topic. If you are looking for a book that will preach progressive Fire and Brimstone, but leave your assumptions peacefully unchallenged, this may not be your book. She is clearly a progressive, whereas I am not, but she is clear-eyed about her own bias, and is willing to turn her insight on sacred cows of her own part of the political spectrum.
In some ways, this reminded me of Micah White's "The End of Protest". White was attempting to convince progressives that the left's reliance on a single tactic (mass protest) was at a dead end and it was time to try something else. Tufekci, on the other hand, is looking at WHY mass protest isn't achieving what it once did, and also why the left is mostly incapable of trying something else. While Micah White's explanation centers on the fact that any tactic, if used again and again, is eventually adapted to by the opposition (in this case, the defenders of the status quo), Tufekci looks at why protest worked in the first place, as a means of explaining why it has largely stopped working. Along the way, she ends up explaining why the left continues to use it, even though it doesn't work very well any more.
Of course, she never exactly says that it has stopped working, but it is clear that mass protests in the U.S. against the War in Iraq and later Occupy Wall Street, in Egypt and elsewhere throughout the Arab world in 2011 in the Arab Spring, in Turkey in 2013 in Gezi Park, have not brought about the same successes that the mass protests of the 1960's did. Why not?
Before one can explain how social networks and other modern communication techniques have changed the nature of mass protest, though, she takes us back to look at the history of the mass protests in support of civil rights in America in the 1960's. The core concept of Tufekci's thesis is, that it was not the protests themselves that changed things, it was what they demonstrated. If you could, in the 1960's, organize a protest of hundreds of thousands of people, you could do a lot of organizing. The important thing about a mass protest, was what it demonstrated what you were capable of, because back then organizing a mass protest was really hard. If you could do that, you could support political candidates for elections, you could organize effective boycotts, you could create and distribute newsletters or newspapers, and you could even (if the crackdown was too harsh) organize violent resistance if it came to that.
This is why, while Twitter and Facebook and other modern technologies have made mass protest easier to achieve, they have also (by that very fact) made it less significant. Even before Facebook and Twitter, email and other electronic means of organizing on a massive scale allowed the anti-war movement in the U.S. turn out people in protests in huge numbers. But, so what? It didn't indicate any ability to do anything OTHER than hold mass protests, and so it was more or less ignored. The Iraq War went ahead, Wall Street's power was not diminished one whit, and so on. Moreover, once the initial protests are over (for example in the case of Occupy Wall Street), there was no mechanism for deciding what to do next.
There is also an extensive discussion of the issue of anonymity on Facebook. Here, we have seen the ability of hierarchical organizations (e.g. governments) to adapt to changing conditions by making changes in their tactics. Five years ago, the call was for Facebook to allow protesters to maintain anonymity, but with the rise of armies of anonymous trolls (either party operatives, paid hourly troll workers, or even automated bots) many progressives have found that they cannot use the internet for organizing or disseminating of information unless they are on a platform (such as Facebook) which requires real names.
One gets the impression that the (brief) section on the Tea Party was one of the hardest for Tufekci to write, but it is to her credit that she was nonetheless willing to write it. The typical response of progressives to the relative success of the Tea Party in influencing political events, is dismissive or flat-out denial that the Tea Party has done anything they haven't. Tufekci points out that the willingness of non-progressives to accept some hierarchy, organization, and conformity to the group, makes them better at choosing, and changing, tactics. The Tea Party started as a structureless protest, and then quickly morphed into enough of an organization to choose candidates, and get them elected, in some cases knocking incumbent Republicans out of office in order to do so.
In some ways, Tufekci's book is an update to Jo Freeman's essay from 1971, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness", and she does mention the essay as well. There is also a good analysis of how computer algorithms for what to show or not show online, can (without any programmer intending it) reflect the racism or sexism of the society they are embedded in. She talks about how the various governments targeted by online protests have moved from attempting to suppress information (the pre-Internet response) to drowning it out with a surplus of (bogus, hateful, or just frivolous) information. The keepers of the status quo, can change their tactics, in some cases better than the structureless resistance movements that one might have expected to be the more agile.
Another very interesting topic she brings up, is whether or not mass street protests have been difficult for progressives to move on from, because it is not the (stated, theoretical) goal that they are protesting for, but rather protest IS the goal. If the only real, gut-level reason for a progressive to join a protest is that the act of mass protest is satisfying in and of itself, then there will obviously be deep-rooted resistance to the idea of trying something else instead. The section on the presence of ad-hoc public libraries at street protests was particularly amusing (and enlightening) to me in this regard.
Like Tufekci, I think there is quite a bit that is unjust and unfair about the way the world is run, and wish that it were (and hope that in the future it will be) run differently. Unlike Tufekci, I don't think that the left holds very many of the answers on how to run it better. In large part, this is because much progressive ideology largely consists of a belief that loudly declaiming the desired outcome, will eventually result in someone providing it, and this is not an attitude that is normally conducive to reflection on tactics. Tufekci is a striking, and welcome, exception. The highest compliment one can pay a book (in my view), is that it makes you a bit smarter for having read it, by enabling you to understand what you are seeing in the world, a bit better. This is such a book.
August 29, 2017
This is certainly an essential reader for the modern activist. Everyone seems to have a theory about the effects of social media on society, spawning terms like slacktivism and prompting scathing critiques from just about everyone. This book puts those armchair theories to the test in a way, taking a balanced look at the good, the bad, and the uncertain impacts of the Internet and social networking sites on social movements. It combines narrative with academic discourse and theory to create a book that is broadly accessible as well as thought-provoking and fairly robust. This is a difficult balancing act that most academics can't achieve, but Tufekci does it quite well, with a few exceptions (e.g. using academic terminology that doesn't really add to the argument but creates a clunky narrative or overusing the word 'networked' to the point that it loses meaning). Though the book has some holes in it from a research perspective, to my mind it's one of those books that highlights how much more you can achieve with a book than with academic articles. Dipping into narrative and out into the literature and back again is one of the great things about this book, with the author combining her own personal tales with stories from other social movements she has studied as well as the literature to explore the many sides of this issue.
I learned a lot from this book as well, particularly about how the policies of various social networking sites advantage certain groups and disadvantage others. I found her discussion about the tendency to measure success via protest numbers and the need to use additional metrics quite important and relevant, especially in the context of her discussion of how social media can bring out big numbers of protestors but faces challenges in building long term capacity and effective social movements that change policy. What we get from protests, the social caché of posting pictures of ourselves at protests, and the change that can be achieved via protest don't always align. Yet at the same time Tufekci critiques these challenges of creating sustainable and effective social movements, this is not a book that is anti-social media by any stretch. She emphasises the good, including the radically different types of people that can find common ground, and emboldening people in countries where they previously would have suffered in isolation.
I 'read' this book via Audible, and I wouldn't actually recommend that medium. It's one of those books that you will want to underline in and remember quotes, so I think it's better to pick up the ebook or a hard copy.
I learned a lot from this book as well, particularly about how the policies of various social networking sites advantage certain groups and disadvantage others. I found her discussion about the tendency to measure success via protest numbers and the need to use additional metrics quite important and relevant, especially in the context of her discussion of how social media can bring out big numbers of protestors but faces challenges in building long term capacity and effective social movements that change policy. What we get from protests, the social caché of posting pictures of ourselves at protests, and the change that can be achieved via protest don't always align. Yet at the same time Tufekci critiques these challenges of creating sustainable and effective social movements, this is not a book that is anti-social media by any stretch. She emphasises the good, including the radically different types of people that can find common ground, and emboldening people in countries where they previously would have suffered in isolation.
I 'read' this book via Audible, and I wouldn't actually recommend that medium. It's one of those books that you will want to underline in and remember quotes, so I think it's better to pick up the ebook or a hard copy.
