Has
technology benefited social movements?
Barry
Gilheany ©
This
essay examines Manuel Castells’ theory of the network society developed to
explain the mobilisation of social movements in the Internet era and to assess
the benefits that these movements are said to have accrued from technological
innovation. It focuses on the uprisings
in the Arab Spring of late 2010 to early 2011 as possible examples of the validity of the network society template. The paper engages with social movement
theories particularly those that analyse the “Global Social Movements” (GSMs)
that have emerged in the early 21st century. It describes the
developments in online technology that have occurred in the last two decades or
so and their impacts on contemporary social movement activism. It examines the prospects of success for
networked cyberactivism as a new paradigm to seeing social change while looking
at what those critics of the “utopian” potential virtual networks who still
assert the primacy of class in social struggles and who caution about the
capacity of states and corporations to colonise large parts of the online
world.
It
is important to remember that there has been so far no comprehensive academic
theory of the “Global Social Movements” (GSMs) that have emerged in the late
(20th and early (21st centuries. It is also important to appreciate that the
term “social movement” is often used to describe a diversity of related
phenomena, including protest events and coalitions and that different schools
of thought hold to different tenets of social movement theory. However all schools of thought in this area
agree on three principal characteristics: they are made up by networks of
informal interactions between diverse actors, including individuals,
organisations and groups; they are bound by shared beliefs and ties of
solidarity that make their participants ascribe a common meaning to specific
collective events and are involved in political and/or cultural conflicts that
arise as a result of social change. The decentralised structure of social
movements consist of the following characteristics: they are segmented, meaning that social movements
consist of numerous smaller groups (or, in the language of networks, “nodes”)
whose involvement may wax and wane while new members join and others leave to
pursue new interests; they are polycentric,
meaning that they have multiple centres and leaders whose influence tends to be
temporary and they are integrated,
meaning that these multiple segments and hubs connect to each other through
interpersonal relationships between activists or through common identities and
belief systems. This SPIN model
(comprising the acronym Segmented, Polycentric, INtegrated model) was devised in
1970 and seems appropriate to current social movements as well (Joyce, ed.
2012).
To
focus on the employment by social movements of online tools for mobilisation,
coordinating and community building can facilitate a wider and fuller analysis
of the role of the Internet in collective action. One of the first movements to have organised
extensively through the Internet is the Global Justice Movement (GJM) (or the
anti-globalisation movement as it is more widely and inaccurately known) which
emerged in late 1999 when Internet access was becoming more widespread. An umbrella movement of trade union
activists, autonomist groups, radical left political parties and organisations
concerned with human rights, environmentalism, poverty and debt relief, the GJM
made its first global imprint at the “Battle of Seattle” in late 1999 when
50,000 demonstrators severely disrupted the meeting of the World Trade
Organisation. Demonstrations at almost
every summit of transnational economic and political power organisations have
followed in the subsequent decade or so including those organised at the London
G20 summit in April 2009 (Joyce, ed, 2012: pp.102-103).
Independent
media coverage of the WTO demonstrations in Seattle was provided by the digital
Independent Media Centre, or Indymedia. Soon Indymedia centres were set up in
other parts of the world. As loose organised networks of groups that post
accessible campaigning and political information on websites they provide
alternative news sources to the mainstream media (Roberts, 2014); in this way
alternative media outlets such as Indymedia disrupt a dominant switch in an
established power network.
Writing
about the movements that emerged from such epoch-defining moments as the global
financial collapse in 2008 which posed serious questions for the democratic
legitimacy in many countries in Europe and the United States and the global
food crisis which impacted particularly severely on the livelihood of most
people in the Arab world, Castells (2012) identified the following common
features:
They are networked in
multiple forms.
As a network of networks, they can afford not to have an identifiable
centre but can still ensure coordination and deliberation through multi-nodal
interaction. Therefore they do not
require a formal leadership, a centralised command structure or a vertical
organisation to feed down resources and information to subordinates. Networking information technology provides
the platform for the expanding network practice consonant with the changing
shape of the movement. Networking guards
the movement from its enemies and from internal power struggles and
bureaucratisation (Castells, 2012: pp.221-222).
While
such movements usually start in cyberspace, they
become a movement by occupying the urban space, whether through the
occupation of public squares or the persistence of street demonstrations. Castells describes the interaction between
the space of flows on wireless communication networks and the space of symbolic
arenas targeted by protest actions as “the space of autonomy” (Castells,
2012:p222).
They are local and
global at the same time, they originate in
specific contexts for their own reasons but then connect around the world
finding inspiration for their own mobilisation by other experiences; sometimes
calling for joint global demonstrations in a network of local spaces in
simultaneous time. They develop their
own form of time between their daily lives in the occupied settlements and the
unlimited potential and possibilities for new forms of life and community which
emerge in their debates; an alternative time to that of the calibrated time of
factory assembly worker and corporate chief executive. These movements are viral ,following the logic of the Internet networks, are highly self-reflective, usually non-violent in principle and through
their horizontal, multi-modal networks create a sense of togetherness which enables people to overcome fear and find hope
(Castells, 2012: pp.222-25).
