Description
Hi there, so this is Communication class called “Media and Social Activism”. For this assignment you will need to watch this one story (movie) of activism and share a reflection on what you saw.
The movie is:
The Square (2013) available at online here or on Netflix.
Address the following in your journal:
What is the name of the protest/movement this film? When and where did it happen
Very briefly, what is the film about? (Summarize the plot it in a few sentences)
What kind of alternative media did this activism use as shown in the film? (Keep in mind all kinds of media including digital media, leaflets, posters, photography, DIY media, bodies, spaces…etc.)
How do institutions (e.g., mass media, police, corporations…etc.) respond to the activism in the film?
What specific academic material is relevant to this film? Explain the concept, theory, etc. clearly so that someone unfamiliar with our class or the materials could understand it.
Recommended citation style: APA style. Your submission should be around 700-800 words, not including references. Your references can be from the course as well as external sources. Please use at least two scientific references in addition to your film.
I will attach the readings where you will need to use as references for your writing. Please make sure all work must be 100% unique and AI free.
https://prezi.com/view/92J0E3JoQBLdp62Rm5Qu/ this link is for a lecture you can use to help and answer to write your journal.
Unformatted Attachment Preview
ZEYNEP TUFEKCI
CULTURE
MAY 22, 2017 12:01 AM
Twitter and Tear Gas: How Social Media
Changed Protest Forever
In an excerpt from her new book, techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci hits the streets to explore the
power and fragility of networked social movements.
Crowds of demonstrators gather at Tahrir Square in Cairo, Nov. 25, 2011. MOISES SAMAN/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
SAVE
ON FEBRUARY 2, 2011, a horde of men, armed with long sticks and whips and riding camels and horses,
attacked the hundreds of thousands of protesters who packed Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, parting the crowd
as if it were the Red Sea and scattering protesters as they went. The horses’ saddles were a brilliant red,
traditional and ornate, but the day was anything but cheerful. A dozen people died. Many believe that the
attackers were undercover agents of President Hosni Mubarak’s regime, although trials afterward were unable
to verify this. Egyptians call the event the “Battle of the Camels,” a sly reference to a seventh-century
internecine struggle among Muslims.
A prominent Egyptian dissident later told me the story from his perspective, starting with his shock at hearing
the trampling hooves on the asphalt, seeing the heads of the animals above the crowd, and watching
confusion and anger spread in waves through the packed square. “I laughed very hard,” he said, “because, for
the first time since it all began, I was sure we had won. Surely, I thought, we had won.”
I wondered whether he had lost his mind. That would have been understandable after 10 days of violence, tear
gas, tension, and no sleep.
But he was right. It had been a turning point.
As he explained to me, letting loose thugs on camelback showed
just how desperate and out-of-touch Mubarak’s regime had become. While camels flooded the square, Tahrir
activists were busy giving live interviews to the BBC and other international media outlets via smuggled
satellite phones, and tweeting over contraband Internet connections. Although Mubarak had shut down the
Internet—except a single ISP, the Noor network—and all cell phones just before the “Battle of the Camels,”
protesters had pierced the Internet blockade within hours and remained in charge of their message, which
was heard around the world, as was news of the Internet shutdown. Mubarak’s acts were both futile, because
the protests were already under way, and counterproductive, because worried families, unable to call their
younger relatives, rushed to Tahrir Square. The sheer, unrestrained brutality of the camel attack and the
clumsiness of shutting down all communication networks underscored the inability of Mubarak’s crumbling
autocracy to understand the spirit of the time, the energy of the youthful protesters, and the transformed
information environment. Camels and sticks versus satellite phones and Twitter. Seventeenth century, meet
21st century. Indeed, the Internet in Egypt soon came back online, and Mubarak, unable to contain or
permanently repress the huge crowds, was forced to resign shortly thereafter.