May 12, 2017
This is a must-read for anyone --- lay person or academic --- interested in the increasing role the Internet and social media has played in recent protests around the globe. Tufecki draws on her extensive first-hand experience with movements that have used recent technologies from the Zapatistas through Occupy and recent events in the Middle East and the last US presidental election, looking at how today's networked platforms can be easily co-opted by small groups to reach large audiences and the resulting successes and failures, contrasting the work with earlier movements such as the American civil rights movement of the 1960s. Given her cultural heritage, she presents an especially interesting and personal account of events in Turkey as they apply to today's networks.
Three areas of the book really stand out to me: her observations and anecdotes about how today's platforms enable very small groups of people to drive large movements very quickly; the advantages and disadvantages these movements have because they are generally consensually led rather than hierarchical, and the close relationship between users, the corporations of the social platforms they use, and their interaction with the nation-states in which they operate.
Tufecki also advances the capacities and signals model for how these networks operate. There I think she might have done somewhat better --- or perhaps I lost the thread of her argument, as my background is more technical than sociological. The model seems sound (although I am not qualified to dispute it), but could have been called out more clearly in some ways from her relating of specific observations and trends. To her credit, she does a good job of summarizing the model in both the introduction and conclusion. This may be a weak point to the academic reader, although I imagine her model is --- or will be --- better-covered in her writing targeted specifically at that audience.
The material she presents is accessible to anyone, but I think has special value for three groups of people: those attempting to implement change using today's networked mediums, those studying trends and developments in Internet culture, and those working on Internet technologies that should be aware that their work has real social consequences that are difficult to foresee in advance.
Three areas of the book really stand out to me: her observations and anecdotes about how today's platforms enable very small groups of people to drive large movements very quickly; the advantages and disadvantages these movements have because they are generally consensually led rather than hierarchical, and the close relationship between users, the corporations of the social platforms they use, and their interaction with the nation-states in which they operate.
Tufecki also advances the capacities and signals model for how these networks operate. There I think she might have done somewhat better --- or perhaps I lost the thread of her argument, as my background is more technical than sociological. The model seems sound (although I am not qualified to dispute it), but could have been called out more clearly in some ways from her relating of specific observations and trends. To her credit, she does a good job of summarizing the model in both the introduction and conclusion. This may be a weak point to the academic reader, although I imagine her model is --- or will be --- better-covered in her writing targeted specifically at that audience.
The material she presents is accessible to anyone, but I think has special value for three groups of people: those attempting to implement change using today's networked mediums, those studying trends and developments in Internet culture, and those working on Internet technologies that should be aware that their work has real social consequences that are difficult to foresee in advance.
May 4, 2019
Zeynep came to Baltimore to do a panel discussion on the intersection of technology and democracy, so I had to go. She's always had interesting columns and ideas about how technology is affecting our society. She was impressive enough that I knew I had to dig deeper and read her book.
Her insights into how protests start, how they proceed, and the factors that contribute to their success or failure were really enlightening. It's obvious that she's a pro, which was great because there was a protest at her panel on an unrelated topic that I was unnerved by, but she handled adroitly and gracefully.
The best thing I'll take from the book is probably Zeynep's discussion of how technology has necessitated and empowered censorship. She talks about how attention is the lifeblood of a protest and people gathering in one place is the real threat to authoritarian regimes. To this end, just blocking off information is a counterproductive form of censorship. The Chinese are much more sophisticated in flooding media with distracting questions and misinformation and prioritizing the blocking of calls to action, not just information or access.
I highly recommend this book to better understand where we've been over the past decade and establish a vocabulary for discussing what is to come in the next.
Her insights into how protests start, how they proceed, and the factors that contribute to their success or failure were really enlightening. It's obvious that she's a pro, which was great because there was a protest at her panel on an unrelated topic that I was unnerved by, but she handled adroitly and gracefully.
