Online Activism



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Keren Wang

kuw148@psu.edu



*First Final Draft

12/17/2012


Online Activism

and

The Emergence of the Virtual Public Sphere
Keren Wang


Abstract: The “Arab Spring” movement demonstrated the vast potential of the Internet as an instrument to promote social justice and discipline abusive authorities; however, the successful utilization of online activism in the Arab Spring has been implicated by paralyzing displays of violent confrontation. The goal of this paper is to reimagine the political space for public-protest in our post-digital world by critically analyzing the relationship between violent protests and the public. Through the case study and comparative analysis of the Arab Spring protests, the 1999 “Battle of Seattle”, the 2009 “Green Dam” incident, and the 2012 protest against SOPA/PIPA, this paper will offer a new paradigm for Web-based public-protest which operates more efficiently and less disruptively than traditional forms of street demonstration. The proliferation of this new model of online activism may facilitate the emergence of the virtual public sphere, which functions as a political space for the legitimate performance of public dissent.


Introduction

For several weeks…demonstrations and strikes across Egypt by students, civil servants, merchants, peasants, workers, religious leaders; by Egyptian women; by Copts as well as Muslims became such a daily occurrence that normal life was brought to a halt. The uprising in the Egyptian countryside was more violent, involving attacks on…military installations, civilian facilities and personnel.1

This excerpt from an Egyptian news article recapitulated the violence and social unrest engendered by the popular uprisings in Egypt. What one may not expect, however, is the fact that those Egyptian protestors were demonstrating against the British colonial rule,2 and the time was 1919.

Marx once noted that history sometimes repeats itself, “first as tragedy, second as farce”.3 Fast-forward to the year 2011—a time when Egypt, once again, was possessed by the revolutionary spirit. Many viewed the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 as a poster child for a new kind of social activism—one that is mobilized by the use of the Internet and social media.4 Yet the prominent use of online activism did not displace the staggering similarities between the Egyptian Revolution 2.0 and its 1919 counterpart—the same groups of protestors demonstrated in public against the same kind of oppressive regime, which resulted in the same sort of violence and social disruptions. Abusive governments must be duly dealt with, but it is both inefficient and counter-productive to use violent means to obtain social justice and discipline authorities. There is a peculiar anachronism at play in the Egyptian Revolution and the larger “Arab Spring” —that all the rapid advancements in the efficiency of human communication failed to bring about consummate improvements in the efficiency of public dissent.

The purpose of this paper is to reimagine the political space in our post-digital world within the context of social activism and public dissent. The Arab Spring movements demonstrated the vast potential of the Internet as an instrument to promote social justice and discipline abusive authorities; however, the successful utilization of online activism in the Arab Spring has been implicated by paralyzing displays of violent confrontation. In the light of the growing significance of Internet-mediated protests, this paper will argue for a widely-applicable alternative public dissent paradigm which functions efficiently and nonviolently. Following this brief introduction, Section II will contextualize current challenges of Internet-mediated protests in the light of the Arab Spring and the 1999 “Battle of Seattle”. Section III seeks to provide a theoretical account for the phenomenon of violent protests. This section will first provide a definition for the term public-protest in the context of this paper by drawing from Dewey’s notion of the self-conscious public and Habermas’s conception of the public sphere. Next, violent protest will be interpreted under the phenomena of the institutionalized public in Western democracies, and the absence of a legitimate public dissent space in many non-democratic states. Section IV will focus on the case study of the 2012 online protest against the SOPA/PIPA legislation in the U.S. and the 2009 Green Dam incident in China. Though played under disparate settings, these two cases of online public dissent are similar in terms of achieving breathtaking efficacy without relying on physical presence. Section V will seek to identify a new role of the Internet in the context of public dissent by juxtaposing the two instances of peaceful Internet-driven protests mentioned above with the Arab Spring and the Battle of Seattle. This comparative analysis will demonstrate the possibility for the online arena to function as an effective alternative to physical public space for staging public dissent. Section VI then considers the functioning of the virtual public space in light of Foucault’s “Panopticon” metaphor for social disciplining, and reimagines the virtual public sphere as a reciprocal system of unverifiable masses disciplining the authority. The essay will conclude by offering an optimistic view that the synoptic functioning of virtual public spheres will synthesize with the panoptic disciplining mechanism of modern institutions in creating a fluid and harmonized relationship between individuals and authorities.