Castells’
analysis is based on his grounded theory of power that he puts forward in his
earlier book Communication Power
(2009)[1].He
starts from the premise that power relations are constitutive of society
because those who have power construct society’s institutions in accordance
with their values and interests.
However, since societies comprise contradictions and conflicts, where
there is power is there is counterpower;
the capacity of social actors to challenge the power embedded in the
institutions of society with the aim of claiming representation for their own
values and interests. State institutions
cannot survive by coercion alone; the construction of meaning in people’s minds
is a more lasting source of power. That
is why the fundamental power struggle is the battle for the construction of
meaning in the minds of people (Castells, 2012: pp.4-5).
The
rise of mass self-communication, the
use of the Internet and wireless networks as platforms of digital
communication, has provided the technological platform for the construction of
the autonomy of the social actor, individual or collective, vis-a-viz the
institutions of society. It has done
this through sending messages between multitudes of senders and receivers and
connecting to seemingly endless networks that transmit digitised information
around neighbourhoods or the world. Mass
self-communication is based on horizontal networks of interactive communication
that governments and corporations find it difficult to control (Castells, 2012:
pp.6-7).
Castells
conceptualises society as a network society in which power is multidimensional
and is organised around networks programmed in each domain of human activity
according to the interests of dominant actors.
These networks of power are intermeshed among themselves. Global financial networks are global
multimedia networks are intimately linked to form a meta-network of
extraordinary power. Networks such as
those in the realm of politics, cultural production and military/security and
form ad hoc networks around specific projects.
These networks share a common interest in creating a political system
that defines societal norms and rules and which is fundamentally responsive to
their interests. They connect with each
other through the capacity to switch
power; the capacity to connect two or more different networks in the
process of making power for each one of them in their respective fields. Power resides in the network society with the
programmers who run the main networks
on which people’s lives depend (government, parliament, finance, media and
national security establishment etc.) and the switchers who operate the connections between different networks
(media bosses introduced in the political class, political elites bailing out
financial institutions and academic institutions financed by big business,
etc.). (Castells, 2012: pp.7-9).
In
Castells’ account, social movements exercise counterpower; the deliberate attempt to change power
relationships. This is done by
reprogramming networks around alternative interests and values and disrupting
the dominant switches. Social movements
have always produced new transformative values and goals in order to create new
norms for social life. Social movements
exercise counterpower through establishing communicative autonomy in digital
social networks such as the Internet, free from the control of those holding
institutional power in the mass media and which enable largely unconstrained
deliberation and coordination of action.
Social movements also build public space for deliberation through the
occupation of sites of state power or financial institutions this public a
hybrid space is thus created between the Internet social networks and the
occupied public space, the occupation of Tahir Square in Cairo by anti-Mubarak
protestors and the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York provide potent
examples of this new public space. This networked space between the digital
space and the urban space is crucially a space of autonomous communication enabling
social movements to thrive and to connect to society at large beyond the
corporate and state mass media power holders. (Castells, 2012: pp.7-9).
Castells
uses the model of networked social movements to describe how they spread by
contagion in a world networked by the wireless internet and marked by fast,
viral diffusion of images and ideas. To
take two examples from the Arab Spring, the success of the Tunisian Revolution
and the partial success of the Egyptian Revolution were made possible by people
overcoming fear through togetherness built in the networks of cyberspace and in
the communities of public space.
The
spark of the revolt in Tunisia was the self-immolation in December 2010 of the
market trader, Mohamed Bouazizi, in the town of Sidi Bouzid, in protest against
the humiliation of repeated confiscation of his fruit and vegetable stand by
the local police after his persistent refusal to pay a bribe. This triggered coordinated and spontaneous
demonstrations against the notoriously corrupt regime of President Ben Ali
especially among the young among whom unemployment ran at 22 per cent for
college graduates. The protests
eventually reached the capital Tunis.
Despite bloody police repression of the protests, the President and his
family departed on the 14th January 2011. The protestors were not assuaged however and,
outraged by the control of both politics and economics by the family of the
second wife of Ben Ali, demanded free and fair elections under a new electoral
law, freedom of the press, an end to corruption and jobs. On 22nd January 2011 protestors
occupied the Place du Gouvernement in the heart of the Kasbah, the site of most
government ministries. Trade union rank
and file and middle ranking cadres voiced their demands and launched a number
of strikes which practically led to the country becoming out of control for the
authorities. Opposition political parties were ignored by the activists and
protestors generated their own ad hoc leaders, mostly in their twenties and
thirties, at specific times and places.
