social media: participation and resistance

Participatory Culture in New Media:

This paper talks about the degrees of participation that new media allows in different spaces or events of interaction. The paper argues that the interconnected platforms of new media exhibit a culture of participatory dialogue in massive scales – one that exhibits a decentralization of information flow placing media owners and users in more productive and challenging states of interactivity. The levels of participation in these spaces reflect a converging of knowledge production between media audiences and media owners as echoed by Henry Jenkins when he says that ‘convergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers through their social interactions with others’ (2006. 3). In the two media events chosen for analysis, the converging of the production, circulation and distribution of new media messages reveal similarities in terms of the networked exchange of ideas and production of meanings. However, the end goals of these ‘participatory’ cultural spaces or events reveal a plurality of discourses that implicates the tensions between disparate political systems and capitalist tendencies.

The Occupy Movement, a political expression of resistance against corporate greed in America, and The Arab Spring, a revolutionary event that dismantled the authoritarian regimes in North Africa are clear examples of social movements that were facilitated by new media. They exhibit a social dynamic that integrates media technologies and human behavioral proclivities whose ultimate expression found its way into the formation of peoples’ movements resisting oppressive systems of corporate authority and authoritarian rule.

The two media events indicate new media’s mobilizing capacity whose degrees of interactivity and dialogic power challenged old media structures and power holders in a strongly globalized society. I believe these two media events or spaces as networked transactions made possible by the Internet, can be considered as having entered the realm of the ‘supercharged public sphere’ which then gives rise to the idea of ‘publicness.’ Robert McChesney articulates that ‘publicness threatens institutions whose power is invested in the control of information and audience behavior.’ (McChesney, 2011. 23).

This statement places media ownership of both old and new in volatile positions as content consumption and production of meaning gain more credential and agency in the hands of new media audiences. The two media events as sites of participatory engagement whose ‘publicness’ is tested in varying degrees by the ideologies of the media structures and political systems on which they operate, places the participatory potential of new media in a critical juncture. How did new media technologies facilitate the formation of peoples’ movements in the two media events or spaces? The extent to which the use of new media technologies can propel a participatory movement that inspires resistance to control of power and information, is an investigation that this paper will attempt to interrogate.

Occupy Movement:

The beginnings of the Occupy Movement can be traced to the event on September 17, 2011 when about one thousand protesters gathered around the Wall Street area in New York City and camped out in Zucotti Park for several days. The protesters had a clear message for Wall Street as the ultimate representation of corporate greed in America made evident by the financial fiasco of 2008. And that is to express their collective rage. The term ‘We are the 99%’ became Occupy Wall Street’s slogan. By October 9^th, Occupy Wall Street spread through other key city centers in the United States and eventually ignited a worldwide mobilization of many Occupy protests across various social and political issues. ‘Occupy encampments arose in Boston, Seattle, Atlanta, LA, Denver, Tucson, New Orleans, Salt Lake City, London, Seoul, Rome, Manila, Berlin, Mumbai, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, and Hong Kong. Estimates range from 750 to over 2,500 Occupy sites.’ (De Luca, Lawson and Sun, 2012)

Political activists in over 25 countries followed suit demanding a global protest against corporate greed. From here on, Occupy Wall Street became the Occupy Movement to give a global face to a peoples’ movement that aims to incite political debate and resistance to transnational corporate greed. In the United States, the Occupy Movement inspired a national dialogue on basic issues on income inequality, unemployment and other issues affecting working-class Americans.

Social media played a key role in the participatory spread and mobilization of information among activists and supporters of the Occupy Movement phenomenon. The rage, the discontent and the activism of a specific group of people wanting to challenge the status quo found a platform of collective expression through various new media forms. Facebook, Twitter and Meetup became the platform to coordinate events and activities during the occupying days. IndyMedia and Skype were used for communication and conferences.