Online Activism and Collective Violence
December 17, 2010: Massive protests broke out in Tunisia following the self-immolation of a street vendor.

28 days later: Tunisian government overthrown…



January 25, 2011: Anti-Mubarak protests erupted in Egypt…

18 days later: Hosni Mubarak ousted…



January 27: Protests spread to Yemen…

one month later: Yemeni government overthrown…



February 15: Protests erupted in Libya, followed by violent armed conflicts…

six months later: Muammar Gaddafi captured, tortured, and killed…



March, 2011: Massive anti-Assad uprisings broke out in Syria…

sixteen months later: Red Cross declares Syrian conflict a civil war…5



Though commonly known as the “Arab Spring”, the fusillade of cataclysmic events listed above can be metaphorically described as “social activism on steroids”—a volatile amalgamation of over-performance mixed with self-harm, marked by rapid dissemination of public anger, fervent display of resistance, exponential escalation in scale, and increasing tendency towards collective violence. Of course, the above descriptions on the so-called Arab Spring run the risk of over-generalization—after all, the ongoing Syrian civil war is very different from the Tunisian Revolution, and the Egyptian uprising is also dissimilar to the Libyan conflict. While it is erroneous to assume that all Arab Spring protests have sprung from the same mold, this essay will nonetheless highlight two common features shared by those recent uprisings in the Middle East. The first is the presence of large-scale physical confrontations, which frequently escalate into immitigable violence. The second touches the prominent use of social media in the Arab Spring, which played a role in both igniting and sustaining the movement.

With regard to the first commonality, although the degree of disruption that resulted from public confrontations has varied from country to country, no Arab Spring-states were left unscathed by the violent displays of public confrontation. The Tunisian revolution, despite being touted as the “success story” for the Arab Spring movement,6 nonetheless has resulted in over 300 deaths.7 The confrontations in Libya and Syria have proven to be much deadlier than the Tunisian revolution.8 In mid-2012, Hussein Ibish, Senior Fellow of the American Task Force on Palestine, published a study in Foreign Policy magazine provocatively titled, “Was the Arab Spring worth it?” The study highlighted the tragic human losses and social costs that resulted from the Arab Spring uprisings:9 up to 15,000 civilians were killed during the Syrian uprisings, more than 700,000 refugees fled Libya, the unemployment rate skyrocketed in Egypt, and the Yemeni economy is facing imminent collapse.10 In 2011 alone, those four countries have suffered more than $35 billion in losses of public finances, with over $20 billion in GDP evaporated.11 While the value of overthrowing abusive regimes may be priceless, the protestors and rebels of the Arab Spring have nonetheless paid high tolls for their revolutions. To be sure, it is not the intent of this paper to use these statistic figures to gainsay the merit of the spectacular uprisings that have transpired in the Middle East and North Africa. After all, history tells us that civil societies often result from violent revolutions, and perhaps history will also inform us that the Arab Spring has ultimately led to greater good. While it is difficult to foretell the long-term effect of those revolutions, in some sense, it can be said that the Arab Spring movement has been extremely successful—not only in the way that the movement was able to spread like wildfire across the region, but in how protesters were able to topple some of the longest lasting despotic regimes in modern history within a very short period. That being said, we should not ignore the problematic aspects of the Arab Spring, that the successes of these public protests are often accompanied by significant social disruptions and tempestuous confrontations. There are of course many factors potentially contributing to the violence in the Arab Spring uprisings—sectarian resentment, historical factors, government repression, and extremist elements, just to name a few. The causes of violence may also be disparate in different states and situations. But for the purpose of this article, we will focus on the structural root of violence—that the society and the political system are structured in a way that precludes peaceful means of public protest. Supposing that our modern civil society, as Freud observed, is constructed in such a way that manages and redirects the dangerous aggressive tendencies of individuals,12 it is reasonable to suspect that without functioning structures to manage and assuage public resentment, disgruntled individuals may run amok.

