Collective Action 2.0: The Impact of Social Media on Collective Action

By Shaked Spier

Collective Action 2.0 explores the issues related to information and communication technologies (ICTs) in detail, providing a balanced insight into how ICTs leverage and interact with collective action, which will have an impact on the current discourse. Recent events in different authoritarian regimes, such as Iran and Egypt, have drawn global attention to a developing phenomenon in collective action: People tend to organize through different social media platforms for political protest and resistance. This phenomenon describes a change in social structure and behavior tied to ICT. Social media platforms have been used to leverage collective action, which has in some cases arguably lead, to political revolution. The phenomenon also indicates that the way information is organized affects the organization of social structures with which it interoperates. The phenomenon also has another side, which is the use of social media for activist suppression, state and corporate surveillance, commodifi cation of social processes, demobilization, or for the mobilization of collective action toward undesirable ends.

• Analyzes social media and collective action in an in-depth and balanced manner
• Presents an account of avoiding technological determinism, utopianism, and fundamentalism
• Considers the underlying theory behind quick-paced social media
• Takes an interdisciplinary approach that will resonate with all those interested in social media and collective action, regardless of fi eld specialism

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Feb 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9780081005798

Shaked Spier

Shaked Spier graduated in Information Science and Gender Studies at the Humboldt University, Berlin. His research and writing analyzes a variety of topics related to the connection between ICTs and society, information ethics, digital policies, and digital rights using interdisciplinary approaches. At present, he works as project manager in diverse information technology projects. Additionally, he volunteers as spokesperson of a German political working group on internet policy, digital society, and digital rights as well as cooperates with various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in this field.

Book preview

Collective Action 2.0

The Impact of Social Media on Collective Action

Shaked Spier

Table of Contents

Cover image

Title page

Series Page

Copyright

Dedication

Biography

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1. Introduction

1.1. #1Mai_Nazifrei

1.2. Hype Cycle and the Need for a Theoretical Framework

1.3. Reciprocal Relation Between Information and Communication Technology and Collective Action

1.4. Book Outline

Part 1. Theoretical Framework

Chapter 2. What Is Social Media: A Critical View

2.1. Social Media as Information and Communication Technology

2.2. Social Media as Institutions

2.3. Social Media as Media

2.4. Beware of Social Media Determinism

Chapter 3. Tehran, Tunis, Tahrir: Social Media and the Formation of Collective Action

3.1. From an Individual Agent to an Active Collective

3.2. A Facebook Revolution Is Just Another Revolution: Social Media and the Formation of a Collective in the Arab Spring

3.3. Conclusions

Chapter 4. Cottage, Tents, and Chocolate Pudding: The Cultural Context of the Israeli Social Justice Protests

4.1. Setting up the First Tent

4.2. Chronology of the 2010s Israeli Social Justice Protests

4.3. Cultural Context of Social Movements

4.4. Social Media and the Cultural Context of Social Justice Protests in Israel

4.5. A Code of Israeliness? Conclusions

Chapter 5. The Social Network: The Relevance of Weak and Strong Ties for Mobilization Over Social Media

5.1. What Are Social Networks?

5.2. Social Media and Social Networks

5.3. Social Networks, Interpersonal Ties, and Mobilization Over Social Media

5.4. A Leaderless Network?

Chapter 6. Berlin Helps: Resource Mobilization and Social Media Deployment in Berlin’s Refugee Aid Movement

6.1. One Hot Summer Day at #LaGeSo

6.2. Resource Mobilization Theory

6.3. Social Media and Resource Mobilization

6.4. Conclusions

Part 2. Discussion

Chapter 7. Between Actions and Algorithms: How Social Media Facilitate and Enable Collective Action

7.1. Between Flickr and the Google Index

7.2. Between Actions and Algorithms

7.3. Conclusions

Chapter 8. Alternative or Mainstream: The Interplay Between Social Media and Mass Media

8.1. The Many Facets of Newsworthiness

8.2. Social Media—Alternative Media?

8.3. Conclusions

Chapter 9. Big Brother Is Watching You: Collective Action and Surveillance in Social Media

9.1. Stasi 2.0: State Surveillance and the Deployment of Social Media for Collective Action in Authoritarian Context

9.2. Living in the Post-Snowden Era: State Surveillance and the Deployment of Social Media for Collective Action in Democratic Context

9.3. Aiding the Enemy: Corporate Surveillance and Economic Interests on Social Media

9.4. Living in the Postpanopticon Era? Conclusions

Chapter 10. Sharing Is Caring? Social Media and Demobilization

10.1. A Long Tail of Slacktivism

10.2. Demobilization and the Structural Elements of Social Media

10.3. Sharing Is Caring? Conclusions

Chapter 11. The Right Tool in the Wrong Hands: Neutrality, Values, and Biases of Social Media Deployment