The Arab Spring:

In January 28, 2011, an Egyptian graduate student posted a four-minute video on Facebook and YouTube calling all Egyptians to join her at Tahrir Square to launch a protest against the government of Hosni Mubarak. The four-minute video posting ignited a revolution that aroused a culture of dissatisfied populace, facilitating an exchange of opinions between and among other organizations that culminated in a collective action of protests seen in major television news programs all over the world in the Spring of 2011. The political unrest in Egypt which resulted in the overthrow of Mubarak after almost 40 years in power and Tunisia’s uprising that toppled its own leader as well prior to Egypt and the succeeding revolutions that took place in Yemen and Libya, became the defining moment for what became known as the Arab Spring.

In a study conducted by Catherine O’Donnell, quantifying the use of social media during the Arab Spring revolts, she reveals that during the uprising tweets from Egypt and around the world increased from 2,300 to 230,000 per day within a week. According to her, conversations on Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere revolve around issues of democracy, revolution and individual liberty. In the same study, Philipp Howard, an Associate Professor at University of Washington asserts that ‘although social media did not cause the upheaval in North Africa, they altered the capacity of citizens to affect domestic politics. Online activists created a virtual ecology of civil society, debating contentious issues that could not be discussed in public.’ (O’Donnell, 2011)

Participation in New Media:

According to a study conducted by Stanford University for the Defense Intelligence Agency entitled ‘The Impact of Social Media on Social Unrest in the Arab Spring’ in 2012, communities formed by social media reveal functions that are similar to those of civil society organizations especially in repressive societies. The authors of the study further argues that

Because membership in civil society is more highly correlated with protest activity,

the ability of social media to offer a sort of virtual civil society platform likely further

boosted participation in protests during the Arab Spring. (iii)

It is within this context of a participatory dialogue among repressed communities that political awakening mediated by new media technologies can achieve meaning and action. Looking at the political systems in which the two media events were operating, there is clearly a difference of ideological formations. The countries in the Arab Spring phenomenon operate in an authoritarian system of government while Occupy Movement sprang from a democratic space. The difference of their political systems may reveal a disparity in each of the culture’s experience of repression as it relates to access to information and human expression. But as the Stanford study suggests, new media’s capacity to create a ‘virtual civil society’ helped encouraged a participatory process that inspired expressions of protest.

Citizens gathering in public spaces spewing anti-establishment rhetoric in Manhattan and Tahrir Square became the image of participation facilitated by new media. This argument resonates with Hans Enzenberger’s position when he asserts new media’s capacity in affecting the dynamics of the social and political relationships in societies where media itself is used for control. He further argues this position when he says that ‘the direct mobilizing potentialities of the media become still more clear when they are consciously used for subversive ends.’ (269) The subversion that new media inspired in the Arab Spring and Occupy Movement uprisings may indicate a reorientation of the way older media apparatus in both authoritarian and democratic systems operate in promoting what Enzensberger calls a ‘bourgeois’ agenda to media consumers. (Enzensberger, 1970). The subversive quality of the two new media events, however, reveal a difference of political outcomes. To what extent do the political systems in which the two media events operate can account for such difference?

McChesney addresses this question by implicating the role of capitalism in the way new media works in society. According to him, the level at which new media inspires its participatory potential should be taken within the interpenetrating dynamics of democracy and capitalism. When McChesney argues that ‘any attempt to make sense of democracy divorced from its relationship to capitalism is dubious’ (28), he poses layers of complexity within which any analysis of new media’s participatory impact should be juxtaposed against. This also plays into the economic conditions that shape the cultural behaviors of people whose levels of social participation in society is dictated by the class formations where they belong. The Occupy Movement may not have triggered a structural change in corporate America, at least not for now, as the Arab Spring event did in overthrowing authoritarian rulers. This discrepancy is illuminated by McChesney when he argues that no one should ignore the role capitalism in the way it influences and shapes participatory behaviors that arise from interaction with new media technologies. McChesney asserts further that capitalism dominates our social lives and the values that grow from it shape the extent to which the political systems can allow the sharing of powers between media owners and media audiences.