As uprisings spread throughout the region, many felt optimistic. The revolutions had not yet turned into
military coups, as would happen in Egypt, or bloody civil wars, as would happen in Libya and Syria. Activists
were flying high. Digital technologies had clearly transformed the landscape, seemingly to the benefit of
political challengers. Rising in opposition to crumbling, stifling regimes that tried to control the public
discourse, activists were able to overcome censorship, coordinate protests, organize logistics, and spread
humor and dissent with an ease that would have seemed miraculous to earlier generations. A popular
Facebook page, created to decry the beating death of a young man by the Egyptian police, had been the forum
for organizing the initial Tahrir uprising and had mustered hundreds of thousands of supporters. An Egyptian
friend of mine would later joke that this must have been the first time in history when a person could actually
join a revolution by clicking “I’m Attending” in response to a Facebook evite. But such social media sites were
important to audiences beyond the protesters; the world also followed the uprising through the Facebook and
Twitter posts of young, digitally savvy and determined protesters.
Organized Chaos
Networked protests of the 21st century differ in important ways from movements of the past and often operate
with a different logic. (I use “networked” as a shorthand for digitally networked, to refer to the reconfiguration
of movements and publics through the incorporation of digital technologies and connectivity.) Many of these
developments have cultural and political roots that predate the Internet but have found a fuller expression in
conjunction with the capabilities provided by technology. Networked protests have strengths and weaknesses
that combine in novel ways and do not neatly conform to our understandings of the trajectory of protest
movements before the advent of digital technologies.
For example, the ability to use digital tools to rapidly amass large
#Revolution
numbers of protesters with a common goal empowers
movements. Once this large group is formed, however, it
How to Use Social Media at
a Protest Without Big
Brother Snooping
struggles because it has sidestepped some of the traditional tasks
of organizing. Besides taking care of tasks, the drudgery of
traditional organizing helps create collective decision-making
capabilities, sometimes through formal and informal leadership
structures, and builds a collective capacity among movement
The Machinery Is in Place
to Make Trump Protests
Permanent
participants through shared experience and tribulation. The
expressive, often humorous style of networked protests attracts
many participants and thrives both online and offline, but
movements falter in the long term unless they create the
capacity to navigate the inevitable challenges.
How Black Lives Matter
Uses Social Media to Fight
the Power
These movements rely heavily on online platforms and digital
tools for organizing and publicity and proclaim that they are
leaderless although their practice is almost always muddier. The
open participation afforded by social media does not always
mean equal participation, and it certainly does not mean a smooth process. Although online media are indeed
more open and participatory, over time a few people consistently emerge as informal but persistent
spokespersons—with large followings on social media. These people often have great influence, though they
lack the formal legitimacy that an open and recognized process of selecting leaders would generate. The result
is often a conflict-ridden, drawn-out struggle between those who find themselves running things (or being
treated as de facto leaders) and other people in the movement who can also express themselves online. These
others may challenge the de facto spokespersons, but the movements have few means to resolve their issues
or make decisions. In some ways, digital technologies deepen the ever-existing tension between collective will
and individual expression within movements, and between expressive moments of rebellion and the longerterm strategies requiring instrumental and tactical shifts.
The Internet’s capabilities have changed greatly during the past two decades. When I showed up at a
Zapatista-organized “Encuentro” in the 1990s, for example, many people greeted me with surprise that I was
not “Mr. Zeynep.” Our main communication tool was email on slow dialup modem connections that did not
allow much visual information, such as pictures. Most users were assumed to be male, and they often were.
We had no smartphones, so we had no connections when we were not at a fixed physical “place.”
But the ability to cheaply and easily connect on a global scale was already emerging and was transforming
social movements. The Internet may have been slow and available only in offices and homes (since phones did
not have Internet then), but the protest and movement culture that flourished in the 1990s already displayed
many cultural elements that would persist. These movements shared an intense focus on participation and
horizontalism—functioning without formal hierarchies or leaders and using a digitally supported, ad hoc
approach to organizing infrastructure and tasks. The Zapatista Encuentro lasted a week, during which
friendships formed around the self-organized functioning of the camp where it took place. Plurality, diversity,
and tolerance were celebrated and were nicely expressed in the Zapatista slogan “Many yeses, one no.” There
was a general reluctance to engage in traditional, institutional politics, which were believed to be ineffective
and, worse, irredeemably corrupt. Digital technology was used to support organization in the absence of
formal structures. An alternative social space was created, and it felt like, and was celebrated as a new form of
politics.
