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| The answer my friends...is blowin' in the wind. |
As protests and anger spread across Turkey,
many cities are seeing clashes and gatherings
following Taksim's model and aftermaths were not late :
so far,
hundreds have been arrested
(in Antakya police detained 25 people and were searching for 13 more
on accusations
of using social media networks such as Twitter to spread false details
about the anti-government protests and police reaction to them)
the number of injured protesters is raising every day
with dozens suffering from severe head traumas or eye loss
and the first victims were found dead both in Istanbul and Hatay.
Now that Gezi's Park sparkle has triggered a phenomenon of a national scale,
the first analysis and comparisons are being shared,
especially on the role played by Twitter which has registered its peack activity
since it became a key actor in the uprisings of the Arab Spring.
And it is precisely the social media structure that is analyzed by Zeynep Tufekci:
(social media editor)
Why has the combination of Twitter and Facebook impacted riots and uprising on such a scale?
"Too slow diffusion of information, and your people will get arrested
faster than they can show up at all. History of modern revolutions is
always mixed up with the history and the structure of the communicative
infrastructure of technology.
That is why the speed of the initial response curve is crucial to
whether a protest will survive or not. In Egypt, activists protested for
many years on January 25 before 2011.
But there were too few of them
(100-150 per year) to sustain against the repression. On 2011, the
initial day, there were about 5000-10000 people in Tahrir. It was too
many and the movement was
able to roll out from there."
And by linking what we are seeing nowadays happening on the web and what lead
to the ouster of Mubarak leads to a necessary and spontaneous comparison :
is Taksim the next Tahrir ?
Zeynep briely explaines :
- Turkey’s government, increasingly authoritarian or not, is duly elected and fairly popular. They have been quite successful in a number of arenas. They were elected for the third time, democratically, in 2011. The economy has been doing relatively well amidst global recession, though it has slowed a bit recently and there are signs of worrisome bubbles.
- The role of internet and social network is different from what Egypt experienced under Mubarak, yet it is not completely free : government has been revolutionized by a massive use of e-government–which has greatly eased many people’s lives as bureaucracy is a major quality of life issue but has also enabled and been accompanied by expansion of state surveillance.
- the government has been moving to legally “mandate” lifestyle choices regarding alcohol, Internet content, etc. to create obligatory behaviors rather than recognizing that there are large swaths of the country that does not agree with its views on what one should drink or watch (ironically, also among its own voters.)
- Prime minister's Justice and Development Party has its roots in political Islam, but Erdogan insists he is committed to Turkey's secular state. The protesters, unconvinced by his claim, are waving flags emblazoned with photographs of past President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who, beginning in 1923, began Turkey's transition from Ottoman Empire into modern, Western-style secular state with a program of political, economic and cultural reform.
Now, can we talk about a social-media style of protests?
Here we can see some characteristic of this newly born phenomenon
(together with some of its main weaknesses) :
1- Lack of organized, institutional leadership. This
also makes it hard for anyone to “sell out” the movement because nobody
can negotiate on behalf of it. 2- A feeling of lack of institutional outlet. In the case of Egypt, this was because elections were rigged and politics banned. In Turkey, media has been cowered and opposition parties are spectacularly incompetent. In Occupy in US, there was a feeling that the government and the media are at the hands of the moneyed interests and corrupt.
3- Non-activist participation. Tahrir protests 2011, Tunisia December 2010, Gezi 2013 drew out large numbers of non-activists.
4- Breaking of pluralistic ignorance. Street demonstrations, in that regard, are a form of social media in that they are powerful to the degree that allow citizens to signal a plurality to their fellow citizens, and help break pluralist ignorance. (Hence, the point isn’t whether the signalling mechanism is digital or not, but whether how visible and social it is).
5-Organized around a “no” not a “go.” Existing social media structures allow for easier collective action around shared grievances to *stop* or *oppose* something (downfall of Mubarak, stopping a government’s overreach, etc) rather than strategic action geared towards obtaining political power. This is probably the single biggest weaknesses of these movements and the reason why they don’t make as much historical impact as their size and power would suggest in historical comparison
6-External Attention. Social media allows for bypassing domestic choke-points of censorship and reach for global attention. This was crucial in the Arab Spring (and we know many people tweeting about it were outside the region which makes Twitter more powerful in its effects ).
7- Social Media as Structuring the Narrative. Here
and in other protests, we saw that social media allows a crowd-sourced,
participatory, but also often social-media savvy activist-led
structuring of the meta-narrative of what is happening, and what shape
the collective grievances should take.
8-Not Easily Steerable Towards Strategic Political Action. Social-media fueled collective action lacks the affordances of politics an institutional arrangement –political party, NGO, etc– can provide.
8-Not Easily Steerable Towards Strategic Political Action. Social-media fueled collective action lacks the affordances of politics an institutional arrangement –political party, NGO, etc– can provide.
To give an idea about the volume reached by the tweets these are
the numbers of 24 h of Twitter activity between May 31 and June 1st :
- at least 2 million tweets mentioning hashtags related to the protest, such as #direngezipark? (950,000 tweets), #occupygezi (170,000 tweets) or #geziparki (50,000 tweets) have been sent.
- Even after midnight local time last night more than 3,000 tweets about the protest were published every minute.
Finally,
I'd like to point out an article which explaines the risks
of a binary interpretation
- quite successfull and common to be honest-
of the movement as a struggle between people demanding for a western (secularist) democracy
and the Islamist - conservative dictator in place.
In other words, movements are read through an ideological scheme,
characterized by Islamophobia and a superficial approach to the cultural and political background
that easily twists the reality.
Here is the article
which also presents a comparison between Egypt and Turkey,
trying to avoid the misinterpretations and the overlapping of two
phenomena that have both common elements and different roots.