The best thing I'll take from the book is probably Zeynep's discussion of how technology has necessitated and empowered censorship. She talks about how attention is the lifeblood of a protest and people gathering in one place is the real threat to authoritarian regimes. To this end, just blocking off information is a counterproductive form of censorship. The Chinese are much more sophisticated in flooding media with distracting questions and misinformation and prioritizing the blocking of calls to action, not just information or access.
I highly recommend this book to better understand where we've been over the past decade and establish a vocabulary for discussing what is to come in the next.
February 11, 2020
A really interesting exploration of the use and impact of social media on the global protest waves of early in the millennium, a time when the culture of global movements was changing. Tufecki started studying movements with a visit to the Zapatistas late in the 1990s, and was perfectly primed to explore both the anti-globalisation movements and the Arab Spring. She traces the ideals of interconnected, open networks that were posited as a technology-driven alternative to previous insider-based hierarchies, and also explored the impact as the Internet technologies became corporate data warehouses, rather than the open-source, uncontrolled world they had imagined. That makes it sound more pompous and theoretical than the book is - exploring instead the way Twitter and Facebook and Whats App are used to quickly mobilise, and seamlessly coordinate tasks which previously took full-time volunteers over months. The insight into medical treatment and supply coordination in Egypt is particularly interesting. Tufekci also looks, however, at how movements growing so quickly lack established trust and leaderships, and struggle to maintain momentum once mobilisations have passed. This is a scholarly examination, not a how-to guide, and that will frustrate some readers, but it was a fascinating read to me.
November 21, 2017
Basically I would recommend this book to everyone I know. In a nutshell, it’s about the relationship between collective social movements & the digitally networked sphere (aka the internet): how the internet provides novel affordances to movements & changes its inherent capabilities. There’s a chapter I particularly like about how the “power” (goverments, industries, etc) had also shifted their tactics to counter these movements, from plain censorship to creating confusion via information glut.
I think it’s important for us, as human beings & citizens, to learn about the information & analysis in this book. Honestly nobody could go wrong with getting a little more knowledgeable in something, right?
I think it’s important for us, as human beings & citizens, to learn about the information & analysis in this book. Honestly nobody could go wrong with getting a little more knowledgeable in something, right?
January 10, 2019
Building on her own experiences from the Zapatistas to Gezi Square in Istanbul, interactions with activists across movements from Occupy to Tahrir and BlackLivesMatter, Tufekci draws interesting lessons on the differences between movements in the digital era compared with prior ones. She argues that digital connectivity reshapes how movements connect, organise and evolve over their lifespans and explains how the affordances of technology change their trajectories and their capacities; how repressive governments have adapted to dealing with networked protest; why the new movements fail to build decision-making structures and processes and, therefore, lack operational agility. An illuminating read.
June 10, 2018
Probably one of the best books on modern day activism from a social media perspective. Anybody who’s a technologist and has the time should try their best to read this.
June 28, 2022
This was a great book on activism and social media.
A pretty important read.
Timely too (have you read the news lately).
Would recommend.
4.1/5
A pretty important read.
Timely too (have you read the news lately).
Would recommend.
4.1/5
August 1, 2020
I’ve been an avid follower of Zeynep Tufekci for awhile now via her articles about social media, digital technologies, protest movements and COVID-19. This book is an in-depth exploration at how digital technologies have reshaped protest movements (as well as government responses to them) by creating a “digital public sphere” that is not simply an online version of traditional protest activity, but a new social dynamic with different metrics and rules of engagement.
At first glance the book seems mainly about the Arab Spring protests – in which Twitter famously played a role, and which Tufekci witnessed first-hand – but the scope is much wider. She takes a sociological approach to explain why people attend protests, compares digitally-enabled activism to pre-digital protest actions like the Civil Rights movement, and explains how the success of a movement isn’t about how many people show up to a protest march, but the ability of the movement to signal to the Powers That Be that they have the capacity to disrupt their narrative and affect change. She also looks at how authoritarian regimes can use social media for their own ends to counter that capacity, and how 21st-century govt censorship isn’t about blocking information but distracting your attention.