11.1. The Wrong Hands? Negative Causes, Framing, and Social Media

11.2. The Right Tool? Values and Biases in Social Media

11.3. There Is No Right Life in the Wrong One? Conclusions

Part 3. Epilogue

Chapter 12. On the Verge of the Plateau: Epilogue

Index

Series Page

Chandos Social Media Series

Series Editors: Geoff Walton and Woody Evans

(emails: [e-mail] and [e-mail])

This series of books is aimed at practitioners and academics involved in using social media in all its forms and in any context. This includes information professionals, academics, librarians and managers, and leaders in business. Social media can enhance services, build communication channels, and create competitive advantage. The impact of these new media and decisions that surround their use in business can no longer be ignored. The delivery of education, privacy issues, logistics, political activism and research rounds out the series’ coverage. As a resource to complement the understanding of issues relating to other areas of information science, teaching and related areas, books in this series respond with practical applications. If you would like a full listing of current and forthcoming titles, please visit our website www.chandospublishing.com.

New authors: we are always pleased to receive ideas for new titles; if you would like to write a book for Chandos in the area of social media, please contact George Knott, Commissioning Editor, on [e-mail] or telephone [phone].

Copyright

Chandos Publishing is an imprint of Elsevier

50 Hampshire Street, 5th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02139, United States

The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, OX5 1GB, United Kingdom

Copyright © 2017 Shaked Spier. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Details on how to seek permission, further information about the Publisher’s permissions policies and our arrangements with organizations such as the Copyright Clearance Center and the Copyright Licensing Agency, can be found at our website: www.elsevier.com/permissions.

This book and the individual contributions contained in it are protected under copyright by the Publisher (other than as may be noted herein).

Notices

Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and experience broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical treatment may become necessary.

Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.

To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-08-100567-5 (print)

ISBN: 978-0-08-100579-8 (online)

For information on all Chandos Publishing publications visit our website at https://www.elsevier.com/books-and-journals

Publisher: Glyn Jones

Acquisition Editor: George Knott

Editorial Project Manager: Anna Valutkevich

Production Project Manager: Omer Mukthar

Designer: Victoria Pearson

Typeset by TNQ Books and Journals

Dedication

To my grandfathers, role models and constant inspiration; may you rest in peace.

Biography

Shaked Spier graduated in Information Science and Gender Studies at the Humboldt University, Berlin. His research and writing includes a variety of topics related to the connection between information and communication technologies and society, information ethics, digital policies, and digital rights using interdisciplinary approaches. At present, he works as project manager in diverse information technology projects. Politically, he volunteers as spokesperson of the workgroup on Internet policy, digital society, and digital rights in the German leftwing party DIE LINKE and cooperates with various nongovernmental organizations in this field.

Acknowledgments

Work on this project was a journey that began on that Mayday 2010 in Berlin, while standing up to a Nazi march through my hometown, Berlin. It was a day that gave me the first inspiration, which led to the writing of this book.

The journey continued as I wrote my thesis on the subject. Therefore I would like to begin with expressing my appreciation to my lecturers Prof. Vivien Petras and Olaf Eigenbrodt from the Humboldt University of Berlin for enabling me to pursue a research topic somewhat outside the mainstream of our faculty.

During the writing of my thesis, I was inspired by the protesters of Tahrir Square and Rothschild Boulevard, claiming their rights of freedom, democracy, and social justice. In the years between these events and the completion of the book, I had the pleasure of participating in movements and protests that not only were academically intriguing, but also moved me as an individual with grievances and anger, with hopes and dreams. I would like to express my deepest thanks and appreciation to the many activists, protesters, and movements—from good friends to total strangers—for the conversations, ideas, insights, and inside views, especially to those with whom I had the pleasure to stand in the way of Nazi marches, demand social justice, protest against the occupation in my homeland (Israel), and spend endless days and nights preparing refugee accommodations, sorting clothing donations, serving food, and building collectives I hitherto never thought possible. This book is their accomplishment as it is my own.

I would like to thank the colleagues, friends, and fellow activists, who took the time to exchange views on the topics discussed in this book; with special thanks going to Rafael Capurro, Gad Yair, and Julia Schramm for their helpful comments and ideas. And to Mathias Stallauke, that special someone, for all the support and putting up with me during long days (and nights) of writing.