These elements would reappear in protester camps and prolonged occupations of public spaces worldwide in
the next decades and would become thoroughly intertwined with digital technologies. These technologies
were not merely basic tools; their new capabilities allowed protesters to reimagine and alter the practice of
protests and movement-building on the path that they had already been traveling but could finally realize.
The hand of a protester recording with a mobile phone in Tahrir Square, 2011. JESS HURD/REDUX
Raising the Cost of Oppression
I visited Tahrir Square after the most tumultuous days of 2011 were over in Cairo, but protests were still
ongoing. The Egyptian military had not yet organized the coup that would come two years later. The square
seemed vast while I was standing in the middle of it during a protest, but from my high-rise hotel next to it, it
seemed small and insignificant, lost in the sprawling expanse of Cairo, a metro area that’s home to more than
20 million people. It was a choke point for Cairo traffic, but traffic seemed to be in a perpetual jam.
Yet in 2011, Tahrir became a choke point for global attention. Digital networks allowing the protesters to
broadcast to the world raised the costs of repression through attention from a sympathetic global public.
Digital connectivity had warped time and space, transforming that square I looked at above, so small yet so
vast, into a crossroads of attention and visibility, both interpersonal and interactive, not just something filtered
through mass media. Throughout the 18 days of the initial Tahrir uprising, I turned on the television only once,
wanting to see how networks were covering the historic moment of Mubarak’s resignation. CNN was
broadcasting an aerial shot of the square. The camera angle from far above the square was jarring because I
had been following it all on Twitter, person by person, each view necessarily incomplete but also intimate. On
television, all I could see was an undifferentiated mass of people, an indistinct crowd. It felt cold and
alienating. The television pictures did not convey how today’s networked protests operate or feel.
Scholars have often focused on the coordination and communication challenges that people engaged in
collective action face. If authorities control the public sphere, how will activists coordinate? How will they
frame their message in the face of corporate or state media gatekeeping and censorship? How will they keep
free riders, who want the benefits that protests might win but do not want to pay the costs of protest, from
skipping out and waiting for others to fight and take risks? How will they counter repression by security forces
that have superior means and can inflict suffering, torture, and death?
None of those dilemmas have gone away, but some of them have been dramatically transformed. Digital
technologies are so integral to today’s social movements that many protests are referred to by their hashtags—
the Twitter convention for marking a topic: #jan25 for the Tahrir uprising in January 25, 2011, #VemPraRua
(“Come to the streets”) in Brazil, #direngezi for Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, Turkey, and #occupywallstreet.
Activists can act as their own media, conduct publicity campaigns, circumvent censorship, and coordinate
nimbly.
Sometimes, networked online political action is derided as “slacktivism” or “clicktivism,” terms that suggest
easy action requiring little effort or commitment. At other times, people assume that movements fueled by
social media are organized by people with “weak ties”—people we do not know well—unlike protests of the
past. However, these perspectives assume that people who connect online are doing things only online, and
that the online world is somehow less real than, and disconnected from, the offline one. In contrast, people
nowadays also join protests with people with whom they have “strong ties”—family and close friends—and
people connect online with other people with whom they have both weak and strong ties. Symbolic action
online is not necessarily without power either—rather, the effect depends on the context. When Facebook
friends change their avatar to protest discrimination against gay people, they also send a cultural signal to
their social networks, and over time, such signals are part of what makes social change possible by changing
culture. Many protesters I talked with cite their online political interactions as the beginning of their process of
becoming politicized. It is not even clear that all online acts are really as easy as “just clicking.” In a repressive
country, tweeting may be a very brave act, while marching in the streets may present few difficulties in a more
advanced democracy.