Although it was published three years ago, it’s still a highly relevant book, given that certain protest movements covered here (#BLM, Hong Kong and to an extent the Tea Party) have entered new phases since 2017. For me personally, as a long-time HK resident, it provides invaluable insight into the HK protests in terms of evaluating the results and understanding the limitations of “leaderless” movements, as well as China’s approach to censorship (which is now in the process of being imposed on HK). If you want a how-to handbook on digital activism or a breezy current-events read, this ain’t it. But with protests springing up around the world as more governments embrace authoritarian rule, this is required reading to understand what’s happening.
At first glance the book seems mainly about the Arab Spring protests – in which Twitter famously played a role, and which Tufekci witnessed first-hand – but the scope is much wider. She takes a sociological approach to explain why people attend protests, compares digitally-enabled activism to pre-digital protest actions like the Civil Rights movement, and explains how the success of a movement isn’t about how many people show up to a protest march, but the ability of the movement to signal to the Powers That Be that they have the capacity to disrupt their narrative and affect change. She also looks at how authoritarian regimes can use social media for their own ends to counter that capacity, and how 21st-century govt censorship isn’t about blocking information but distracting your attention.
Although it was published three years ago, it’s still a highly relevant book, given that certain protest movements covered here (#BLM, Hong Kong and to an extent the Tea Party) have entered new phases since 2017. For me personally, as a long-time HK resident, it provides invaluable insight into the HK protests in terms of evaluating the results and understanding the limitations of “leaderless” movements, as well as China’s approach to censorship (which is now in the process of being imposed on HK). If you want a how-to handbook on digital activism or a breezy current-events read, this ain’t it. But with protests springing up around the world as more governments embrace authoritarian rule, this is required reading to understand what’s happening.
November 29, 2019
wow never finished a book this fast before.
stunningly captured through many different global examples & through author’s lived experiences within them. amazing redefinition of censorship & signals within movements that changes my framework forever. mind-blowing conceptual frameworks that are surprisingly very accessible & easy to digest on purpose
10/10 must read to know how current tech affects social movements & institutions that fight over them!
stunningly captured through many different global examples & through author’s lived experiences within them. amazing redefinition of censorship & signals within movements that changes my framework forever. mind-blowing conceptual frameworks that are surprisingly very accessible & easy to digest on purpose
10/10 must read to know how current tech affects social movements & institutions that fight over them!
May 24, 2020
It’s been a really long time since I wrote a book review, many books happened in between actually but work is a bitch and I could not make time.
Keeping all that aside, there is a book I read recently and I have to tell you about it. I think it was one of those books which need a long follow-up of more reading and more researching after it’s done and let all that begin by this very blog where I jot my experience.
I had got my hands on Twitter and Teargas since a month but I only picked it in recent. I learnt about it on a podcast. Now we all know how valuable are the book recommendations from the people we look upto. I dowloaded it immediately from the website, her book, by the way, is made available for free by legitimate sites because the aim was to be widely read and not make profits as such (another thing which pulled me towards reading this book). This isn’t one of those books which are written in order to keep the interest of the reader with each passing page, the language is assuringly academic and dry. So, you have to crack it open with that level of patience and interest.
Twitter and Teargas – the power and fragility of networked protest is an account of (political) social movements, dealing with the matters of authority, culture, governance and technology. There were days when in order to show public dissent you just had to show up to the streets and chances are, that you will be heard but times have changed, the cultures have emerged and evolved, while internet has facilitated some movements, big time, it’s not enough to get results they protest for. If the main weapon for people protesting by mass assembles on street is with the use of technology and social media sites, we must know, the party on the receiving side of the rage( the system, the gatekeepers, the political regime) that also has internet and knows the rules of the game we are participating in. So how must the structure of political protests stratergise to have an impact (and change)?
This book is hard-hitting analysis on networked protests that rely on the fragile wires of the internet to string tight the rallies together.