And last but not least, I thank George Knott, Harriet Clayton, Anna Valutkevich, and Omer Mukthar from Elsevier for their editorial support and input on the various stages of the work.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Abstract

This chapter serves as an introduction to the topic of social media and collective action. The chapter stresses the importance of addressing the discourse that accompanies the topic. Furthermore, the connection between social media and collective action is regarded as part of the continuous development of the reciprocal relations between information and communication technologies (ICTs) and collective action; and in a broader sense between ICTs and society.

Keywords

Collective action; Discourse; Hype cycle; ICTs; Labor day; Social media; Social movement theory; Social networks

Contents

1.1 #1Mai_Nazifrei

1.2 Hype Cycle and the Need for a Theoretical Framework

1.3 Reciprocal Relation Between Information and Communication Technology and Collective Action

1.4 Book Outline

References

1.1. #1Mai_Nazifrei

On Labor Day (May Day) 2010, the German right-wing party NPD planned to march through the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood in Berlin. Over the years, a tradition of peaceful protests that stand in the way of these provocative rightwing demonstrations has emerged, which is supported by many civic movements, activists, political parties, and civilians. Prior to the march on May 1, 2010, several activist and antifascist groups as well as an alliance called 1. Mai Nazifrei (May Day without Nazis) called for counterdemonstrations, publishing information regarding the Nazis’ organization and their demonstration’s possible routes.¹ Using the gathered information, thousands of protesters tried to achieve blockades at as many strategic points as possible, to block all possible routes and thus stop the march.

The counterprotests on that day, however, have added a new dimension to the protest’s on-site organization—many protesters used Twitter to communicate the developments on-site. Since there were many spots to block and the police had put up a major effort to secure the area, communication between protesters was crucial. Individuals used hashtags such as #1Mai or #1Mai_Nazifrei and delivered updates regarding developments in their current locations (about the music and cultural activities taking place in some spots; police (mis)treatment; useful breaches in the police’s barricades; if the spot is occupied enough or if a certain spot is understaffed and needs reinforcement to block the Nazi march), retweeted other people’s messages, and provided those who did not make it to the protests after the police sealed the area with information. Furthermore, the 1. Mai Nazifrei alliance’s Twitter account was accompanying the counterprotests, giving out important information and updates gathered from the alliance’s activists on the field as well as from other activist groups and twitter users among the protesters.

As a participant and observer, I was fascinated with the new dynamics that this sort of real-time, ad hoc communication and organization has given the demonstrations—a certain spot is understaffed? Escalation with the police at a certain spot, so that other protesters should stay away? Information regarding a new alternative route that needs to be blocked? Good music and street dancing at one of the spots? A few tweets get into circulation, amplified by retweets and the official Twitter account, and many further protesters beyond those within the reach of the classical on-site communication channels are informed and can act accordingly. Especially, this communication has given the protesters advantage over the hierarchical, centralized manner of communication deployed by the police.

At the end of the day, the NPD groups could not march for more than several hundred meters, facing the first blockade of citizens who refused to let this kind of groups enter their neighborhoods. Since the police had to seal the surrounding area, many of the NPD sympathizers could not have reached their demonstration’s starting point and the police, informed that all possible routes were being blocked, canceled the Nazi demonstration. An alternative, unregistered demonstration in a different part of town was stopped and the participants were arrested.

The communication over Twitter was not the decisive factor of the 1. Mai Nazifrei protests and their success, but rather a supplement to weeks of preliminary research and fieldwork, on- and offline mobilization, on-site communication between activists and protesters, as well as a complex mixture of German societal and historical aspects, resentments toward the NPD Party and Nazi ideology, and a developed protest culture in the city of Berlin. Nonetheless, the new qualities that the protests gained from the additional mode of communication were visible on several levels—mobilization of participants and resources; dissemination of protest-relevant information, pictures, and videos (many of them shared on social media platforms such as YouTube); and on-site ad hoc communication, coordination, and organization.

The phenomenon that was hitherto still in emergence quickly became an integral part of a wide arsenal of tools and methods applied by social movements and activists around the world. The deployment of social media platforms has given many instances of collective action (e.g., social protests, flash mobs, political campaigns, collection of donations) new qualities that, in some cases, fundamentally affected them. On the other hand, in many cases social media usage had negative effects such as demobilization, neglect of other important sources due to an exaggerated belief in the power of social media or the Internet, being subjected to state and/or corporate surveillance, or handing over power to those in control of the platforms and infrastructure on which they are built. Furthermore, law-enforcement and other state institutions have also adapted their methods to handle the use of social media on demonstrations. For example, in many demonstrations I visited in the past years in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany, the police force interfered with 3G cell-phone reception in the area of the demonstration, which denied cellular Internet usage by demonstrators in a certain radius.