Turning to the second shared element among the Arab Spring protests, while the press has given considerable attention to the use of online social media among the protestors, there are disagreements amidst pundits and analysts on the significance of online activism on the protests in the Middle East.13 In early 2011, the Project on Information Technology & Political Islam (ITPI) based in University of Washington published an empirical study on the role of social media during the Arab Spring.14 The ITPI study finds that social media not only “played a central role in shaping political debates in the Arab Spring”15 and “a spike in online revolutionary conversations” would often lead to major protests on the ground,16 but also that new media played an important role in spreading the revolutionary spirit across international borders.17 A similar study conducted by the Dubai School of Government in May 2011 also largely resonated with the conclusions made by the ITPI report.18 However, others questioned the above findings, and instead view the role of Internet-use on the Arab revolutions as merely peripheral.19 “There have been a lot of bold statements about the uprising in Egypt and Tunisia: that they couldn't have happened without the internet. I think that is an exaggeration,” said Hisham Matar, a renowned Libyan writer,20 “the people who have access and know how to use it are the elite. The Egyptian uprising didn't happen on Facebook or Twitter because it couldn't have happened without the working classes, and they don't have access to those things.”21 Though speaking in the tone of a “cyber-skeptic”, Matar nonetheless acknowledged the important role of the Internet in providing an alternative arena for the protestors to engage in discussions: “in Tunisia and Egypt, I think Facebook and Twitter have created a political discourse that is bypassing the old regime.”22 Mr. Matar raised a very crucial point with regard to the functioning of the online sphere as a viable discursive public space for an otherwise disempowered public. He rightfully pointed out that frequently, authoritarian regimes seek to control public opinion by restricting public discourse, that “political dictatorships take possession not just of money and belongings but of narrative.”23 Yet “narratives” in themselves are not public discourse, per se, without publicity.24 In the context of Matar’s comment, the “possession of narrative” is in fact referring to government’s total control over means of publicity25—often done through heavy-handed censorship and prohibition of public assembly. Some traditional means of publicity include public assembly, various forms of publications, as well as printing and broadcasting press. The notion of the online sphere functioning as a public discursive space will be examined more closely in the subsequent sections. For now, it is safe to conclude that while debates still persist over the precise role the new media has played in the Arab Spring, there is general consensus that the “digital revolution” is fundamentally inked to the Arab revolutions. In some sense, the advent of the Arab Spring also transformed the larger discussion on the relationship between social activism and the Internet. This transformation was succinctly summarized by Sheldon Himelfarb, Director of the Center of Innovation at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) during a 2011 conference on the role of social media in conflict hosted by the USIP:

A year ago, the big social media debate was between the polar opposites of cyber-utopian and cyber-skeptic… Now the debate has shifted, giving way—thanks to events in the Middle East—to a general acknowledgment of social media’s organizing power and a more nuanced discussion around the characteristics of this organizing power: enabler or accelerator.26

The revolutions that took place in the Middle East demonstrated the vast potential for the Internet as an instrument to promote social justice and discipline abusive authorities. On the other hand, even the most optimistic cyber-utopian should not overlook the devastating effects of violence and social disruptions. In the context of the Arab Spring, it is apparent that physical confrontations and virtual activism seem to engender each other—large street protests are often organized and fueled by the use of social media, and the events on the ground in turn galvanize online activism.27

The Arab Spring is not the first prominent case of violent internet-assisted protests. The 1999 Seattle WTO protests, also known as “The Battle of Seattle”, can be seen as an incipient example of this unique form of public dissent—a riotous amalgamation of street and online activism. “It was billed as a chance for Seattle to shine around the world and rake in more than $11 million in tourist dollars,”28 The Seattle Times reported, reflecting back on the optimism the city vested in hosting the WTO Ministerial Conference of 1999. It was meant to be Seattle’s coming-out party, a showcase for the high-tech capital as a site where international delegates would converge and marshal the global trade order. “Instead, here is what is left as participants and protesters to the World Trade Organization leave behind…: Broken glass and boarded-up buildings. Burning eyes and scratchy throats. More than $12 million in lost holiday sales. Threats of lawsuits to recover the money…”29 The setting of the 1999 Battle of Seattle differs from the Arab Spring on many levels—the former took place in a flourishing high-tech metropolis on the U.S. West Coast known for its coffee shops, indie music scene, and amicable, tolerant attitudes; the latter sprung up in one of the most restive regions in the world, plagued by abusive governments, sectarian tension, and social instability. Even though they occurred under disparate socio-political milieux, the two events nonetheless share the motif of violence and internet-use.



