Twitter and Tear Gas

Journalism & Communication Monographs Series, 2018

2020

Protest movements have been galvanized recently by social media and are commonly, and somewhat hyperbolically, referred to by mainstream media as “Twitter revolutions.” This article identifies social media as a battleground for disseminating contending versions of reality, not only during Twitter revolutions, but also in their aftermath. Articulating the enduring impact of popular social movements and examining how protestors and governmental supporters contest their meaning over time, the article studies the digital traces of the Gezi Park protests in Turkey (2013) after the mobilization dissipated. The digital traces of protests act as critical digital artifacts of contestation with actors on both sides (pro- and anti-AKP [Justice and Development Party] government in Turkey). These digital traces are reanimated by both actors to build support, assert truth claims, foster identity/community, and/or demand recognition. The article deploys content and multimodal analyses of texts and images on Twitter, shared through hashtags on the protests when the protests’ alleged leaders faced trials (2018‒2019).

This chapter brings in a relational perspective to the structure and agency across the Gezi Park uprisings in Turkey. In order to understand the social and political dynamics that played out in the course of the mobilizations, we discuss and critically elaborate the relation of class, authoritarian rule, and contentious politics to the agency of the protests. Drawing on in-depth interviews with organizationally affiliated and unaffiliated protesters, protest event analysis, public surveys, and official documents, the chapter shows how public outrage at the government's political encroachments into particular lifestyles, values, and orientations helped an ongoing urban resistance evolve into a mass rebellion. By focusing on the eventful characteristics of the protests, we also delve into the political subjectivities that have been activated, contested, transformed and in the making since the eruption of the uprisings.

A version of this paper was presented at the First West Asian Studies National Convention, Centre for West Asian Studies, JNU on 14 November 2014. The goal of this paper is to place the role that new social media has played in achieving collective action using the early events of the Arab uprisings and the experiences of Egypt and Tunisia as particular references. Almost four years since the uprisings began, their disrupted momentum has challenged the oft hypothesized and heavily mediatized season of unified Arab awakening. The political economy of communications differed across the affected region making it evident that these countries were in different stages of social, economic, political and digital development. This informs why different regimes were more or less vulnerable to opposition (including cyberactivism) and why the structure of opposition, in turn, varied. Though resisting techno-optimist narratives, the paper seeks to explain the communicative and connective power of social media in the Arab context as well as its disruptive potential in discourse-shaping. In setting up the stage for street protests, the use of ICT’s by Arab activists most crucially aimed at revealing an accurate picture of their respective societies, not just within but also to a broader international audience. Rather than support the cohesive neoliberal success stories quoted in the international media, the respective online Arab publics cast film onto the reality of everyday economic and political repression. Moreover, Arab cyberactivists created virtual forums for citizen journalism through enabling ordinary citizens to question regime legitimacy and record instances of governmental brutality, corruption and violations of human rights. This allowed for the continued exchange of civic discourse, deliberation and articulation, enhancing the region’s social capital and contributing to the growth of a tentative virtual civil society. The liberating role of cyberspace in overcoming gender, class and geographical barriers is, however, tempered in the final analysis by the contradictory impact of networked technologies – in terms of the quality of content generated and by whom as well as the capacity of regimes and traditional political actors to monitor, control and manipulate online communication (“Tyrants can tweet too”). Further, in the persisting debate between those on the optimist and pessimist sides of networked technology communication, an underlying tension is that while leaderless network structures can mobilize and even unite a disparate coalition of protestors around issue- specific demands such as “The people want the fall of the regime”, they are ineffective at articulating nuanced demands in the subsequent negotiation processes. Cyberactors are also reluctant to participate in the political processes of party building and institutional organization. In other words, digital storytelling supersedes the political communiqué and expressive protest- politics tends to depoliticize the impact of cyberactivism.

This article analyses the geography of urban uprising during the so-called Arab Spring, with a focus on the relationship between its virtual and physical dimensions. To enhance understanding of contemporary social movements, it pays particular attention to the interwoven relationship between the social media that now organise gatherings and communicate political messages, the practices of protest in urban space and the magnifying power of global and national media. Using case studies from Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, it analyses the spatial and temporal aspects of recent protests and suggests that the reciprocal interaction between social media, urban space and traditional media does not simply reproduce relations between these actors, but also transforms them incrementally.

The Sage Handbook of Social Media, 2018

Conjunctions. Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation, 2015

During Turkey's Gezi Park Protests in the summer of 2013, millions of people became connected as fellow protesters. In the early days of the Gezi movement, the increase in participatory activism through social media made visible the police brutality exercised in the last days of May 2013 against a small group of environmentalists who were protecting Gezi Park from being demolished in order to build a shopping mall. Th roughout Turkey's political history, there has been no other example of this kind of spontaneous mass movement resisting the state apparatus with the large participation of diverse groups and self-convened protesters, without any dominant ideological appeal or leader affi liation. In this article, I will analyze the ways in which these patterns of contradictory interactions formed, evaluated, or triggered various types of social relationships, by critically examining the content of viral images, memes, and widely shared posts by Gezi protesters on social media. In the absence of internal cohesion or an ideological and organizational agenda, I argue that widely shared viral images, memes, and text messages provided the content to collaboratively construct and publicly frame the autonomous logic of the "Gezi spirit" by the Gezi protesters. I aim to analyze this new understanding of collective identity in autonomous logic processed through social media as a being-with (mit-sein), rather than a fusion of the individual to an enigmatic we-ness in order to represent "I". I claim that this autonomous collectivity is driven by fl uidarity as a public experience of the self in relation to the other without intermediary apparatuses and hence can be conceptualized as having built a new sociality.

2016

This article proposes a conceptual guideline with the objective of understanding the political, economic and social complexities of contemporary street/square protests. It will be argued that contemporary protest movements can be understood from a conceptual perspective that effectively integrates individuals (their minds and bodies) and spaces to the approach of “multitude”. This guideline consists of three moves: conceptualizing individualistic dimension; space dimension; and collective dimension. In the first section, resisting individuals as cognitive and material beings with the acknowledgement of their multiple subjectivities will be discussed. As the second pillar of the movements, the relationship between resisting individuals and space of resistance will be unpacked. It will be highlighted that the contemporary resistance movements develop a novel relationship with the space they occupy by respatializing it as “home of resistance”. Finally, the multitude approach will be discussed in relation to the radical democratic approach in order to conceptualize the collective dimension of the movements.