Digitalisation, Democracy and Protest: An exploration of the impact of social media on social action

Digitalisation, Democracy and Protest: An exploration of the impact of social media on social action

"When we change the way we communicate, we change society" claims Internet “guru” Clay Shirky in his book Here Comes Everybody: How change Happens When People Come Together (2008, p. 17). Anyone who has glimpsed the news in the last 12 months will have noticed the increasing number of references to the power of social media and its impact on world events such as the Arab Spring uprisings. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are a growing part of our media culture, a culture in a constant state of change and evolution. Do these technologies have the capability to directly and permanently change our lives, our actions and therefore our society? If so then we could be on the verge of a new era of politically aware, socially conscious citizens; about to see a complete shift in power, from governments, global corporations and big businesses into the hands of the people. If not, what are the dangers of overestimating the positive impact of these technologies?

The idea for this topic stemmed from my own (small) involvement with protest and activist movements over the last 5 years – all of which have largely been conducted and organised online. In 2008, with a network of women in London we created a “Ladyfest” grass roots D.I.Y. festival celebrating women’s music, literature, performance, debate etc. Physical meetings were held, but recruitment and organisation done through email lists, social networking sites and blogs. I have also been involved with Hope Not Hate, an organisation set up by Searchlight magazine to combat the threat of the BNP. And most weeks I sign some sort of online petition. My initial impression was that technology has enabled me to be informed about a range of issues and organisations that I might otherwise not have encountered.

The school of thought that suggests that these technologies do have the capacity to change society is technological determinism, a powerful theory about the nature of social change in relation to technology and technology’s effects on human beings. The process is outlined - and later criticised - by media theorist Raymond Williams:

“New technologies are discovered, by an essentially internal process of research and development, which then sets the conditions of social change and progress. Progress, in particular is the history of these inventions, which ‘created the modern world’” (Williams, 2003, p. 5)

Technological determinism suggests that the agents of media – the technologies themselves – have a deep impact on wider society. In 1964 Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. In it he claims that “the Medium is the Message” – the content of the media is not worthy of study, instead it is the form of media itself that has a significant socio-cultural effect. He argues that “the medium . . . shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action” (McLuhan, 1964, p. 9). By this he refers to the way in which television has transformed patterns of leisure, entertainment and work. If McLuhan were alive today, he might support the idea that social media technologies are reshaping human existence and that recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt happened as a direct result of the creation and proliferation of these technologies. Couple McLuhan’s belief in the transformative power of the machine with Shirky’s claim that the internet enables “ridiculously easy group forming” (2008) and we should all be finding ourselves involved in more groups and communities than ever before, and using these groups to improve our lives and drive social change. Hilary Clinton takes a position approaching technological determinism in her Newseum Address on Internet Freedom: “The freedom to connect to these technologies can help transform societies” (2010). In other words, by giving people the means of finding information, we are giving them democracy. In its extreme form, such cyber-utopianism seems to suggest that the technology itself will magically overthrow dictators or, at the very least, arm previously unempowered citizens with the tools for revolution. As Jon Stewart, host of the satirical American Daily Show, said, mocking the internet’s capacity to transform problematic countries like Afghanistan and Iraq: “Why did we have to send an army when we could have liberated them the same way we buy shoes?”

This cynical viewpoint is perhaps justified as it highlights the fact that in Western countries with free information we are more likely to use the internet as a tool for shopping, entertainment or communicating with friends and family than for protest and activism (OFCOM, 2011). Another cynical suggestion – is it possible that Western countries have a political and economic motive for endorsing these technologies as the harbingers of democracy? They are, after all, Western technologies, mostly operating out of the United States – and of course the common way of accessing them is through a Microsoft browser.

In the Western mainstream media Twitter and Facebook are being granted a certain amount of credit for the successful overthrow of authoritarian regimes in Arab Spring revolutions. The Factiva database of major English-language newsprint sources contains 778 mentions of “Twitter revolution” and 402 mentions of “Facebook revolution”. Indeed there is almost an obsession in mainstream print journalism with these tools; newspapers regularly include “what they are saying on Twitter” sidebars and newspaper columnist were early and enthusiastic adopters of Twitter. The rhetoric surrounding social media has become extremely powerful and utopian: for example, of the 2009 riots in Iran The New York Times said, “on one side the government thugs firing bullets . . . [and] on the other side are young protestors firing Tweets” (Morozov, 2011, p. 2). In a war, I know which way I would rather be armed.

It is easy to get caught up in a wave of euphoria about social media; it is exciting to think that we can change the world with a couple of Tweets, a poke and a wall comment, but it seems unlikely. The political danger of this internet-centrism is that Western governments spend too much time and money creating policy based around the assumption that the internet is the key to global democracy. This, argues Morozov, is a “flawed methodology which prioritizes the tool over the environment and as such, is deaf to the social, cultural and political subtleties and indeterminacies.” (2011)

In parallel, systems of surveillance are being developed that tap into the proliferation of social networking sites. A further area for exploration is the way in which social networking sites can be used against activists – there are numerous examples of media-savvy dictators using these tools to monitor, control and censor citizens who represent a threat to their regime, making organising activism online increasingly dangerous.

Another significant area for exploration is the effectiveness of networked groups organised through social networking sites. If groups are “ridiculously easy” to form, surely they are as ridiculously likely to dissipate. In an essay for The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell cites a study by international relations scholars Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Calvert Jones on the effectiveness of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which started out as a network. They write that

“Structural features typical of networks—the absence of central authority, the unchecked autonomy of rival groups, and the inability to arbitrate quarrels through formal mechanisms—made the P.L.O. excessively vulnerable to outside manipulation and internal strife.” (Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Jones, 2008)

So how realistically can an organisation sustain success without a central figure or group in control? In a very different context, the autonomous nature of Ladyfest meant that quite often we were directionless or slow to act, and many new members, who attended meetings wanting to know what we wanted them to do, were put off by the “find something you want to do and do it” nature of the meetings. Without being made to feel useful, they felt useless and disempowered and consequently never returned. Similarly in the past I have signed out cameras to students over the holidays asking them to make a film about anything they want only to have them return the camera in September claiming they couldn’t think of anything. Perhaps structure, hierarchy and accountability are such intrinsic parts of our society that people need them to be productive. However, groups such as UK Uncut – a non-hierarchical network of individual activists – continue to grow and gain members.

To summarise: can Twitter really cause a revolution? Can networked activism succeed? Do social networking sites empower communities? Do they create more dangers than benefits for activists? And finally, if technology can have a positive impact on social participation and social action, is this a tool teachers can use to empower and engage students in a way that is more effective and culturally relevant to their lives?