Zeynep Tufekci

I came across the title of this book when I was reading another one on social media. Zeynep Tufecki has written a book that should give all food for thought. Unlike many books that focus exclusively on Western examples, her examples focus on the happenings in Turkey and the Middle East. There are Western examples as well.

She has demonstrated the changing climate of protests and how activists spread their message through social media. However, as she points out: governments are becoming adept at using social media to drive confusion and disinformation through society. The nature of censorship is changing.

Some fundamental requirements don't change: does a movement, for instance, have the capacity to grow and become a movement that can disrupt, influence, and force an electoral change?

You must read the book carefully to glean the lessons embedded in the many case examples.

The book may shake you.… (más)

The Publisher Says: From New York Times opinion columnist Zeynep Tufekci, a firsthand account and incisive analysis of the role of social media in modern protest

To understand a thwarted Turkish coup, an anti–Wall Street encampment, and a packed Tahrir Square, we must first comprehend the power and the weaknesses of using new technologies to mobilize large numbers of people. An incisive observer, writer, and participant in today’s social movements, Zeynep Tufekci explains in this accessible and compelling book the nuanced trajectories of modern protests—how they form, how they operate differently from past protests, and why they have difficulty persisting in their long-term quests for change.

Tufekci speaks from direct experience, combining on-the-ground interviews with insightful analysis. She describes how the internet helped the Zapatista uprisings in Mexico, the necessity of remote Twitter users to organize medical supplies during Arab Spring, the refusal to use bullhorns in the Occupy Movement that started in New York, and the empowering effect of tear gas in Istanbul’s Gezi Park. These details from life inside social movements complete a moving investigation of authority, technology, and culture—and offer essential insights into the future of governance.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM THE LIBRARY. USE THEM OFTEN, OUR PATRONAGE IS THEIR JOB SECURITY.

My Review: What with #MuskyTwitter becoming a real thing and then "reassuring" advertisers that "Twitter cannot become a free-for-all hellscape" while then saying that "Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise," all of which pretty much add up to something just like a hellscape to me, minus the "free" part.

What went right about this read for me as a reader was its blend of "I-was-there" anecdotal reports and a sociologist's academic assessment of what leads the riled-up masses to fail in achieving their aim. As they are not conflated, as in attributing to her eyewitness statements the weight and force of academic analysis, I found them mutually enriching to my read. I was equally convinced that the author was, in openly acknowledging her left-leaning bias and explaining why it informed her analysis, transparent in reaching her conclusions.

Since the advent of social media in the Aughties, we've undergone a startling tectonic shift in the public conversation about politics and current events. Loud voices (eg Alex Jones) predominate; their usually right-wing extremism (save the both-sides and what-about crap, it's more effort than I care to spend to debunk their fundamental wrongness politely) echoes and echoes while picking up force without ever gaining any meaning or truth. Alex Jones's lies about Sandy Hook are going to cost him nearly a billion bucks which he doesn't have, and is proof that Author Tufekci's central thesis is correct: Attention is the main currency of social-media movements, not information which was at the heart of previous propaganda drives. If Jones's grip on the attention of millions hadn't been so finely tuned and thus successful, the bogus information he was peddling would've vanished in its own ripples. Revolutionaries using social media to spread their word have succeeded insofar as they've grabbed attention and even inspired action based on it...but have failed to make consolidatable gains in opposition to their enemies because that step requires information to reach people ill-equipped to comprehend or act on it.

This last fact, evidenced by the failures of many current social-media-driven movements, are failures to create systems and get buy-in from the protestors. There are no "network internalities," a term I learned from reading the book that's basically the opposite of the well-known term "network externalities", derived from the easy and showy online "organizing" that barely outlasts the social media post. In olden days, when organizing was a rough and effortful slog of meeting after meeting after committee upon speech-giving bloviation, the fact that 500 people showed up to a protest said something very loud about how this message they organized around resonated with them. Now that the message is reduced to an attention-grabbing snippet to get your engagement to it in place of simply doomscrolling on, there's very little investment on the consumer's part.

Another signal failure on the reliance of protests on social media is the interruptibility of attention-based engagement as opposed to information-based buy-in. The model she uses for this is the Tea Party...an online scattering of loudly outraged racist scum (my term, not the author's) whose "movement" (in the same sense as "bowel" in my never-humble opinion) transcended the attention-based group's ephemerality by embracing older techniques of protest: accepting hierarchical thinking, coalescing their ideas into clearly stated goals, etc. They've been stunningly successful in fomenting their ignorant, evil, putrid "ideas" and getting mainstream buy-in for them. More's the pity. The strength they rely on for their success is pounding away at the attention-grabbing "messaging" while accepting the behind-the-scenes scaffolding of disciplined application of information-based knowledge.

It's a model for success against the effective countering of the attention-grabbing social media rebellion: Drown the attention out in a flood of irrelevant, often false, and designed to distract "information." It is a very effective technique, as current political tragedies have shown again and again. Records, as in "lists of factual things," are judged fake insofar as they disagree with the hearer's agenda, and thus require time and effort to deny, explain, or simply distract from in return. That's time not spent doing the real job. And that is he entire plan for success of the right-wing nightmare machine.

Academics aren't going to like this abbreviated treatment of the topics the author covers, or appreciate the absence in-book of notes and a bibliography. Lay readers aren't going to be thrilled that the author doesn't spoon-feed them conclusions that agree with their established prejudices. But if you invest in the author's central thesis, the revolution that can be televised is doomed to co-opting and failure, there is a lot to be learned from discovering why and why you should care. That's the point of the book. It makes its point very well indeed. And, as #Midterms2022 approach, it behooves us all as voters to learn what our manipulators want us *not* to see, to attend to.

NB there are hyperlinks to citations and definitions on my blog page.… (más)