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February 19 - February 26, 2019
Given the role of pluralistic ignorance in keeping people who live under repressive regimes scared and compliant, technologies of connectivity create a major threat to those regimes.
These dynamics are significant social mechanisms, especially for social movements, since they change the operation of a key resource: attention.
Censorship is usually thought of as a dichotomous concept: something is either censored or not, often by a centralized gatekeeper,
the past, mass media operated like it held a monopoly on public attention, and movements needed mass media to publicize their cause and their events to tell their story.
Movements often faced having their causes trivialized or distorted by mass media, with no chance to talk back.
By 2011, everything had turned upside down. The potential number of cameras filming each event was enormous. In many events of public importance, what is striking is not just that there is video of it, but that the video of the event shows many other people with their phones out, filming the same event.
Tahrir Supplies of Egypt, which I will discuss further in chapter 3, had gone from an idea to a website and a Twitter page in one day and an effective field medical-supply coordinator in just a few more.
The details of what they wanted to do were vague: turn social media into a platform for journalism, break the censorship they knew dominated mass media, and become intermediaries for the public.
With all the digital technologies at their disposal, they could start building, and ask questions later.
Cell phones in almost every hand certainly have had important consequences for the public sphere, but they do not, by themselves, mean that the correct information will always or easily reach broad audiences.
Another crucial dynamic in the new public sphere is the role of verification and trust, as many more people acquire the ability to become broadcasters, and as information diffuses in networks rather than through a few gatekeepers. Often there is simply too much information, and too much of it is unverified.
Traditional journalism was supposed to check its facts, at least normatively, and when direct censorship was severe, it was an explicit failing and a divergence from journalism’s stated norms.
Rather, the challenge is that there is too much information, some of it false, and there is often little guidance for sorting through it.
as a profession, journalists have an ethos of verification, investigation, and accuracy, even if real-life practice falls short to varying degrees.
it provided boundaries of discourse and often delivered on at least some of their normative functions of investigative journalism, fact-checking, and gatekeeping.
People often tune in to ideologically resonant sources of information and become suspicious of everything else they see, both because of well-known human tendencies to seek information we agree with and to defend against information glut.
long-established Tunisian anticensorship activist group Nawaat curated key videos that were picked up by mass media around the world.
Nawaat activists did much of their curating and monitoring from abroad, a practice that seems antithetical to understanding the dynamics of a movement.
Traditional journalism tries to solve a problem of scarcity: lack of cameras at an event. Social media curatorial journalism tries to solve a problem of abundance: telling false or fake reports from real ones and composing a narrative from a seemingly chaotic splash-drip-splash supply of news.
They looked for metadata in the sources: a time stamp, a geolocation, an author.
verify geographic and temporal information through digital triangulation.
the young team of 140journos honed and developed a multilayered strategy for taking in the chaotic, complex, and unfiltered input from the open world of social media and separating fact from fiction, news from deliberate fraud, and noteworthy information from the glut.
The mistaken perception of the digital world as virtual and the faulty analysis of online political acts as slacktivism had influenced how many people in Turkey, too, thought about social media.
general, pre-digital-era protesters often faced adversaries who were able to communicate in real time and who were more organized, numerous, experienced, better equipped and wealthier.
Overall, this digitally enhanced capacity allowed a movement that came to being with zero preparation beforehand and with little or no institutional leadership, to pull off perhaps the largest spontaneous demonstration and occupation in the history of modern Turkey—a country with little history of such movements—and to sustain it for weeks.
New digital technology did not create this but allows protesters to better fulfill pre-existing political desires.
This model of networked protest can be thought of as an “adhocracy”—tasks can be accomplished in an ad hoc manner by whoever shows up and is interested.
the consequences of this shift to digital connections as a form of organization can be surprisingly complex because the how or organizing is more than an afterthought.
Digital tools are not uniform. Rather, they have a range of design affordances that facilitate different paths
Many who do this type of work report suffering genuine trauma, because the online world is not unreal or virtual.
Our capacity for empathy is not necessarily limited by physical proximity.
The @TahrirSupplies story is an example of the arrival of the “smart mobs” heralded by technology writer Howard Rheingold in 2003: groups of people congregating quickly to undertake a single action.
much popular writing about social movements, the how of organizing is mentioned only as an afterthought.
Not looking at the “how” can blind us to significant differences, both in their nature and in the political capacities they signal to power, between the types of protests that require onerous labor and deep organizational and logistical capacity to make things happen, and those that use digital technology to take off as soon as they tap into a vein of grievance in the zeitgeist and that scale up quickly using digital affordances.
What gets lost in popular accounts of the civil rights movement is the meticulous and lengthy organizing work sustained over a long period that was essential for every protest action.
work that went into traditional organizing models generated much more than rides and fliers.
formal institutions and informal ties that were crucial for the boycotters to weather the severe repression
After both long-term organizing and working together during the boycott to take care of a myriad of tasks, the movement possessed a decision-making capability that saw it through challenges as they came up, and one that was strong enough to survive outside pressure and internal strife.
There was certainly internal strife, but it did not play out publicly on social media,
Older movements had to build their organizing capacity first, working over long periods and expending much effort. The infrastructure for logistics they created, using the less developed technology that was available to them at the time, also helped develop their capacity for the inevitable next steps that movements face after their initial events (be it a march, a protest, or an occupation) is over.
Modern networked movements can scale up quickly and take care of all sorts of logistical tasks without building any substantial organizational capacity before the first protest or march.
Gezi Park moment, going from almost zero to a massive movement within days, clearly demonstrates the power of digital tools.
new movements find it difficult to make tactical shifts because they lack both the culture and the infrastructure for making collective decisions.
ability (as well as their desire) to operate without defined leadership protects them from co-optation or “decapitation,” it also makes them unable to negotiate with adversaries or even inside the movement itself.
the ease with which current social movements form often fails to signal an organizing capacity powerful enough to threaten those in authority.
no formal decision-making or organizational mechanisms emerged, and there were no existing networks of civil society that were widely accepted and able to mediate conflicts that arose in these spaces.
The minor organizing tasks that necessitated months of tedious work for earlier generations of protesters also helped them learn to resolve the thorny issues of decision making, tactical shifts and delegation.
Network internalities are the benefits and collective capabilities attained during the process of forming durable networks
the long term, however, the process of organizing may be as important as the immediate outcomes.
Technology can help movements coordinate and organize, but if corresponding network internalities are neglected, technology can lead to movements that scale up while missing essential pillars of support.