May Day 2010 was the occasion on which I became aware of the relation between social media platforms and collective action. Over the following years, this reciprocal relation was granted a considerable amount of media, social, and academic attention. The attention to the subject peaked as the events of the Arab Spring were framed as Twitter revolutions or Facebook revolutions and continued during a wave of social protests around the world in the first half of the 2010s. As the prominent quote of the journalist Andrew Sullivan in light of the protests surrounding the Iranian 2009 elections declared: The revolution will be twittered (Sullivan, 2009).

Or will it?

1.2. Hype Cycle and the Need for a Theoretical Framework

The term Social Media, which describes a wide collection of technologies and practices, comprises an essential, but in most cases hidden, aspect of technologies per se, namely, being social. Technologies are designed and deployed in social contexts and therefore contain affordances and biases in their deployment. The reciprocal relation between technology, especially Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and social media, and society is manifold and will be critically examined from a variety of perspectives throughout the book.

Beyond its social dimension, the application of technology—the manner in which it is used, the objectives pursued by the users, etc.—is accompanied, in turn, by a discourse. Framing the discourse regarding the application of social media in the context of collective action is helpful to understand the reciprocal relation between the former as a technology with implicit and explicit social dimensions and affordances, and the latter as the social context, in which this technology is applied.

The information technology research and consulting firm Gartner has developed the Hype Cycle methodology to represent what it terms as maturity, adoption, and social application of specific technologies (Fenn and Raskino, 2008). In the Hype Cycle representation, Gartner claims that technologies go through the following five stages in the adoption and application (Fig. 1.1):

1. Technology Trigger: A potential technology breakthrough kicks things off. Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger significant publicity. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven.

2. Peak of Inflated Expectations: Early publicity produces a number of success stories—often accompanied by scores of failures. Some companies take action; many do not.

Figure 1.1  Gartner Hype Cycle. From Gartner, Inc., 2015. Research Methodologies: Gartner Hype Cycle. Gartner. Retrieved from: http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hype-cycle.jsp.

3. Trough of Disillusionment: Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.

4. Slope of Enlightenment: More instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise start to crystallize and become more widely understood. Second- and third-generation products appear from technology providers. More enterprises fund pilots; conservative companies remain cautious.

5. Plateau of Productivity: Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology’s broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off (Gartner, 2015).

The vocabulary used by Gartner to describe the Hype Cycle reflects the economic interests that lay behind the methodology. In fact, this methodology is often used to consult companies on the deployment of technologies, according to their maturity, i.e., according to the extent of the technology’s deployment on the market and the advantages and opportunities it might provide the company with in terms of financial profit, solving business problems, workers’ productivity, public image, etc.²

Having said that, the five stages described in the Hype Cycle methodology also tell the story of a discourse that, according to Gartner, accompanies specific technologies (to different extents) throughout their deployment. The traditional Hype Cycle representation locates a group of tools and/or methods with a common basis in their technological or organizational utilization on a fixed discourse axis with the five stages mentioned earlier. The location of each specific tool, method, or utilization reflects the correlation between the expectations and promises regarding the tool and between the practical experiences gathered in different use cases.

An alternative way to look at the Hype Cycle representation is to locate the same manner of deploying a technology or a group of technologies with a common basis on the discourse axis and consider the changes, which the sociotechnological discourse experiences over time according to the Hype Cycle’s five stages. Considering the utilization of social media in collective action, such a representation offers us a manner to frame the media, academic, and civic discourse surrounding the relation between the two, which is, in turn, instructive for studying these phenomena.

1. Technology Trigger: Social media platforms achieve high adoption rates within different, heterogeneous groups of users. This adoption and frequent usage among users constitute a critical mass, which is in turn a basic condition for the application of specific social media platforms in small and middle-scale instances of collective actions, such as organizing fund-raisings, demonstrations, and flash mobs or locating a lost person, pet, or cell phone.

2. Peak of Inflated Expectations: The issue of protesters successfully deploying social media becomes a media hype in the media coverage of social protests and—for many Western recipients, surprising—revolutions around the world. Known examples of this phase are:

a. Tehran, Iran, 2009: Protests during the elections and Andrew Sullivan’s term the revolution will be twittered.

b. Tahrir Square, Egypt, 2010: As a central (but not first) event in the revolutionary wave known as the Arab Spring, the protesters’ usage of Facebook and Twitter led to a media circulation of terms such as Facebook-revolution.

3. Trough of Disillusionment: In face of the several revolutions leading to undesired outcomes (from other undemocratic forces taking the place of the ousted ones or a revolution ending up in a civil war) and some cases of utilization of social media backfire (e.g., tracking down activists online, shutting down internet connection or cellular reception by state authorities, or crackdowns on activists that organize online), many of