With the events such as Egyptian revolution of 2011, the global Occupy movement,Turkish Gezi Park protests of 2013, the Umbrella Movement of Hong Kong, the roars against the oppression have already begun. We are all well versed with the Arab springs movement and the stir it created worldwide, Twitter contributed to it big time, with the assemble of people at large against the rigid political regime of Mubarak, and low standard of living. While it was well networked and it observed masses Tufekci analyses the weakness while providing lessons to the activist of tomorrow.
Sure, you can organise a political protest from your home, but a crowd of clueless fucks are not going to make a difference who only have the knowledge of the reason of their assembly, the challenge is the scale it up to reach fruition of demands. There are many things which matters in a protest, the plan to scale, the strength of community protesting, educating the community, the safety measures, the food/books/clothes/internet/digital connectivity allocation. A protest is as much a political act as it is a humanitarian act, and the scaling demands to be with an agenda, qualitative and quantitative. Tufekchi introduces this term called ‘adhocracy’ in which the tasks happen in a hoc manner, as in when somebody volunteers. Now while that does the work, that’s not sustainable. The ‘tyranny of structurelessnes’ becomes stifling after a point of time, and the effervescence of the political fire oozes out (Umbrella movement).
After the failure of Umbrella movement the people of Hong Kong took a rather smart approach and used a local online forum which is similar to reddit. It enabled them to make the macro and the micro decisions like logistics, aid, locations. They scale the same with an upvote, downvote etc. And this worked in their favour in comparison to the previous time.
One insight I gained reading this case is what works for one culture, one country, one strata of people and against one government will not remain the same. With the demographic changes the political weapon. While some may use Twitter, other can use local forum (provided they have it), the power lies in strengthening the local ties in order to gain momentum. And this makes sense because if you are protesting in one part of the country, you can expect to go back home, type a tweet and go to bed, while on the other side or another country you might receive physical or psychological torture in the pursuit of political freedom to voice your opinion.
The author suggests an approach of ‘signal and capacities’. She wants you to measure the potential of the movement. The potential must be able to be quantified in narrative capacity ( ability of a movement to tell a story, why should the world care about it), disruptive capacity ( how can it disrupt the regular operations of authority to take a stand) and electoral capacity( power to make change in political level). These three measures are hard to stomach, so my mind started to think if it can relate with the personal experience and I thought of the ‘Shaheen Bagh’ movement in India a protest which happened where a stand was taken to protect the interests of minority citizens of India (Reference, Citizen Amendment Bill). Not that I was apart of it (i participated in only one protest in Mumbai), it happened in Delhi, but my friends were, and it caused a stir in all states of India, while it rested for about a hundred days in rebellion in the capital of the city.
As much as we hate it the system is rigged. While twitter can prove to be really instrumental at some points some big sites can turn absolute (Facebook), but then again, there are a variety of networking apps that can cause a difference on a local level to scale the masses. A selective mix of corporations and government are hell bent to divert our attention and fill it my misinformation, confusion, non credible information and cynicism. While social media sites have huge potential to bring change they only thing they want to share on big scale is cat videos and not strong words of dissent against the system. It’s sad but there is hope and we are far from where we started, In Singapore an act called POFMA (Protection from online falsehoods and manipulation act) in 2019 to fight against misinformation.
This was such an important book to have read, I feel like I have chugged several Red bulls, I feel weirdly energised after reading this. In one of the interviews of the author, I heard her say, ‘ the real thing the corporations are fighting for is your attention’ use it wisely.
Go to the web and read this book, it’s available everywhere for free. it will open your eyes to the underbelly of networked protests and the things that matter to you as a citizen in the shaky political climates we have ahead of us. In about three hundred pages, not one page is BS.
December 16, 2021
الكتاب مش سهل بس كويس
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October 15, 2024Interesting topic explained well by the author with her own impactful, personal experiences.
June 19, 2020
The book provides important conceptual frameworks to understand how both the protesters and the government can leverage social media and other digital tools to forward their cause and thwart opponents' efforts. These social movement and censorship tactics have been abundantly exemplified by the large scale protests and government responses in online and offline spheres of life since the publication of the book.