While the bulk of the street protests only lasted four days, from November 30 to December 4,30 mobilization for the anti-WTO protests have begun months ahead.31 Much of the preparatory works were conducted via the internet, with the help of hundreds of national and international groups and organization.32 For example, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a Minneapolis-based NGO, created the website WTOWatch.org as a major online platform for organizing protestors. Independent Media Center, an anti-corporate international journalist collective, created Indymedia.org as an online news platform for providing grassroots coverage of the protests in Seattle.33 London-based NGO Friends of the Earth International distributed an online petition calling for action against the planned WTO negotiations in Seattle. The online petition was signed by more than 1500 activist groups. On November 30, 1999, months of online mobilization eventually culminated into a grand spectacle of approximately 50,000 protestors on the streets of downtown Seattle. 34 The sheer size of the participating crowd dwarfed all previous anti-globalization protests.35 “Seattle battle showed Internet's populist power”, reads the front-page headline from The Toronto Star, published two weeks after the disquietude in Seattle: “dozens of Web sites—featuring everything from personal stories of police brutality to chat rooms, photographs and even video—have sprung up on the Internet from around the world.”36 37 The newspaper’s exclamation on the Internet’s new-found potential for social activism was echoed by many scholars. Mattheu Eagleton-Pierce referred to the Battle of Seattle as “an important watershed for Internet-mediated activism.”38 Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples also commented that “Seattle…witnessed the enactment of forms of activism adapted to a wired society.”39 Setting the “cyber-optimism” aside, the 1999 Seattle protests were also haunted by the specter of violence. “Anarchists”, used in this case by the media to refer to those fractious demonstrators at Seattle, has evolved into a nom de guerre for future reoccurring protests against international institutions. “We weren't ready for the depth of anti-WTO sentiment that was being expressed”, said Norm Stamper, the former Seattle Police Chief, “we weren't ready for the very large numbers of individuals, representing a minority of all protesters, who were bent on destruction or violence.40” Analogous to the multiplicity of the Arab Spring movement, the Battle of Seattle was also far from being a monolithic event. Amongst different groups of peaceful demonstrators, bands of masked rioters dressed in black ran amok, trashing whatever they saw as material representations of oppressive global capitalism.41 Shops were looted, windows were smashed, and private properties were vandalized.42 Lines of police officers equipped with full riot gear and gas masks were deployed against the black-clad anarchists. The placid Seattle downtown soon devolved into a warzone, where the riot police used pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets, and percussion grenades to disperse the recalcitrant demonstrators.

In light of the Battle of Seattle and the Arab Spring movements, the prominent use of the Internet in both cases signaled the ascendance of online activism as a crucial component for social activism in the post-digital age. But this new-found optimism of Internet as a protest facilitator does not assuage concerns over violence and social disruptions. In the context of the Arab Spring and the WTO protests, it is apparent that physical confrontations and virtual activism seem to engender each other—large street protests are often organized and fueled by the use of social media, and the events on the ground in turn galvanize online activism.43 But online activism and violent confrontations should not be natural corollaries. While we may view street protests and online activism as two forms of the same activity—the act of public dissent— they differ in physical presence. In terms of physicality, the two forms of protests are diametrically opposed—the violent confrontations on the streets marked by the physical and determinable presence of exposed individuals within a confined locus is contrasted with the non-violent and geographically unrestricted discussions on the Web marked by virtual and indeterminable presence of anonymous users. It is the synthesis of these two antithetical forms of public dissent that gives rise to the key contradiction of those Internet-mediated uprisings–that the increased efficiency and publicity brought by the use of new media is implicated by the counter-productivity of violent confrontations on the street. Given the unfortunate tendency for public demonstrations to degenerate into collective violence, a question central to this exigency of destructive social activism has to do with the substitutability of physical activism: under what circumstances would non-violent virtual activism obviate the need for street protests? Two recent cases of online activism—the 2012 protests against the proposed SOPA and PIPA legislations in the United States and the 2009 Green Dam protests in China—have demonstrated a new modality in which protesters would induce social change and discipline institutional behavior without relying on means of physical resistance.