In 2011, I observed how four young people, only two of whom were in Cairo, coordinated supplies and logistics
for 10 large field hospitals at the height of some of the worst clashes in Egypt. They accomplished this feat
through creativity and youthful determination, but it would have been nearly impossible without Twitter,
Google spreadsheets, text messaging, and cell phones. In the same time frame, I watched another four college
students in Turkey establish a countrywide citizen journalism network, reporting news, busting censorship,
and otherwise countering deep polarization. They did this in their spare time, with no funding, fueled only by
grit, creativity, and caffeine (preferably from coffee shops with free Wi-Fi). I saw countries with authoritarianleaning governments lose control over the public sphere, while in democratic countries, issues that had been
sidelined from the national agenda, from economic inequality to racial injustice to trade to police misconduct,
were brought to the forefront through the force of social media engagement and persistence by citizens.
But I have also seen movement after movement falter because of a lack of organizational depth and
experience, of tools or culture for collective decision making, and strategic, long-term action. Somewhat
paradoxically the capabilities that fueled their organizing prowess sometimes also set the stage for what later
tripped them up, especially when they were unable to engage in the tactical and decision-making maneuvers
all movements must master to survive. It turns out that the answer to “What happens when movements can
evade traditional censorship and publicize and coordinate more easily?” is not simple.
Egyptian youths use laptops to post videos of the protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Feb. 7, 2011. ED OU/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
How Governments Strike Back
If the politics of protest do not look like those of the past, neither do some of the obstacles the protesters face.
In the United States, the same week the Gezi protests erupted, Edward Snowden revealed details of the
existence of a massive US government surveillance program, and we thus glimpsed what state surveillance
capabilities may exist. The US is almost certainly not the only government to surveil at large scale. In fact, as I
stood in Gezi Park, tweeting from a phone tied by law to my unique citizenship ID number in Turkey, I knew
that the government surely had a list of every protester who showed up at the park with a phone. Despite this
fact, once protests broke out on a large scale, the threat of surveillance deterred few people, partly because
they felt protected by size of the massive protest.
Many movements face severe repression, much as they did in the pre-Internet era. In Egypt, a few years after
the initial uprising, things were not going well for the revolutionaries. Many of my friends there were now in
jail or in exile. Although Mubarak was ousted, the military was not. The Muslim Brotherhood had won the
election but had not managed to unseat the old guard from the state apparatus nor manage to win over the
whole population—many people were alarmed at their acts in government, too. In the polarized atmosphere,
supporters of the military also began to flood online social networks with their message. People opposing the
Muslim Brotherhood, some of them open supporters of the military but others just concerned about the state
of the country, held a large rally in Tahrir Square in July 2013. Soon afterward, the Egyptian military took over
the country in a brutal coup, citing the protests as legitimizing its actions. The new military government
mowed down more than 600 protesters in Cairo’s Rabaa Square. Sufficiently brutal governments seem not to
bother much with scientific network analysis and the minutiae of secretly surveilled online activists. Instead,
they are often guided by the philosophy “Shoot at them all, and let terror sort them out.”
Other governments, less willing or able to engage in such indiscriminate mass violence, have learned to
control the networked public sphere through a set of policies more suited to the new era. Surveillance and
repression do not operate primarily in the way that our pre-digital worries might have forecast. This is not
necessarily Orwell’s 1984. Rather than a complete totalitarianism based on fear and the blocking of
information, the newer methods include demonizing online media and mobilizing armies of supporters or
paid employees who muddy the online waters with misinformation, information overload, doubt, confusion,
harasment, and distraction. This in turn makes it hard for ordinary people to navigate the networked public
sphere and sort facts from fiction, truth from hoaxes. Rather than acting directly on dissidents’ political
communications, many governments try to embarrass or harass activists by hacking and releasing their
personal and private information. If anything, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World appears more prescient than
Orwell’s 1984, which imagined totalitarianism with centralized control of information—more applicable to the
Soviet Union than to today’s networked public sphere.
Whereas a social movement has to persuade people to act, a government or a powerful group defending the
status quo only has to create enough confusion to paralyze people. The Internet’s relatively chaotic nature,
with its surfeit of information and weak gatekeepers, can asymmetrically empower governments by allowing
them to develop new forms of censorship based not on blocking information, but on making available
information unusable.