Within the occupied public space, protestors erected tents and organised
a standing forum which held animated deliberations which could last for days on
end and which were relayed by video on the Internet. Secularism, Islamism and nationalism
co-existed in the movement and it developed its own soft surveillance network
to enforce the rules around the protestors’ new found freedom of speech; this
succeeded despite police violence and several evictions (and re-occupations). There was a symbiotic relationship between
mobile phone citizen journalists unloading images and information onto You Tube
and Al-Jazeera (watched by forty percent of Tunisia’s urban dwellers). Twitter played a major role in discussion of
events and coordination of actions as demonstrators used the hashtag
#sidibouzid to communicate, thus indexing the Tunisian revolution (Castells,
2012: pp.22-28).
Through
this hybrid space of physical occupation of the Kasbah and online dissemination
of words and images from the Revolution, the Tunisian protestors persisted
throughout 2011 with their demands for full democratisation of the country
until clean, open elections were held on 23rd October leading to the
moderate Islamist coalition of Ennahad becoming the leading political force in
Tunisia. Despite the challenges that
Tunisia will face in the years ahead, the legacy of the sacrifice of Mohamed
Bouazizi consists of a fairly democratic polity in place and a vibrant civil
society, still occupying cyberspace and ready to re-enter the public space if
necessary (Castells, 2012: pp.30-31).
The
Tunisian Revolution proved to be the spark that ignited the revolution in
Egypt. It was preceded by political
protests against rigged elections, women’s rights struggles and the bloody
repression of striking workers at the textile mills of Malhalla-al-Kubra on 6th
April 2008. Out of the latter event
emerged the 6 April Youth Movement which created a Facebook group attracting
70,000 followers. This movement
conspired with many others online and offline to organise demonstrations which
culminated in the set-piece occupation of Tahir Square on 25th
January 2011. The network around the
Facebook group “We are all Khaled Said” in memory of a young activist beaten to
death by the police in June 2010 after distributing a video exposing police
corruption was the most prominent of these groups. The Egyptian Revolution was dramatized in the
fashion of the Tunisian example, by a series of six self-immolations in protest
against rising food prices that left many hungry. A vlog posted on her Facebook page by a 6
April founder, Asmaa Mafhouz, announcing her intention to go to Tahir Square on
25th January, National Police Day and imploring others to do so went
viral after being uploaded to You Tube.
The call to action spread from cyberspace to the social networks of
friends, families and associations of all kinds including supporter networks of
Cairo’s two rival soccer teams. Tens of
thousands of people converged on the symbolic Tahir (Freedom) Square from all
socially excluded groups, including the urban poor, religious minorities, women
Islamists and secularists where they found a safe space to call for the end of
the oppressive regime of President Hosni Mubarak. |Attempts by police to suppress the
demonstrators were met with determined resistance at the cost of hundreds of
lives. Similar events occurred in many
other cities, including Alexandra, in solidarity with the Tahir Square
protestors and eventually the regime collapsed (Castells, 2012: pp.53-56).
Although
Egypt has not experienced the subsequent democratic successes that Tunisia has
enjoyed; the same dynamics were at play.
Tunisia symbolised the hope for change.
Networks formed in cyberspace extended their reach to urban space, and the
revolutionary community formed in public squares successfully resisted police
repression, and connected with multimedia networks with the Egyptian people and
globally. Tahir was the switcher that linked together the multiple networks of
counterpower in spite of their diversity (Castells, 2012: p.81). The communal solidarity created in Tahir
Square became a role model for the Occupy movements that sprang up around the
world in the months ahead (Castells: 2012: p.59).
Castells
paints a very positive picture of the Internet’s capacity to act as an agent of
freedom and autonomy for social movements.
In his potted history of the Internet, he explains that it was
deliberately designed as a decentred, computer communication network able to
withstand control from any command centre.
Emerging from the culture of freedom prevalent in the university
campuses of the 1970s, it was based on open source protocols from the start,
the TCP/IP protocols developed by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn. The creation of the World Wide Web, another
open source programme, created by Tim Berners-Lee, made the Net user friendly
on a large scale. The really
transformative development in the potential of the Internet came in the first
decade of the 21st century with the shift from individual and
corporate interaction on the Internet( for example, the use of email) to the
autonomous construction of social networks managed by their users. This shift was enabled by improvements in
broadband, and in social software and from a wide range of wireless
communication systems feeding the Internet networks. The most important activity on the Internet
now goes through social networking sites (SNS) which have become open forums
for most types of activities including socio-political activism. Thus the Net enhances empowerment,
sociability and autonomy (which Castells defines as the capacity of a social
actor to become a subject through involvement in projects independently of
societal institutions, according to the values and interests of the social actor). He cites survey evidence from a 2010 study in
Britain conducted by the sociologist Michael Wilmott showing particularly
positive effects for people with lower income, fewer qualifications, for people
in the developing world and for women[2].