The book also serves as an explainer to modern and more often than not, urban protest culture for a South Asian like me whose country has seen many historical protests that ousted the authoritarian regimes but have only recently experienced one nascent urban youth led protest, galvanized into action in social media, and that which wasn't affiliated to any political party.
Despite the important reflections and conceptual tools, the book could have used better editing. 33 koti Gods know how I struggled to read it all.
The book also serves as an explainer to modern and more often than not, urban protest culture for a South Asian like me whose country has seen many historical protests that ousted the authoritarian regimes but have only recently experienced one nascent urban youth led protest, galvanized into action in social media, and that which wasn't affiliated to any political party.
Despite the important reflections and conceptual tools, the book could have used better editing. 33 koti Gods know how I struggled to read it all.
March 1, 2024
I really enjoy Tufekci's writing, usually in shorter-form articles around the internet. This is a great book about social movements, social media, and censorship. Dr. Tufekci's years experience talking with protesters from Chiapas to Tahrir Square and Gezi Park informs her deep analysis of the nature of social movements and the "public sphere" in a world with nearly-ubiquitous internet. She discusses the challenges of ad-hoc, horizontally-structured movements.
Perhaps the most thought-provoking is the theory she develops of protests as part of a social movement's capacity signalling. Social movements signal to others (those in power, the international community, and ambivalent bystanders) their capacity to construct and control narratives, affect elections and institutions, and disrupt business as usual.
Bonus, a quote about libraries:
"Libraries are core symbols of an ethic of non-commodified knowledge. Anyone, regardless of how much money she or he has, can check out a book, and a book is passed from person to person in a chain of knowledge sharing. Perhaps more than anything, libraries represent a public good and a public space that is non-monetized and shared. In setting up the library, protesters also express a desire for people over profits or money, a slogan that comes up in many such protests. And unlike other items that one can buy, like food or clothes or cigarettes, but that are often distributed for free in protest camps, books symbolize knowledge and occasionally rebellion, and embody intellectual values."
Perhaps the most thought-provoking is the theory she develops of protests as part of a social movement's capacity signalling. Social movements signal to others (those in power, the international community, and ambivalent bystanders) their capacity to construct and control narratives, affect elections and institutions, and disrupt business as usual.
Bonus, a quote about libraries:
"Libraries are core symbols of an ethic of non-commodified knowledge. Anyone, regardless of how much money she or he has, can check out a book, and a book is passed from person to person in a chain of knowledge sharing. Perhaps more than anything, libraries represent a public good and a public space that is non-monetized and shared. In setting up the library, protesters also express a desire for people over profits or money, a slogan that comes up in many such protests. And unlike other items that one can buy, like food or clothes or cigarettes, but that are often distributed for free in protest camps, books symbolize knowledge and occasionally rebellion, and embody intellectual values."
September 15, 2018
She illuminates how social movements have changed in the last thirty years due to the internet, hitting topics like social media, its early effects, and the tactics that activists and governments use to push their side. However, she interjects a personal touch a bit too often, sounding more like "I was there, I knew this person, I knew this was happening before anyone else" that got a bit old. The concepts that she illustrates concerning "signaling significant capacity", the weaknesses of quickly built-up movements, and the retaliation of governments are fascinating and very relevant in this day and age. Her book left me wishing she had more answers for combating trolls, misinformation, and information glut, but I suppose we are all looking for answers to those questions. Hilariously enough, I signed up for Twitter because of this book and was banned in ten minutes...for what, I'm not sure, but that is one way to keep people from sharing information.
November 21, 2019
Really solid, with a the first few chapters crackling with a startling, vivid recollection of on the ground protest experiences. Her analysis of our connected world is spot on, though the book meandered a bit over the second half. I'm not sure how many new things someone neck deep in the tech/digital platform/adtech scene will learn, and I don't know how interesting it's going to be for those who aren't. Still, it's an important topic; thank God someone as smart and brave as Tufekci is covering it.
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