The networked public sphere creates many other challenges. Activists often face harassment and abuse
organized by governments or their opponents on social media. Ad-financed platforms use algorithms—
complex software—to control visibility, sometimes drowning out activist messages in favor of more advertiserfriendly content. Their filtering can entrench “echo chambers” where like-minded people get together
(including social movement activists) but then go on to undertake vicious battles online, increasing
polarization and thus turning off many people from politics.
But movements can also use these very platforms to further their goals, as these technologies allow people to
find one another, to craft and amplify their own narrative, to reach out to broader publics, and to organize and
resist. Movements are making their own history, but in circumstances and with tools not entirely of their own
choosing.
Science
Your weekly roundup of the best stories on health care, the climate crisis, genetic engineering, robotics, space, and more. Delivered on
Wednesdays.
Your email
Enter your email
SUBMIT
By signing up you agree to our User Agreement (including the class action waiver and arbitration provisions), our Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement and to receive marketing
and account-related emails from WIRED. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
And those tools shape the course of events and social movements in often unpredictable ways. The
contradictory and sometimes counterintuitive dynamics unleashed by the emergence of the printing press
demonstrate all too clearly that there is little that is straightforward about the implications of a revolutionary
communications technology. And when it comes to understanding the strengths, weaknesses, challenges,
opportunities, and future of networked movements, we have likely just begun to see what it may all mean.
This article is excerpted from Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep
Tufekci, Yale University Press 2017.
TOPICS
NATIONAL AFFAIRS
POLITICS
PROTESTS
LONGREADS
MORE FROM WIRED
SOCIAL MEDIA
Gen Z Is Leaving Dating Apps Behind
Frustrating experiences on platforms like Tinder sent hopeless and horny romantics to Reddit, TikTok, and elsewhere to vent. Now, young
people are swiping left on dating apps.
JASON PARHAM
The Death of E3 Signals the End of Gaming’s Most Extravagant Era
Now that any video game company can go online to hype up its big new releases, no one needs big events anymore.
MEGAN FAROKHMANESH
Video Games That Encourage Human Interaction Can Build Better Vibes
At a WIRED event Tuesday, a panel of studio founders and researchers discussed game designs that foster civility and discourage toxicity.
BOONE ASHWORTH
Why Even a Partial Digital Detox Is a Good Idea This Christmas
Usually these stories are about parents begging their kids to put their phones down. This time it’s my daughter asking me to stop taking so
many pictures.
TAMMY RABIDEAU
4 Tips to Spot Misinformation on the Web
Don’t believe everything you read on social media.
DAVID NIELD
Sony’s New Access Controller Reveals a Big Problem in Adaptive Gaming
Sony’s new Access controller is a welcome addition to accessible hardware solutions. But its high price tag is a reminder of the cost that
gamers bear simply for being disabled.
GEOFFREY BUNTING
‘Authentic’ Is the Word of the Year. You Read That Right
In a year dominated by artificial intelligence, deepfakes, and disingenuity, “authentic” has somehow emerged as Merriam-Webster’s word
for 2023.
ANGELA WATERCUTTER
Taylor Swift, QAnon, and the Political Weaponization of Fandom
Last week, Taylor Swift was named Time’s Person of the Year. QAnon conspiracy theorists say it’s all part of a psyop to alter the trajectory of
the 2024 election.
ANGELA WATERCUTTER
Sponsored Links by Taboola
Stuffy nose at night? Here’s what your body is trying to tell you
OhMyMag
The world’s greatest rugby players: How wealthy are they?
See And So
Gareth Southgate: Beyond the sidelines of the England boss
See And So
Football’s high-profile transfer: The top flops in history
See And So
Shocking Leaked Tesla Documents Hint at Cybertruck Problems
WIRED
Elon Musk May Have Just Signed X’s Death Warrant
WIRED
One year for
$29.99 $5
SUBSCRIBE
DO NOT SELL MY PERSONAL INFO