Digital
penetration has been particularly and crucially prevalent in the Arab
world. From 2009, both BBC Arabic
TV(launched in March 2008) and BBC Persian TV (launched in January 2009) both
drew on User Generated Content (UGC) streaming out of Arab countries, enabling
them to cover events of the Arab Spring in real time. New satellite channels like Al-Jazeera and
digital technology in the shape of the Internet had helped to create an Arab
digital public sphere which steadily grew in the 1990s and 2000s. However relatively inexpensive new media
products like iPhones and the relative ease and low costs involved in setting
up social networking sites enabled new outlets for protestors to publicise the
Arab Spring. Facebook only became
available in Arabic in 2009, and yet more than a quarter of the protestors in
Egypt first heard of demonstrations taking place there on Facebook. Some Arab readers posted their own opinions
on the online comment boards of western newspapers to place the demonstrations
in their proper context. Citizen media
outstripped the mainstream media in the reportage of the initial stages of the
Egypt revolution in January 2011. For example, on 25th January 2011,
76 % of all videos uploaded to the internet detailing the demonstrations came
from citizens, while journalists produced only 24% (Roberts,
2014:pp.159-160). Mobile phone
penetration exceeded 100% in half of all Arab countries, with most others over
the 50% mark and many in urban centres had some sort of access to social media
(Castells, 2012: p.95).
Other
commentators are not as sanguine about the emancipatory capacities of new media
technology for social movement activism.
Jones cautions that Web 2.0 and social media represent a barrier to
practical activity. Instead they
represent a shortcut into “slacktivism”, defined by the social media
specialist, Evgeny Morozov, as “feel good online activism that has zero
political or social impact”… “the ideal type of activism for a lazy generation”[3]
(Jones, 2011). He refutes the idea that
the Internet is neutral space on which all sides as “hopelessly utopian” as
technologies are developed in a social, political and economic context. One has to pay an Internet Service Provider
(ISP) to get online and ISPs have tremendous power in barring access to the
Internet. Capitalism is very adept at
exploiting new avenues for capital accumulation and the absorption, for
example, of Open source software (OSS) into the market as an essential source
of profit shows that the online world is no exception. (Jones, 2011: p.8). Furthermore, unstructured online decision
making can unaccountable and exclusive; it may be appropriate for short scale
direct actions organised, for example , by the anti-tax avoidance network UK
Uncut but is not applicable to strikes or to long-term strategic thinking
(Jones, 2011: p.9).
In
the same vein, Roberts, in offering a balance to those perspectives that
“overly” celebrate the social media in providing an important impetus for the
Arab Spring, points out that corporate hegemony had been operating in the media
infrastructure of many Arab countries for years. For example the first two private satellite
companies created to serve the Arab world were the Middle East Broadcasting
Centre (MBC) in 1991 and, in 1993, the Arab Radio and Television (ART) had
close links with the Saudi ruling family from the outset. In turn they are plugged into other business
networks proving that satellite channels in the Arab world are owned by the
super-rich with support from political elites like their Western counterparts
(Roberts, 2012: p.169).
In
conclusion, while I accept that there have yet to be grand, overarching
theories and narratives for Global Social Movements and the need for caution
about the liberating potential of new media technology; Nicholas's account of the Quantified Self from tool
of liberation to tool of Taylorian scientific management of the
white-collar workforce (2013) and Terranova’s analysis of the potentially
exploitative nature of labour in the digital economy (Terrenova, 2000), serving
as particularly cautionary tales, I largely concur with Castells’ account of
the benefits of the Internet and social media for the flexible and polycentric
protest movements that have swept our contemporary world. It is to be hoped that they will bequeath a
vibrant civic culture and hybridised activist space which can resist whatever
centralising and controlling tendencies that may emerge in the Netscape of the
future.
Bibliography
Castells,
M (2012). Networks of Outrage and Hope.
Social Movements in the Internet Age Cambridge: Polity Press
Jones,
J. (2011) “Social Media and Social Movements” International Socialism (130) pp.1-13
Kavada,
A. “Activism Transforms Digital: The Social Movement Perspective” in Joyce, M.
(2010) Digital Activism Decoded. The New
Mechanics of Change pp.101-118 New York: IDEBATE Press
Roberts,
J.M. (2014) New Media & Public
Activism. Neoliberalism, the state and
radical protest in the public sphere. Bristol: Policy Press
Terranova,
T. (2000) “Free Labour: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy” Social Text 63 (18, 2) pp.33-58
Nicholas (2013) Frederick
Taylor and the Quantified Self
[2] Wilmott analysed
35,000 individual answers between 2005 and 2007 from global data obtained from
the World Values Survey of the University of Michigan.
http://netefect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/05/19-the_brave_new_world_of_slacktivism
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