New Media and the creation of political space:

The Arab Spring event presents a clear act of subversion induced by a social movement inspired by a participatory process of information exchange mediated by technologies of the new media. It showed a very distinct dismantling of power lines between the state apparatus and the citizenry as evidenced by the eventual overthrow of Egypt and Tunisia’s authoritarian rulers. While this subversive act may not equal the outcomes seen in the Occupy Movement uprising, the level of resistance that Occupy evoked for the international community present its own revolutionary fervor on a different scale. So what is it in the participatory process that inspired the formation of social or political spaces? What ideologies govern the shaping of a revolutionary or subversive act and how does new media fit into this?

According to the Stanford Study, ‘New information technologies have also helped develop a more unified Arab political space, which has created a greater diffusion of ideas and contributed to the adoption of similar language and protest methods among demonstrators.’ (11) While the study also poses some reservations about the extent of new media’s efficacy in producing and sustaining social capital and community interaction, it also articulates a more favorable scenario by saying that combining ‘web-based organizing and social movements, in which members participate both online and in the real world’ can be an effective method especially in politically repressive regimes where cyberspace can provide alternate routes for sharing opinions and strategies that downplays risks of public activism. (10).

The Arab space that the Stanford study suggests is the symbolic culmination of a population wanting to liberate itself from repressive political systems. It is this potential of expressing political dissent against authoritarianism that inspired a participatory culture in new media. In the case of the Occupy Movement, it is the anger over corporate greed and economic inequality residing in a capitalist system like the US that defines the ‘political space’ on which the sustaining ideology for Occupy rests. Both political spaces have shaped a media event phenomenon that gained a state of ‘publicness’ as asserted by Jarvis. (McChesney, 23)

The Stanford Study reveal challenges in new media’s capacity to build social capital to sustain the impetus of social movements towards democratization. Although the Study also concludes that other social and political factors other than new media technologies contributed to the Arab Spring revolts, a determinist tendency that places a direct causal relationship between new media and the Arab Spring revolutions can be very tempting as expressed by McChesney (31). This apprehension is echoed by Enzenberger when he asserts that ‘anyone who expects to be emancipated by technological hardware, or by a system of hardware however structured, is the victim of an obscure belief in progress.’ (267) There is an ominous resonance in Enzensberger’s statement in that it provides a cautionary suggestion to avoid a determinist approach to finding value to the transformative potential of new media’s participatory promise. That true progress and the attainment of self-determination and freedom of expression are influenced by economic and political factors that intertwine in complex configurations in different human settings is a necessary backdrop on which to maximize the potentialities that new media can offer.

The level of subversion as seen in the Arab Spring phenomenon which transformed the institutions of power in Egypt and Tunisia showed the extent to which new media technologies incited the political awakening of a community of people hungry for change. The level of resistance that the Occupy Movement showed for average Americans is a positive push for individual empowerment. To what extent is Occupy Movement a rehearsal for the subversive act that The Arab Spring revolts performed remains to be seen. But both media events and spaces reveal the formation of a new culture of participative energy trying to break away from old media traditions of submission and passivity.

a paper written for a class in New Media and Culture under Paul Booth, PhD, Department of Media and Cinema Studies. DePaul University. Fall 2013.

 

Works Cited:

DeLuca, Kevin M, Sean Lawson and Ye Sun.”Occupy Wall Street on the Public Screens of Social Media: The Many Framings of the Birth of a Protest Movement.” Wiley Online Library. November 9, 2012

Dewey, Taylor, Juliane Kaden, Miriam Marks, Shun Matsushima, and Beijing Zhu. “ The Impact of Social Media on Social Unrest in the Arab Spring. Stanford University. March 20, 2012

Jenkins, Henry. ‘Introduction: Workship at the Altar of Convergence’. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. 2006. 3

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. “Constituents of a Theory of the Media.” The Consciousness Industry. New York: Seabury Press. 1974. 261-275

McChesney, Robert. “What Is the Elephant in the Digital Room?” Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning Internet Against Democracy. New York: The New Press. 2013. 16- 36

O’Donnell, Catherine. “New Study quantifies use of social media in Arab Spring”. September 12, 2011. (online source)

“The Impact of Social Media on Social Unrest in the Arab Spring.” Final Report prepared for:Defense Intelligence Agency. Stanford University. March 12, 2012

Wikipedia. ‘The Occupy Movement”.