A Pragmatic Approach for the Study of Online Social Movement Rhetoric

Before delving into the more detailed discussion concerning online social movement rhetoric, a case must be made for the theoretical approach of this paper. Why study the rhetoric of social movement? The simple answer is because social movements, in large parts, ARE rhetorical.

Many social scientists outside the discipline of rhetorical studies have given recognition to the rhetorical dimensions of social movements. Charles Tilly, perhaps one of the most prominent social movement scholars in the late 20th century, has broken down the generalized collective phenomenon into a number of discursive and symbolic performances:

“Social movements combine: (1) Sustained campaigns of claim making; (2) an array of public performances including marches, rallies, demonstrations, creation of specialized associations, public meetings, public meetings, public statements, petitions, letter writing, and lobbying; (3) repeated public displays of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment by such means as wearing colors, marching in disciplined ranks, sporting badges that advertise the cause, displaying signs, chanting slogans, and picketing public buildings. They draw on (4) the organizations, networks, traditions, and solidarities that sustain these activities.44

Social movements are goal-oriented. They consist of individuals coming together, engaging in discussions, debates, and designing, mobilizing, and employing various devices to promote, resist, or undo socio-political change. Those activities identified by Tilly—marching, demonstrating, letter-writing, lobbying, picketing, chanting and so on, function as persuasive devices utilized by the protestors to advance their collective cause. In Aristotle’s own words: “rhetorical study, in its strict sense, is concerned with the modes of persuasion.”45 Merely identifying the relevant rhetorical devices for OSM, however, is not enough. More important than knowing what those modes of persuasion are is to understand how they work. The capacity for the protestors to achieve their goal, to a great extent, depends on the protestors’ ability to employ their persuasive devices effectively and efficiently. In this sense, disruptive riots can be seen both as an undesirable and inefficient form of coercive rhetoric.

Aristotle’ specifically defined rhetoric as “the counterpart of dialectics”—an art an orator’s ability to utilize the “available means of persuasion” in a deliberative situation. 46 From this preposition, Aristotle categorized rhetoric into several genres (deliberative, forensic, and epideictic) and devices (ethos, pathos, and logos), and taxonomically investigated these well-defined elements. Traditionally, many rhetorical scholars have adopted the Aristotelian approach, where the study of public discourse mostly falls within the study of “great orators” and speeches through predetermined genres and devices. 47 Rigid divisions of knowledge do function well for the maintenance of order and hierarchy through the systematic organization of knowledge and practices. However, fixed disciplinary barriers may petrify and become disjointed with the functional reality. While “persuasion”, in a broad sense, is a universal feature of human language,48 the modes of persuasion and their functioning may vary in different historical and social contexts. Consider Mohammed Bouazizi—a disgruntled Tunisian street vendor whom, by setting himself on fire, sparked the 2010 Tunisian Revolution.49 Neither was Bouaziz a “great orator”, nor did he make any “speech”; nonetheless, his self-immolation was arguably the single most important rhetorical act in initiating the Arab Spring movements. Furthermore, the rhetorical effect of Bouazizi’s symbolic act was intrinsically linked with the use of new information technology, as his family members and friends used social media to share his story with the larger public and the international media.50 The example of Bouazizi demonstrates that rhetorical analysis must go beyond orator and orality in order to take other relevant forms of symbolic performances and performers into consideration. As Kenneth Burke observed, rhetoric encompasses all “symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.”51 This expansive understanding of rhetoric does not imply that theoretical frameworks from the past are irrelevant for studying of present-day rhetorical phenomena. A “theory” can be seen as an amalgamation of different ideas with varying functional “expiration dates”. Depending on the subject of inquiry, certain concepts from Aristotle’s Rhetorica may still be relevant, whereas other scholarly concepts from only a few years ago may no longer be applicable. As information technology and social movement are rapidly evolving social variables, it is advisable pragmatically and eclectically to apply theoretical approaches that are still functional within the context of the present-day online social movement.



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