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February 19 - February 26, 2019
Over the years, both the latent weaknesses of these movements and the inherent strengths of their opponents had substantially emerged.
This is a story not only about technology but also about long-standing trends in culture, politics, and civics in many protest movements that converged with more recent technological affordances—the actions a given technology facilitates or makes possible.
I had begun to think of social movements’ abilities in terms of “capacities”
marches, rallies, and occupations as “signals” of those capacities.
digital technologies were profoundly altering the relationship between movement capacities and their signals.
the tedious work performed during the pre-internet era served other purposes as well; perhaps most importantly, it acclimatized people to the processes of collective decision making and helped create the resilience all movements need to survive and thrive in the long term
What was particularly striking about the post-2011 movements was their struggle with tactical maneuvering after the initial phase of large protests or occupations was over.
Having arisen so suddenly and grown so quickly, they hit their first curve requiring agile tactical shifts at great speeds, with little or no prior experience in collective decision making and little resilience.
The future trajectory or potential impacts of networked movements cannot be fully understood by using only the conceptual models, indicators and benchmarks that we have gathered from the histories of earlier movements.
twenty-first-century protest square: organized through Twitter, filled with tear gas, leaderless, networked, euphoric, and fragile.
talk about what I call “tactical freeze,” the inability of these movements to adjust tactics, negotiate demands, and push for tangible policy changes, something that grows out of the leaderless nature of these movements (“horizontalism”)
digital technologies strengthen their ability to form without much early planning, dealing with issues only as they come up, and by people who show up (“adhocracy”).
The Zapatista solidarity networks marked the beginning of a new phase, the emergence of networked movements as the internet and digital tools began to spread to activists, and general populations.
My goal in this book was above all to develop theories and to present a conceptual analysis of what digital technologies mean for how social movements, power and society interact, rather than provide a complete empirical descriptive account of any one movement.
aim primarily to examine networked movement trajectories and dynamics in the light of protesters’ capacities and signals.
not all movements using these digitally fueled strategies are seeking positive social change: terrorist groups such as ISIS and white-supremacist groups in North America and Europe also use digital technologies to gather, organize, and to amplify their narrative.
The sheer, unrestrained brutality of the camel attack and the clumsiness of shutting down all communication networks underscored the inability of Mubarak’s crumbling autocracy to understand the spirit of the time, the energy of the youthful protesters, and the transformed information environment.
Camels and sticks versus satellite phones and Twitter.
Digital technologies had clearly transformed the landscape, seemingly to the benefit of political challengers.
Rising in opposition to crumbling, stifling regimes that tried to control the public discourse, activists were able to overcome censorship, coordinate protests, organize logistics, and spread humor and dissent
Networked protests of the twenty-first century differ in important ways from movements of the past and often operate with a different logic.
the ability to use digital tools to rapidly amass large numbers of protesters with a common goal empowers movements. Once this large group is formed, however, it struggles because it has sidestepped some of the traditional tasks of organizing.
The result is often a conflict-ridden, drawn-out struggle between those who find themselves running things (or being treated as de facto leaders) and other people in the movement who can now all also express themselves online.
In some ways, digital technologies deepen the ever-existing tension between collective will and individual expression within movements,
protest and movement culture that flourished in the 1990s already displayed many cultural elements that would persist.
These movements shared an intense focus on participation and horizontalism—functioning without formal hierarchies or leaders and using a digitally supported, ad hoc approach to organizing infrastructure and tasks.
These elements would reappear in protester camps and prolonged occupations of public spaces worldwide in the next decades, and would become thoroughly intertwined with digital technologies.
in 2011, Tahrir became a choke point for global attention. Digital networks allowing the protesters to broadcast to the world raised the costs of repression through attention from a sympathetic global public.
Digital technologies are so integral to today’s social movements that many protests are referred to by their hashtags
Activists can act as their own media, conduct publicity campaigns, circumvent censorship, and coordinate nimbly.
saw countries with authoritarian-leaning governments lose control over the public sphere, while in democratic countries, issues that had been sidelined from the national agenda, from economic inequality to racial injustice to trade to police misconduct, were brought to the forefront through the force of social media engagement and persistence by citizens.
But I have also seen movement after movement falter because of a lack of organizational depth and experience, of tools or culture for collective decision making, and strategic, long-term action.
Rather than a complete totalitarianism based on fear and blocking of information the newer methods include demonizing online mediums, and mobilizing armies of supporters or paid employees who muddy the online waters with misinformation, information glut, doubt, confusion, harrasment, and distraction, making it hard for ordinary people to navigate the networked public sphere, and sort facts from fiction, truth from hoaxes.
Whereas a social movement has to persuade people to act, a government or a powerful group defending the status quo only has to create enough confusion to paralyze people into inaction.
The internet’s relatively chaotic nature, with too much information and weak gatekeepers, can asymmetrically empower governments by allowing them to develop new forms of censorship based not on blocking information, but on making available information unusable.
the early twenty-first century, digital technologies and networks—computers, the internet, and the smartphone—are rapidly altering some of the basic features of societies, especially the public sphere,
dynamics of public spheres are intertwined with power relations, social structures, institutions, and technologies that change over time.
The twenty-first-century public sphere is digitally networked and includes mass media and public spaces, such as the squares and parks where many protests are held, as well as new digital media.
“Networked public sphere,” like the terms “digitally networked movements” or “networked movements,” does not mean “online-only” or even “online-primarily.” Rather, it’s a recognition that the whole public sphere, as well as the whole way movements operate, has been reconfigured by digital technologies,
The authorities, too, have changed and altered their tactics to control and shape the public sphere even though their aims have remained similar.
Producing information glut, inducing confusion and distraction, and mobilizing counter-movements, rather than imposing outright censorship, are becoming parts of the playbook of governments that confront social movements.
movements, among other things, are attempts to intervene in the public sphere through collective, coordinated action.
she had gone online to look for political conversations that were more open and more inclusive than any she had experienced in her offline personal life, and that this had led to her participation in the massive Tahrir protests.
the initial stages of these movements illuminate how digital connectivity alters key social mechanisms.
Activists generally are among the earliest adopters of digital technologies.
The ignition of a social movement arises from multiple important interactions—among activists attempting to find one another, between activists and the public sphere, and among ordinary people finding new access to political content matching their privately held beliefs.
Most people who become activists start by being exposed to dissident ideas, and people’s social networks—which include online and offline interactions—are among the most effective places from which people are recruited into activism.
technical ineptitude among the people who run many governments poses problems for Western countries, but it proved to be crippling for dictators in countries whose rule depended on controlling the public sphere.
since the Arab Spring, regime after regime has been forced to recognize that a freewheeling, digitally networked public sphere poses a threat to entrenched control.
Two key constituencies for social movements are also early adopters: activists and journalists.
