Twitter and Tear Gas Quotes

“As people chat with me and learn that I have studied movements elsewhere, one question keeps coming up: “How do you think this will end?” I say that I do not know. In the mountains of Chiapas, I learned a Zapatista saying: “Preguntando caminamos.” It means “we walk while asking questions.”
― Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

“We no longer live in a mass-media world with a few centralized choke points with just a few editors in charge, operated by commercial entities and governments. There is a new, radically different mode of information and attention flow: the chaotic world of the digitally networked public sphere (or spheres) where ordinary citizens or activists can generate ideas, document and spread news of events, and respond to mass media. This new sphere, too, has choke points and centralization, but different ones than the past. The networked public sphere has emerged so forcefully and so rapidly that it is easy to forget how new it is. Facebook was started in 2004 and Twitter in 2006. The first iPhone, ushering in the era of the smart, networked phone, was introduced in 2007. The wide extent of digital connectivity might blind us to the power of this transformation. It should not. These dynamics are significant social mechanisms, especially for social movements, since they change the operation of a key resource: attention… Attention is oxygen for movements. Without it, they cannot catch fire.”
― Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

“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.”
― Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

“Even European languages like the French language became standardized into the Parisian version—derived from a hodgepodge of dialects—only after the emergence of the French Republic and the rise of mass media (newspapers). Political scientist Benedict Anderson called this phenomenon of unification “imagined communities.” People who would never expect to meet in person or to know each other’s name come to think of themselves as part of a group through the shared consumption of mass media like newspapers and via common national institutions and agendas.3”
― Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

“If the internet is virtual, what harm could a few bloggers typing in an unreal space do?”
― Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

“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.”
― Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

“One working journalist described the pressure she was under this way: “I first censor myself, as I know I’ll be in trouble if I write something critical of the government. And then my editor censors me, if I haven’t been mild enough. And then owners of the newspaper also check, to make sure nothing too critical gets through. And if something is published anyway, especially if in defiance, someone from the government calls our boss. And then the tax inspectors are sent in, to find something to fine the newspaper with.” Such pressure on the media from government officials and corporate owners is common around the world.”
― Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

“The internet similarly allows networked movements to grow dramatically and rapidly, but without prior building of formal or informal organizational and other collective capacities that could prepare them for the inevitable challenges they will face and give them the ability to respond to what comes next.”
― Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

“Ethan Zuckerman calls this the “cute cat theory” of activism and the public sphere. Platforms that have nonpolitical functions can become more politically powerful because it is harder to censor their large numbers of users who are eager to connect with one another or to share their latest “cute cat” pictures.”
― Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

“With my newfound power to connect through a shaky, sputtering modem, and full of curiosity, I participated in the earliest global social movement of the internet era.”
― Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

“A traditional journalist can see what is in front of her nose and hear what she is told; a social media journalism curator can see hundreds of feeds that show an event from many points of view. 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.”
― Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

“This is what the digitally networked public sphere can do in many instances: help people reveal their (otherwise private) preferences to one another and discover common ground. Street protests play a similar role in showing people that they are not alone in their dissent. But digital media make this happen in a way that blurs the boundaries of private and public, home and street, and individual and collective action.”
― Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

“A common media trope imagines connectivity devices functioning as mere “alienating screens.” In fact, especially in protests, they act as “inte- grating screens” because many people use their devices to connect with other people, not hide from them.”
― Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

“This is far from the only such example. Michael Anti is a Chinese journalist and a former reporter for the Beijing bureau of the New York Times who goes by that name in his offline life. He was awarded fellowships at Harvard and Cambridge, and is well known as a democracy activist. Anti specializes in using new media to write about Chinese censorship.”
― Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

“Digital connectivity alters the architecture of connectivity across an entire society even when much of it is not yet connected. People on Facebook (more than four million Egyptians around the time of the January 25, 2011, uprising) communicate with those who are not on the site by sharing what they saw online with friends and family through other means: face-to-face conversation, texting, or telephone.27 Only a segment of the population needs to be connected digitally to affect the entire environment. In Egypt in 2011, only 25 percent of the population of the country was online, with a smaller portion of those on Facebook, but these people still managed to change the wholesale public discussion, including conversations among people who had never been on the site. The internet’s earliest adopters”
― Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest