technosociology

Last night, while I was flipping through Facebook looking for examples of the recent meme where Israeli citizens post the message: “Iranians. We will never bomb your country. We ::heart:: you” over their pictures,  I noticed a tweet from fellow academic Katy Pearce, who speaks Armenian, about how the word “pisi” means cat in Turkish, Farsi, Armenian and Azerbaijani. I responded that in Turkish, it was mostly used in baby talk, or to call out to cats: “come here pisi, pisi.” We got into a fun conversation about shared words in the region–and were soon joined in by others.

The word “kef” came up. Katy said it meant to “party” in Armenian.  Someone pointed out that it meant to “get high” in Uzbek. Another said that it refers to weed in Hebrew. We soon realized that it also had a similar connotation in Russian. I thought that it might all be related to the word “keyif” in Turkish which means pleasure in a sensuous sense.  But the word, it seemed, was everywhere and everywhere in the region. What gave?

A little bit of Internet sleuthing later, Wikipedia gave us our answer. In different incarnations, Wikipedia dutifully informed us, the word kef –kief, keef, kif, kef—refers to “resin glands of cannabis” which apparently contain higher concentration of psychoactive cannabinoids.  And the word, in all its incarnations, appears to have derived from the Arabic word “kayf” which connotes pleasure and well-being. A vice of pleasure, it seemed, had gone viral, at least linguistically.

Already sleepy, images floated in my head about how this phrase might have spread and take such strong root through this war-torn region. I had visions of an underground of devotees of hashish, smuggling their vice of choice among each other—would they continue their trade as wars broke out between the countries?  Would they speak each other’s languages beyond a few words? Would they sit around and get high together? Would a drug deal gone bad ignite more violence? I don’t mean to glamorize use of pyschoactive substances—I’m aware that one person’s pleasurable vice can be another’s addiction hell. Still, though, I was intrigued in the kind of human contact that must occurred to spread this word to so many corners—especially considering  that nowadays, ordinary Armenians and Turks –and for that reason Greeks, Russians and Arabs as well– often have very little day-to-day contact with each other.

And does contact make wars less likely? History of communication technology is littered with such optimistic predictions. Yet, it is hard not to be moved by how Iranians, too, have responded both privately and publicly by reaching out to Israelis. “We love you too,” apparently said one message from an Iranian responding to the campaign. “Iranian people, aside from the regime, have no hard feelings or animosity towards anybody, particularly Israelis.”

My thoughts were also with another past war yesterday was also the anniversary another major war, the Gallipoli campaign (“Canakkale” in Turkish) of World War I. (The Australians commemorate the battle as “Anzac Day” on April 25, while Turkey remembers it on March 18th.) About half a million people lost their lives in that fateful battle—many from as far away from Australia.  I never cease to shiver at the horror of a world that brought young man from as far away Australia to what was then the Ottoman Empire, half a world away–to kill and die among people they had never seen and never would again.

Hence, as it is probably the case on Anzac Day in Australia, there was a lot of news coverage in Turkish newspapers about the bravery and sacrifice of the soldiers –often peasant conscripts—who lost their lives in that battle.  Yet my inbox had a counter feeling. A more thoughtful friend sent me a song from Australia: “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda.” I hadn’t heard it before. A haunting first-person indictment of the folly of war, the song is told through memories of a young man who lost his legs in Gallipoli, as “corpses piled higher” even around him. My friend said another friend had sent him the song. I thought about a network of people tuning out the official speeches that speak of a false glory of war, and instead share stories about its reality with each other.  What if we could do this before the soldiers got on the ships?

Would a world in which the reality of war is more visible also be less likely to fight wars? In his latest book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” linguist and Harvard professor Steven Pinker argues that level of war violence has gone done down dramatically in the 20^th century. I’m only somewhat convinced. These days, most war deaths occur in the peripheries of battlefields—the collateral damage, the spiking infant mortality, malnutrition, disease. From Iraq to Afghanistan to the Democratic Republic of Congo, large numbers of people continue to die from wars, but fewer and fewer of them are soldiers on the battlefield.  Still, though, there is little doubt that the ratios of war deaths have gone down even as the numbers remain significant. Major wars used to kill tens of millions of people—and would still do if another one was fought. Does  globalization and increasing human contact decrease chances of wars?

From Wall Street Journal

People had high hopes that  radio, which started out as a two-way communication technology, would do just that–decrease wars by increasing human contact. Yet, Radio was shut down from its early interactive form right around World War I—and became, essentially a military technology. So perhaps history is not hopeful. Yet, there are reasons to think that human-to-human “diplomacy” is a more potent force than the past attempts.  Unlike early radio, the interactivity of Internet platforms is vastly more advanced and is used every day by billions of people. Plus, a kind of  “Globish” –a limited English– has indeed emerged as a shared language.  As the spread of Kony 2012 video shows, there is also tremendous interest in humanitarian fables–albeit in flawed an overly-simplified form as it was the case with that particular campaign.

Which brings me to my point: the greatest power the public sphere has is the act of granting of consent and the conferring of legitimacy to governments.  And that is where the Internet has been a game-changer. Often, it is erroneously thought that rulers rule through force–and dissidents have legitimacy on their side. In reality, it is almost always the other way around.  Consent and legitimacy among the population is the true the coin of all rule, including undemocratic and authoritarian ones.  Once the rulers lose legitimacy, they often also lose their control over force. Militaries refuse to go out of their barracks to save the regime, or turn against their old patrons. The police disappear from the streets. Elite divisions accelerate.  Ruling more through force than legitimacy requires draconian control over the public sphere. Hence, such regimes are thus distinctly vulnerable to disruption of new communication technologies like the Internet.

I would like to strongly note that I am not equating legitimacy among the population with democracy, or with liberalism, or with values that may be close to my own heart. Legitimacy can also be garnered through intolerance, extreme nationalism, and even, unfortunately, war-mongering. Hence, if one looks at cases where the spread of the Internet did not challenge authoritarian rule, one often sees a combination of different amount of two dynamics: a draconian attempt to keep control over the public sphere through the emergent challenge posed by the Internet *and* a good deal of legitimacy. Hence, from China to Russia to Iran, authoritarian regimes rule partly because they continue to have sizable amount of legitimacy among portions of their public (something Mubarak did not have as much in Egypt).

Thus, often, the strongest political act that a populace can do is to actively and publicly withdraw their consent and refuse to confer legitimacy on a particular regime—or, in this case, a war.  This is not to say that active withdrawing of consent guarantees to stop a war; but it certainly complicates efforts towards one. At a minimum, active displays of dissent can challenge a condition political scientists call “pluralistic ignorance”; i.e. when people privately hold beliefs that they believe are the minority but are in fact majority but hidden from view because people keep their preferences hidden. And Facebook and such platforms make it easy for people to easily reveal their true preferences—and to start rapid cascades. (Speed with which such things can spread is a very important dynamic as slow and fast diffusion do not create a little less or a little more of the same thing-they create very different consequences.) Hence, I am obviously not saying that Facebook postings are enough. However, if there was enough dissent within Israel towards a war with Iran, viral Facebook postings indicating such dissent would certainly be one active way of intervening in the public sphere and challenging the legitimacy of a pro-war drive.

What’s new and interesting about campaigns like the “We love Iran” is that they are easy enough for ordinary citizens to do. The fact that they are significant speaks  to failure of our conventional politics–in almost all developed nations, the institutional connections between citizens and levers of power have become weaker. The real critique should not be that the Internet is not enough to fix politics, but that most of politics has become so heavily dominated by insiders and the already-powerful.

I’ve already critiqued the derision towards so-called “slacktivism” –so common among gatekeepers– in my last post. As I said there, the concept of slacktivism misses the point of online symbolic action. Slacktivism “is not at all about ‘slacking activists’; rather it is about non-activists taking symbolic action—often in spheres traditionally engaged only by activists or professionals (governments, NGOs, international institutions.).” Rather than being pointless, such overt political displays –easily visible to one’s social networks; easy to share, to participate and to comment—provide a potential new path for ordinary people to have their voices heard in the public sphere. Symbolic action can certainly matter if the topic is important and the moment is right. And the Israel-Iran campaign could be such an example, depending on internal political dynamics is Israel and how widespread the dissent really is.

So while the outcome of all this is still uncertain,  one can certainly hope that it is harder to sustain a rhetoric of inevitable war against a country when, along with funny videos, pictures of pets, children and sunsets, their citizens are declaring their love for you on their status updates.

By now, you probably know the story. A previously little-known group made a slick video with just the right mix of “the triumph of the human spirit” meets deep human tragedy about Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. The video goes super-viral.  In just a few days, it is viewed more than 60 million times on just Youtube alone. Then comes a swift backlash and many people criticize the content of the video–ranging from its factual errors, to questions about the group’s finances, to the implicit “White Savior Complex”.  That is indeed an important discussion, one that has been covered in-depth elsewhere and not what I want to focus on here. (I wrote a bit about those topics in my short op-ed in the New York Times here).

Instead, in this post, I’d like to argue that evolution of Kony2012 has revealed how useless –and indeed harmful—the concept “slacktivism” has become to understanding networked symbolic action in the 21st century. I’d like to argue that people interested in social change need to step back and analyze the specifics of what is happening in its full complexity–without dismissing it, either due to their objections to the content or because they erroneously think it means nothing.  (On the other hand, if you get your kicks from erudite snarks about how kids in this generation have unruly hair, no manners, and no respect for its elders; well, enjoy. There is a huge market for that—just as huge, if not bigger, than the one for superficial hyping of social media as traditional gatekeepers often love to complain about how the new generations don’t appreciate Little House in the Prairie.)

My argument is this: the concept of slacktivism is not just naïve and condescending, it is misinformed and misleading.  What is called commonly called slacktivism is not at all about “slacking activists”; rather it is about non-activists taking symbolic action—often in spheres traditionally engaged only by activists or professionals (governments, NGOs, international institutions.). Since these so-called “slacktivists” were never activists to begin with, they are not in dereliction of their activist duties. On the contrary, they are acting, symbolically and in a small way, in a sphere that has traditionally been closed off to “the masses” in any meaningful fashion.

In other words, slacktivism should be seen as the encroachment of politics and civics into people’s everyday worlds which tend to be dominated by mundane concerns of day-to-day existence–or dominated by the consumerism transmitted through traditional media. It’s also a step in the unraveling of the professionalization of human rights and cause advocacy. [Credit: parts of this argument were developed in discussion with Alaa Abdal Fatah of Egypt and Sami Ben Gharbia of Tunisia].

So, not only are these people not slacking, they are acting symbolically in spheres that previously had higher barriers to entry. Symbolic action is not a magic wand–and its consequences depend on how it interacts with  other kinds of power, including institutional power.  Symbolic action and symbolic power, however, are not mere “epiphenomenon” of other kinds of power—as if they were a shadow, or an afterthought.

On the contrary, narrative and symbolic action are central forces in human societies. We are a highly-symbolic, group-oriented species and signaling our preferences –to others– is a key dimension of human action. “Public” is a meta-concept; it’s not just about what you know internally, but what you express and what others know that you believe and that you know that others know… ….  Hence, the public sphere is formed not just through people’s silently held beliefs, but through overt signaling of ideology and narratives-and this signalling increasingly takes place online.

As social psychology and related fields have long shown, and as any observant person knows –and like it or not– for the human animal, there are no pure facts; instead, there are narratives.  We act differently depending on our embedded narratives–even if we seemingly profess to the same facts as others. Humans accept, reject and make sense of facts within narratives. Just the very question of how we get to define what is a fact is a complex and socially-contingent one.

If humans came with a warning label, I’d like it to say: “WARNING: MAY APPEAR MORE RATIONAL AND LOGICAL THAN ACTUAL.”

Further, all human societies operate in a world of socially-constructed norms and ideals. And the changes to those ideals are immensely important.  If norms move, than often action also moves—not always in a straight line, and not always in a simple fashion because the world is complex and narrative power is but one kind of power among many. Still, action for change is always entangled with action for norm change, i.e. symbolic action.

Hence, there is no “activism” that does not have a strong symbolic side. Thus, today’s “meaningless click” is actually a form of symbolic action which may form the basis of tomorrow’s other kind of action.  Thus, signaling preferences –even seemingly obvious ones like being against child soldiers being abused—can be crucial.

Want some proof? Look at how many obvious –and not that hard– things we do not do globally. Children around the world die of the flimsiest causes.  Lack of so little action in that front is no doubt partially due to the fact that there is no strong symbolic infrastructure that makes those children important to us in a manner that is connected to capacity for impact. Clearly, the Kony2012 video is tapping into just that gap—and I cannot imagine a human-rights advocate who thinks that this is irrelevant.

It is well and worthy to discuss the interaction between symbolic power and other kinds of power—and how and when convergence among different kinds of power leads to change and when and how it remains confined or repressed. Still, the incorrect conceptualization encapsulated in the term “slacktivism” is making it harder to have exactly those conversations.

The power of the symbolic action to shape particular narratives is exactly why so many people felt the need to pushback against #stopkony—the video was effectively and powerfully laying down a narrative for a particular kind of action.

Indeed, go back in history, and you see these normative shifts, brought about by words and symbolic action, before or along with major social changes. History is full of such examples.  Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Anna Sewell’s animal rights story “Black Beauty.”  Or take a modern variation, like the clever video, “The Meatrix.”  These are examples of symbolic action which helps structure narratives within which further human action occurs.

And social media streams are a new and important dynamic in how those narratives are formed—and, importantly, who gets to have a say. I usually do not like to proclaim new developments as “good” or “bad”—they are often a complex interaction of both. However, contrast the swift pushback against the simplistic and dangerous narrative of #stopkony with the lead up to the Iraq War of 2003. It was clear to many people at the time that the narrative being built up in the rush to war in Iraq was erroneous, dangerous and in many ways, irresponsible.  However, opposition voices –while loud, organized and including many —were drowned out by the gatekeepers—big media, Sunday talk shows, political powers…

In contrast the swift backlash against Kony2012 was loud, organized and, most importantly, also able to command attention. In just one day, I saw more human-rights experts and African and Ugandan voices on mainstream media than I do in a month or three.  My social media stream was flooded by critical and in-depth discussion about the topic, often from Ugandans or topic experts. This is a key way in which Kony2012 differs from, say, “We are the World” campaign in the eighties in which Africans never got to be anything beyond silent victims. People can now talk back a lot more effectively. Indeed, the spread of Kony2012 is likely going to be remembered as one of the early examples how emergent networked global publics can connect amongst each other and focus their –and everyone else’s—attention in a manner that would have hard to imagine just ten years ago.

It also appears to me that this was, at least at first, spread most strongly by teenagers and young adults, at least at first. I obviously don’t have hard numbers at the moment –and hope we will at some point—but anyone with any experience in activism, organizing and social movements can immediately recognize that most lifelong dedicated activists have a “gateway” moment, often in their teens.  It would not be surprising if the intensity of the attention to this video –as well as the intensity of the backlash—did not become just such a moment for many future leaders. The kids are listening, maybe to a simplistic message, maybe to a misguided cause.  But some portion of them will keep looking, listening and learning. Such moments have long-terms consequences.

There is much more to analyze in this event in terms of content, politics of the message, the increasingly complicated interaction between our global institutions –such as the International Criminal Court—and increasingly networked global public. But here’s one thing. This is not unimportant. This isn’t about activists who are slacking. It’s symbolic action in a networked world, a complex and important topic for anyone interested in social change.

P.S. (Sorry for the linkless post: I am on a shaky Internet connection at the moment and will add more links later)

I met this girl in a little village tucked away in the gorgeous but harsh highlands of Chiapas, Mexico:

After the Zapatistas burst into the scene in the 2000s 1990s with their uprising, there was a lot of discussion about their use of the Internet–and I was quite curious about that aspect*. I was a graduate student and it was quite easy to get to southern Mexico, especially if one took a cheap flight to Cancún and took the first bus out of that overbuilt heap of cement. There’s probably no harm in naming the particular village at this point, but the name hardly matters as it was a fairly typical Zapatista community, nestled between beautiful mountains and high enough to be in the clouds which look so delicate from afar but chill you to the bone when you are in their midst.Let’s just say it was this village:

I visited Chiapas multiple times over the years and I’ve always been careful about taking pictures of people as people’s attitudes to cameras vary from region to region, or even village to village.  They are often wary. On this occasion, though, it was this girl’s mother who insisted I take her picture. Puzzled, I tried to inquire why. Conversation was difficult as the women in these remote villages spoke very little Spanish, not to say anything about my linguistic inadequacies in Spanish. With the help of children who seemed to switch easily between Mayan languages of Tzoltil, Tzeltal, Tojolobal (as that particular area was at multilingual crossroads) and Spanish, she explained to me that she wanted for there to exist pictures of her children who grew before her eyes. It wasn’t just that there was no running water or electricity in this village. There were also no cameras. Time was reduced to its essence: ephemeral and passing. I did quickly ponder the ethics of the situation, and my own role in introducing new technologies, but quickly decided that I was in no position for any pretentious pondering of the “prime directive.” She wanted pictures of her children. I clicked on the shutter.

Fast forward just a little more than a decade, and we it seems we have cameras everywhere. Everywhere. Youtube’s “news director” Olivia Ma once told me that within about an hour of something of some importance happening anywhere in the world, Youtube has video of it uploaded. It is striking enough that Youtube has a news director. It’s stunning that videos of almost all events appear on Youtube within such a short time. In fact, correctly put, it would not be incorrect to say that Youtube is probably the biggest news site in the world–and that fact is often overlooked because there is also so much else on the site. Sometimes, it can take a while for a significant video to be discovered and no doubt that some never are beyond a small audience but there is almost always something, however shaky and grainy. This is nothing short of a revolution in surveillance capacity of citizenry.

One may wish that stoning death of Yazidi Kurdish young girl Du’a Khalil Aswad in 2007 was never discovered on Youtube, but that seems so trivial compared to wishing that she was never killed in such a cruel, brutal fashion. She was, though, for the alleged crime of seeing a boy of a different faith. She was murdered somewhere early in April 2007 and the video of her awful death started circulating widely later that  month. A few weeks after her killing, and a few months after the video was discovered and eventually made headlines around the world, a series of bombings shook Yazidi villages near Mosul, resulting in about 800 deaths and more than 1,500 injured—making it the single biggest episode of mass killing in an act of political violence since September 11, 2001. While the culprits were never discovered, most observers traced the events to the tensions that began with the video of her death.

The fact that the event was filmed and uploaded to the Internet is quite striking, too, considering the community. The Yazidis are a mostly Kurdish speaking religious group in the Middle East who keep to themselves as much as they can. The reasons for their protectiveness is lengthy and complicated but is related to the fact that a central figure in their faith, Melek Taus is accused of being identical to the Muslim figure of Satan. Having faced much prosecution, and also having a contentious faith in a contentious region, Yazidi society is predicated upon keeping outsiders out and practices strict endogamy—no marriage with outsiders.

Du’a Khalil, just 17 years old, crossed just that line with her alleged relationship with, and rumored conversion to Islam. For that, she was dragged to the street by a few dozen men who proceeded to beat her to death as she curled up on the ground, bleeding.  The shaky and grainy video, which I saw in bits over the space of a few days as I could not bear to watch in in a single sitting, shows at least *three*other people recording her stoning with cell phones.  It is quite stunning to think—not only are they killing her –this secretive, closed society which managed to survive for thousands of years by being so guarded and cautious— her killers felt like they should film this. Not one of them but at least four. And, more, upload it to the Internet.

Below, I’ve included the same stills from her death that Wikipedia has; the video is harrowing.

I’ve been thinking about that incident as I’m recently thinking a lot about what it means to have so much video of horrific death and destruction out of Syria. Indeed, as one journalist I spoke with put it, we are literally watching a war on civilians being live-streamed.  Despite all efforts by the Syrian regime, it is quite clear that this is not censorable or stoppable. The combination of cheap and small satellite modems and a fairly dispersed uprising has meant that there is truly no real way for the government to shut this down. The Syrian uprising will be live-streamed.

I have more questions than answers. What does it mean that everything –including  the most trivial but especially the non-trivial– has such a great chance of being available worldwide? Starting with the printing press, the threshold for the ability to publish has been getting lower, and the potential reach of publications has been getting bigger. We are now at the level of the person, publishing at the level of the world. The publishing revolution is almost complete.

Does this level of documentation make it more likely that the international community will be compelled to react to atrocities–which will likely come with higher and higher levels of visibility? Or will this, too, become just background noise, similar to famines or disease in Africa have become for most of the world (except the victims, of course)? Does the level of documentation and surveillance –and thus, evidence– make it harder to establish processes like the Truth and Reconciliation efforts in places ranging from South Africa to Guatemala? Will  this amount of documentation of atrocities make divisions even more likely and pernicious–as the ability to forgive often needs some level of forgetting? And the Internet, it seems, does not forget. Will this all make regime bureaucrats more likely to defect—as “I was just pushing paper and had no idea all this was going on” has become an even weaker defense? Or will they cling to power to the very end as much as they can, knowing their victims and survivors have much evidence as well as awful reminders of their crimes?

I don’t have the answers but I’m quite convinced that we’ve entered an irreversible point in terms of documentation of our lives, including death and destruction—not just baby pictures and trips, parties and graduations but also shelling of towns and killing of children. There is no going back. And tools matter. Just as wars with nuclear weapons are different than wars with bows and arrows, a world with cell-phone cameras in every other hand is different than a world which depended on traditional journalists and mass media gate-keepers for its news.

I want to emphasize that I am not making the argument that we, as humans, are drastically different in terms of our urge to document. In fact, I find such approaches to technology to be without support. Most of the time, the remarkable changes from technology come not because people suddenly start having new and unprecedented urges but rather because people continue to practice their mundane and human urges—but under drastically different conditions. The difference is not in human nature but in the socio-technical architecture. So, it seems, with our urge to capture out lies. The speed which we have taken this up clearly means we must have always had the itch to document, to surveill, and to display and share. But now we can scratch and scratch and scratch–and share on a global scale with a click.

I left my camera with that mother in Chiapas and have never gone back to that exact village to find out what has happened. It’s quite possible that not much has changed. Women are probably still painstakingly grinding the corn by hand, and children probably still go out at dawn to collect firewood from the dwindling surrounding forest for the stone tortilla ovens. There probably still isn’t a doctor within a reasonable walking distance of a day or so.

I am quite sure, however, that there would be at least a few cell phones with cameras in that village–as there are now in villages around the world, from Africa to rural India. And as more and more of those cell phones come with basic audio-visual capabilities, the surveillance revolution is here to stay. And I hope that little girl –probably a teenager now– is doing well, and I hope her mother has a few pictures of her as a toddler and as a young child to remind her of the days gone by. But I mostly hope that their future is even better.

* PS. The extraordinary thing about the Zapatistas and the Internet was not that the Zapatistas were that much different (or “postmodern” as commonly claimed)–in fact, they were a quite ordinary Latin American peasant uprisings in many respects. However, their insurrection took place in a world where the Internet was emerging as a powerful tool for political communication–and that did make a big difference.  That topic deserves a post of its own so I’ll leave it there.

*** PPS. The date typo confused a few people. I was not there in the early days of the uprising –followed it closely, but from a distance–. Rather, I traveled there later multiple times while the unrest was ongoing.

<Soundtrack for this post was Joni Mitchell, “The Circle Game.” >

New York Times author David Carr has a wonderful, mouth-watering piece about the joys of sitting to dinner with a group of friends and eating home-made bread baked from a recipe passed on from the host’s mother. Then he finishes the column with this point about face-to-face interaction:

All of which is a way of saying something that is probably obvious to others who are less digitally obsessed: you can follow someone on Twitter, friend them on Facebook, quote or be quoted by them in a newspaper article, but until you taste their bread, you don’t really know them.

I agree with most everything he says in the column because, besides the last paragraph, his column is a antidote to digital dualism–the idea that online and offline worlds are somehow separate entities, one “virtual” and the other “real.” But his column brings back digital dualism at the end–and does a disservice, in my opinion, to the rest of his points. He starts by explaining how the dinner group first met each other mostly online, then had this beautiful dinner together, and then shared the recipe over email–and ponders whether or not Google would ever find this recipe. (It seems that Carr asked the host, Clay Shirky, for the recipe and I have a feeling that it might soon end up where Google can find it.)

All these examples of how the online interacts with offline are clear example of why questions like “face-to-face or online friendship?” or “was online or offline more important in the Arab spring?” are not fruitful. The answer is yes. Because there is no “virtual” world separate from this world. As Nathan Jurgenson, who often writes about “digital dualism”, puts it the correct model to understand the Internet is not that the Internet is the “Matrix” and this world is “Zion” a la the movie Matrix. The world is one.

However, that one world is not the same one as the world before the Internet. What’s analytically and politically important is that the online is NOT the same as the offline, not that online and offline are somehow two separate planets. Bits and atoms have different properties and their current integration creates many novel configurations we have not yet adapted to as societies.

Bits are easy to copy while preserving their full organization, atoms are not (in other words, in the online world we have whatever Scotty in Star Trek used to beam people up by deconstituting them molecule by molecule and reassembling them someplace else. (Oops, if you are in an industry where your product is in bit form). Bits travel much easier than atoms, making bits much harder to censor and isolate (I’m looking at you, Mubarak). The architecture in the online world depends on the underlying code while the architecture of the offline world depends on laws of physics. Hence, online, we don’t have the same balance of privacy and visibility that come from the physical properties of space and time: that offline speech disappears after it is uttered; that, offline, we can usually see who is looking at us; offline walls, doors, locks and windows operate in a predictable manner. (That is why Facebook can be so jarring at times: it often ignores deeply ingrained cultural conventions based on laws of physics. It puts all your friends in the same room, by default–and its new timeline defies rules of flow of time as we knew it).

This lack of dualism applies to other technologies which separate the person from their words (which is the nexus of what Plato was vehemently objecting to when he decried the invention of writing and hence the separation of the human from their utterances. That critique is not invalid and remains applicable). When I was a child in Turkey in the pre-Internet era, I would have running conversations in my head with my favorite authors. These authors were quasi-people in my life because I had a void in my personal  world. It’s not that I was asocial, on the contrary. I had many  friends and I played in the streets and did all the kid things –and enjoyed them– but I also had a deep interest in topics that I was unable to find anyone around me to talk with in person (I suspect  this is not an uncommon experience). So, I’d go for walks and have conversations in my head. With authors. Whom I’d never met and probably would never meet.

And, somehow I just couldn’t manage this conversation as well with authors who I knew were dead. I was fully aware the odds were almost impossible –heck, I didn’t even speak English then– and I was a kid having these conversations walking by the sea by myself in a little sleepy town in Turkey. But there was always this tantalizing possibility that one day, I’d have that conversation with that person: books and my world were not dualistic, they were augmented. And I knew that the only true separation, the only true duality was death, and hence my deep disappointment whenever I learned a favorite author was not a contemporary. (A poignant  Turkish proverb asks: “Is there a village beyond death?” ["ölümden öte köy var mı?])

These days I meet people sometimes first online, sometimes first offline, but almost always have interactions that span both modalities. When a friend recently told me (online) that he was going on a pretty amazing trip, my first reaction was “how cool.” My second reaction was, “um, heck, does this mean I can’t email you with my random thoughts on stuff we’d been talking about?” Connectivity has become augmented and for me and the deeper divide has become not whether or not connectivity is online or offline, but whether there is some kind of connectivity or not.

There is certainly a difference between emailing someone and, say, sitting in a cafe by the Bosphorus; however, I am not able to categorize it merely as one is good/the other is bad. Each form has strengths and weaknesses depending on the topic, person, location, moment… Some things are better discussed over email. But sometimes you need to be able to hold out a hand. And as Carr mentions in reference to my work, interaction is one of the key mechanisms through which ties can strengthen or weaken–and certainly accessibility through online interaction is part of this mix. In fact, ubiquity of online platforms might increase the isolation of those who either through choice, disposition, or opportunity are not willing or able to be part of mediated, digital sociality and hence create a third level of “social” digital divide. (First level being basic access and second level being skill).

You might think my own experience is unique (and as a traveling academic I am certainly not typical), and Carr is also not typical. But recent survey findings reveal that ordinary people are also  increasingly establishing “migratory” friendships–In two separate studies, about 20 to 25% of respondents report friendships which begin online and migrate offline (Wang and Wellman 2010; Gennaro and Dutton 2007) so this is certainly not the exclusive domain of the digerati.

I am not at all claiming that this augmentation of bits and atoms does not have profound consequences; it does. For example, thanks to the Internet, we are more increasingly able to connect with people with whom we share affinities rather than people we happen to live next to (but it also works the other way around — when I moved to Chapel Hill, I chose to live where I live so I would be neighbors with  someone I knew previously and with whom I had mostly interacted online before). This is what sociologist Barry Wellman calls “networked individualism”: instead of being completely confined to historical “boxes” of family history and geography, we can open up to constructed ties of interests and affinities. This is a profound change and it is still playing out in the early stages. (Carr and others worry that this might lead to “filter bubbles” as we get our information mostly from chosen friends. Maybe, maybe not, as I reflect on this here.)

The fact of online and offline augment, rather than categorically oppose, does not change the fact that there is something deeply human and imitable about in-person interaction. Babies, even when a few days old, respond to a human smile differently than a non-smiling human, and distinguish between a representation of a face and a shape that has elements of a face but is not arranged like one. To this day, one of my greatest regrets is that I never managed to meet in person with one of the authors with whom I had these deep, personal but internal conversations, Edita Morris, and tell her she changed my life. She was alive when I read her book but died a few years after. By exposing me to the existential horror that can be brought about by scientific knowledge, something I had not considered before, her novels about the aftermath of the atom bombs started me away from the path of the child driven by scientific curiosity and one who wanted to be a scientist herself to who I am as an an adult–a person who wants to understand and help shape how science and technology interact with our world. If I had the Internet then, I could have at least emailed her.

As I read this essay on “The Death of the Cyberflâneur” by Evgeny Morozov who argues that the Internet lost its early quality of leisurely strolling and encountering the unexpected, I kept thinking about how this did not fit my experience. While there are many parts to Morozov’s essay –some of which I am not going to discuss here at all– I want to focus on the idea of “wandering around” the Web and encountering the unplanned in light of the emergence of the “social web”. For me, the social web has greatly increased exactly this quality of the Internet –encountering the unsearched and the unplanned– and I don’t believe this is because I am exceptional but rather it is because connectivity through people –the social web– yields more diverse and surprising encounters than mere connectivity through topics or information-the early Internet.

To go back to Morozov’s essay: there are two parts to his claim why the Internet is less about the aimless encounter: first is empirical, and the second is structural. Here’s the empirical argument:

Something similar has happened to the Internet. Transcending its original playful identity, it’s no longer a place for strolling — it’s a place for getting things done. Hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore. The popularity of the “app paradigm,” whereby dedicated mobile and tablet applications help us accomplish what we want without ever opening the browser or visiting the rest of the Internet, has made cyberflânerie less likely.

First let’s get some numbers out of the way. Is it true that “hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore”? In a recent (December 2011) and nationally representative survey, Pew Internet found that 74% of all online adults answered “yes” to the question if they do go online for “no particular reason except to have fun or to pass the time.” I don’t think this is blip. In my 2010 surveys with college students a whopping 77.9% said “very often” when asked how often they went online “for no reason at all”—and I’ve probed this question many times since 2005 and I have similar numbers for all the years.

I’ve asked Evgeny Morozov about his data and he pointed to a Microsoft advertisement survey—the survey had scant public information but actually shows a 4% increase in amount of surfing from 2007 to 2010; and surfing remains the second most popular activity after email. Morozov also referred to the famous Wired article which argued that the “The Web is Dead.” I’m sympathetic to the argument in the Wired if interpreted structurally: that the Web is being taken over by “walled gardens” like Facebook and single-purpose apps. Data-wise, though, the Wired piece does not speak to this argument of encountering the unexpected or wandering around (it’s comparing peer-to-peer and video traffic to “Web” traffic, for example). (Also, see this critique.)

So, let me consider structural argument which I find a lot more interesting. Here it is in a nutshell:

As the popular technology blogger Robert Scoble explained in a recent post defending frictionless sharing, “The new world is you just open up Facebook and everything you care about will be streaming down the screen.”

This is the very stance that is killing cyberflânerie: the whole point of the flâneur’s wanderings is that he does not know what he cares about. … Compared with Facebook’s highly deterministic universe, even Microsoft’s unimaginative slogan from the 1990s — “Where do you want to go today?” — sounds excitingly subversive. Who asks that silly question in the age of Facebook?

I have to say that at face value, this is an attractive argument, and one that has been echoed by others: the “filter bubble” or the “daily me”—and indeed raises deep questions about how to design for serendipity:to find not merely what we are looking for, but to wander and to stumble upon things a la the flâneur, to encounter the unexpected, to savor the surprise.

However, in my personal experience, platforms like Facebook and Twitter have greatly increased the amount of unplanned and interesting information I encounter exactly because they are person-to-person spaces rather than information-spaces. Online, I interact with people with whom I share at least one strong interest–but thanks to the social Internet, I am not exposed to just that limited topic but the much wider universe of what my friends share. And this is always much broader than the narrower affinity that first connected me with that particular person.

The trick to understanding this effect is to understand that people’s affinities don’t lump neatly, nor do they ever overlap completely. In other words, we are, fortunately, not clones of each other. Stereotypes work as broad generalizations at the aggregate, statistical level but break down spectacularly at the individual level: show me a stereotypical “X”, and I’ll show you traits he/she does not share with other stereotypical “X”s.

For example, I have strong interests in social impacts of technology, human rights and democracy and the Middle East–and often make friends based on that basis. However, I have other strong interests which do not fit into any of those categories—and, crucially, so do my friends. Social media thus exposes me to other interests of my friends, and exposes my friends to other interests of mine—and I am surprised everyday by the richness and diversity of these encounters. A friend I met because of shared interest in the emergence of the Internet and the Middle East may pleasantly introduce me to a music genre I dabbled in but never had the time and expertise to dive into. From another, I encounter the intricacies of representing light on metallic surfaces on oil paintings. Somebody shares an article on how bilingualism changes the brain.  Baby pictures, sunsets and cat videos, of course, also pass through my stream.  But along musings on nature parks in Latin America. There is a new restaurant in town—well, in a town I’ve never been to. It goes on and on and on in a great deal of richness, diversity and complexity.

In fact, encountering things I did not explicitly care about happens to me significantly more than the days I had to click-click-click my way around “cyberspace” because as much as I thought I wandered around, I could never wander around within the richness and depth of my encounters through the social web.

At this point, you might say that I have interesting friends and that is an anomaly. Perhaps, but that is not the point. The point is that I have friends who are not clones of me but have enough similarity with me that they introduce me to topics that I did not know I was interested in, but may plausibly be, if it just popped in front of me. This is likely true for most people for structural reasons.

Crucially, my online encounters introduce me to spaces that are both adjacent to (interests of people somewhat like me) but also far (not my interests) from me.  In the old days of seeking by information, I was more likely to encounter only information I was seeking (Duh) but not manage to get too far unless I truly started clicking randomly–but how do you do that? Search for “random”?  In the new era of connecting to people, I am exposed to a lot more because “people” are a lot broader than “categories of information” which are, by definition, narrow.

To put an empirical point on this, look at this striking finding from the latest February 2012 Pew survey.

It is commonly the case in people’s offline social networks that a friend of a friend is your friend, too. But on Facebook this is the exception, not the rule. A fully connected list of friends on Facebook would have a density of 1 (everyone knows everyone else). The average Facebook user in our sample had a friends list that is sparsely connected. As an example, if you were the average Facebook user from our sample with 245 friends, there are 29,890 possible friendship ties among those in your network. For the average user with 245 friends, 12% of the maximum 29,890 friendship linkages exist between friends.

For those of us familiar with research on this topic, this number, 12%, is very striking. Most of the time, it is fairly safe to assume that a person’s friends form “close triads”—people you know also know each other–and this creates a structure that looks like a triangle: everyone is connected to everyone else. What this 12%  number is saying is that on Facebook, your Facebook friends are almost never friends with each other, i.e. rather than triangles, they form “open triads”. People in closed triads tend to be more similar each other either due to origins of the connection  (living in the same environment) or due to convergent homophily (people exposing/converting each other through multiple encounters over time).

Finally, here’s the best empirical finding on this topic: Look at this striking study of 250 million people on Facebook [in a true experiment, no less] by Eytan Basky explained here:

Although we’re more likely to share information from our close friends, we still share stuff from our weak ties—and the links from those weak ties are the most novel links on the network. Those links from our weak ties, that is, are most likely to point to information that you would not have shared if you hadn’t seen it on Facebook. The links from your close ties, meanwhile, more likely contain information you would have seen elsewhere if a friend hadn’t posted it.

In other words, platforms like Facebook connect you with people who connect you with information you simply would not have encountered yourself—and these connections happen especially through your weaker ties who, structurally speaking, are more likely to be in open triads with your other friends, i.e not friends of your their friends.  I suspect this may be even truer for Twitter.

I don’t deny there is something to the argument that the shift to walled gardens comes with particular threats, but I disagree that the shift to the social Internet kills diversity, surprise, or richness. An Internet that is collection of sites which brings together, say, “people interested in model airplanes to talk about model airplanes” is going to be a lot less likely to expose us to the unexpected than the social Internet which connects us to people in their fuller richness.

It is not the Internet of things, or Internet of information, which keeps the Web brimming with the unexpected: it’s the Internet of people. Sometimes nothing is a more surprising and complex bundle of the unexpected as another human being.

I know many people are upset with Twitter’s announcement that it will now be able to block tweets country by country. There has been a lot of excellent writing / reporting on the content explaining that this is not as bad as it looks. (Check out good posts by my friend Jillian York here or Alex Howard here). My initial reaction upon a cursory reading of the announcement was also that it wasn’t too bad, given the alternatives. However I’ve since looked at the policy in more detail and my conclusion is that this isn’t a mediocre but acceptable policy; rather, this is an excellent policy which will be helpful to free-speech advocates.

I often criticize companies on this blog so I want to take a moment to recognize Twitter for a model policy and explain why these should be the kind of practices that I hope other Internet companies follow.

In my opinion, with this policy, Twitter is fighting to protect free speech on Twitter as best it possibly can. (It also fits with its business model so I am not going to argue they are uniquely angelic, but Twitter does have a good track record. Twitter was the only company which first fought the US government to protect user information in the Wikileaks cas,e and then informed the users when it lost the fight. In fact, Twitter’s transparency is the only reason we even know of this; other companies, it appears, silently caved and complied.)

Twitter’s latest policy is purposefully designed to allow Twitter to exist as a platform as broadly as possible while making it as hard as possible for governments to censor content, either tweet by tweet or more, all the while giving free-speech advocates a lot of tools to fight censorship.

Let’s look at the policy.

1-      The policy is narrower than before. Previously, when Twitter would take down content when forced to do so by a court order, it would disappear globally. Now, it will only be gone in the specific country in which the court order is applicable. This is a great improvement.

2-      The policy is realistic–and non-realistic policies are not better as they won’t work. The idea that Twitter can just ignore court orders everywhere is not only unrealistic, it would result in more countries to try to block Twitter completely–or make it accessible only via proxies and thus greatly restrict its power. The Internet is not a “virtual” space, and cyberspace is not a planet which can float above all jurisdictions forever. In this move, Twitter is acknowledging this fact while complying within the bare minimum framework.

3-      The policy is transparent. Blocked tweets will be shown as “blocked” along with the blocking country. This is excellent! This level of transparency should be the model for all Internet companies. Companies should not remove content globally; rather they should do so in as few jurisdictions as possible with as much notice as possible. (for a negative example, check out the story of how Blogger is censoring Egyptian activist Ramy Raoof’s post on brutality by security forces in Egypt. In that case, Ramy’s content is blocked globally and the post just *disappeared* without a clear indication of the censorship).

4-      The policy provides tools for free-speech advocates. Twitter will publish list of blocked tweets, along with links to the original tweet –so everyone who is not at that particular country can see what it’s about–as well as a copy of the court order or enforceable takedown notice at http://chillingeffects.org/twitter. Free-speech advocates have a transparent and powerful tool.

5-      The policy is not made hard to circumvent. Twitter helpfully included instructions on how to change your country (“manually override” the country setting which is determined by IP). I don’t know about you, but does this sound like Twitter is caving? Also, obviously, Tor users and proxy users will be able to access the content fairly easily.

6-      Twitter spokespeople have repeatedly said they will only block content in “In the face of a valid and applicable legal order.” This is a good standard and I don’t think any company can get around this in jurisdictions where they have physical presence; nor is it clear that they should. Of course, we all need to be watching carefully to ensure that they do so and not just cooperate with governments based on “requests.”

I suspect this policy will cause some governments to continue to block Twitter on the whole because it doesn’t make it easy for governments to block content (they have to at least follow some level of procedure) and it creates a “Streisand effect” on censored tweets

Twitter can’t fight all free speech battles by itself; and it can’t change laws or governments around the world, nor can it ignore issues of jurisdiction. In particular, if faced with a court order that requires Twitter to identify dissidents in a country where torture or severe repression is in place, I hope Twitter first makes this as public as possible, and then choses to pull out of that country rather than comply (as Yahoo did in the shameful case of Wang Xiaoning and others in China – and some these people remain in prison after almost a decade).

There is a lot more to be said about the dangers of centralization, the emergence of corporate platforms as larger and larger portions of our political and social commons, and the conflicts between control, profit motives, and free and civic speech these recent developments raise. I don’t want to sound like I am happy to trust a few corporations and that’s it. On the contrary, I’ve repeatedly tried to warn against these dangers. All that said, I don’t think it is helpful if we don’t recognize a good policy when we see one.

In this particular policy, Twitter has done everything it can do to help free-speech advocates around the world except deliver coffee and bagels in the morning.  This is a model of how Internet companies should behave.  I hope Twitter practices this policy as it outlined, and practices maximum transparency and minimum compliance with restrictive laws.

Journalists won’t admit this often, but they tend to be pack animals. I got my first sense of this while hanging out with foreign correspondents and journalists in Turkey–and I later worked with international news organizations as a local organizer and translator. All the journalists, and all their camerapersons, and all their crew, and even their local workers seemed to not only know each other very well, they were almost always together. You could literally spot them from a distance as a large mass of people with their gear, lights and correspondents fixing their hair before going on the air.

Staying in the same hotel. Hanging out in the same bar. Attending the same press conference. Going to the same event. Taking the same picture from near-identical angle.

Packs often made their decisions collectively as well.  While I was in Diyarbakir, Turkey, for example, with one of those large packs covering ongoing unrest Northern Iraq, we were told that the roads were unsafe and travel was not possible via the usual routes. The journalists pushed and prodded and looked for alternative ways—but, in the end, “the pack” gave up and settled into an uneasy wait, eating kebabs and watermelon in the lovely “Kervansaray” hotel we were all staying in. (Yes, journalists also all stay in the same hotel because there is often only one reasonable hotel in an area).

Some, though, abandoned the pack. Christian Amanpour, for example, took off in the middle of the night through a circuitous mountain route. And I know she made it because I ran into her about a week later at the border when she approached me out of the blue and said, “Hey, are you Zeynep?” Yes, I said, and I ventured a guess that I just woke up in an alternate universe where I was the notorious one instead of her.  Truth was, a producer I was working with had asked her to look for me to deliver a message–and there weren’t that many petite brunette women hanging out at the border in what was then a serious conflict region. My alternate universe was deflated but she was indeed in an alternate universe than my pack as she had been in Northern Iraq the past few days while we waited.

This awareness that traditional journalism is often poorly-sourced, and what appears as many reports is actually a single report,  is partly why I was encouraged by the explosion of citizen journalism enabled through social media. News outside the pack, I thought. Many, many, many sources of news instead of the eyes of a united pack.

I understand why journalists stay in those packs—they are often navigating their own way around unchartered territory, worried about safety, and also worried about being scooped. If everyone has the same story, more or less, things are okay, more or less, professionally.

But it certainly results in poorer, thinner news. With shrinking number of foreign correspondents, and with too few correspondents covering too many countries (too big a beat – how can one person cover all of Middle East?), and too little time in any one country, it just makes sense to stick together.

However, journalism isn’t just about multiple sourcing. Journalism also isn’t only about knowing the area one is covering, but it is also about knowing the audience one is communicating with, knowing how to evaluate and bring facts together, and knowing how to evaluate and tell a story to that particular audience. It’s a two-way street with competencies required on both sides of the equation, both compiling and presenting the news.

Hence, we still need journalists who can stand between the multitudes of citizen journalists and news sources to apply the craft of journalism to produce the best stories: to construct narratives, to evaluate news and rumors, and finds ways to most effectively communicate with the audiences.

One such journalist  to emerge in the last year’s events has been NPR’s Andy Carvin who’s been “anchoring” a Middle East based newsfeed on Twitter since December of last year when the Tunisian uprising began. His timeline  has emerged as an “oral history”, a curated story, and an important source of on-the-ground news from the uprisings sweeping the region. Another example is Robert Mackey who writes “The Lede” blog for the New York Times and often covers very important stories.

However, there has also been backlash and rejection of this kind of journalism. The criticisms are not invalid and should not just be dismissed as old-fashioned. While many accept that it is useful, a common issue which comes up is: “how do you know what you hear on social media is true?” I think that is an important question and one that requires a lot of thought and study and expansion of the craft of journalism.

Here, I want to examine some aspects of that question to highlight a key difference between traditional journalism (and its shortcomings) and social-media-based journalism (and its shortcomings).

My case study begins yesterday when the prominent Egyptian newspaper Shorouk posted an article stating that prominent Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd-el Fattah, whose case was recently transferred from military to civilian courts as a result of pressure from Tahrir and elsewhere, was now charged with premeditated murder, among other charges, for his activities the night of the Maspero killings in Egypt which resulted in the death of 27 Copts during a protest march. Alaa is well-known by many people in the West (including Andy Carvin and myself) and the charges were fairly ridiculous even before premeditated murder were added. Alaa is a lifelong activist and blogger and he had written extensively about his efforts that night in question and it seems pretty clear that his effort was all about documenting the killings–and the idea that he’d be out there with guns killing people was quiet shocking, pretty impossible to believe, and also a potential capital offense—putting the life of one of Egypt’s best thinkers and democracy activists on the line.

It starts with this:

Just as Andy Carvin started asking around for confirmation on this story, Al Jazeera English posted an item reporting the same story on its story. However, that too, was based on reaction to the Shorouk piece and did not have independent confirmation.

I was not yet paying attention to this story at the moment but soon after, a key development, as far as I can tell, occurred, through Mona Seif, Alaa’s sister who also leads a campaign against military trials and is thus quite knowledgeable about the court system:

Soon after I saw Andy Carvin’s reporting *and* his exchange with Alaa’s  sister, the Shorouk article was translated verbatim. The statement was very clear and it appeared that the charges now included premeditated murder. Alarmed by the statements from Alaa’s sister, I sent out tweets stating this news. While there was heated discussion of this issue, more Egyptian news organizations jumped on this topic, reporting the same news:

Ahram Online:

Bikya Masr:

However, it soon started emerging that maybe Al Shorouk had it wrong. Another twitter user and physician Mostafa Hussein posted the audio of Alaa’s lawyer explaining the charges, and twitter user and AUC professor Rasha Abdulla reached the lawyer by the phone.

As a result of the efforts of these two citizen journalists, it soon became clear that the charges likely included no new charges and that Shorouk likely got the story wrong:

(Although later that night, Alaa’s sister posted this answer to me which seemed to suggest there might be “group charges” including Alaa, although Alaa’s wife @manal, seemed to think not). In the end, though, it seems that the correct story is that there are no new charges, and the process is just convoluted and confusing for many.

The full story of how it played out can be seen in this Storify by Andy Carvin.

LESSONS AND TOOLS

This case is very informative in identifying weaknesses and strengths of social-media based journalism. Let’s look at how it works best and how it fails, as it did in this case.

1-      Triangulation needs to be more explicit and cautious. The strength of social-media based journalism lies in its ability to deviate from the “pack” behavior, which as I explained often necessarily dominates traditional news reporting. (To be clear, I am not just blaming traditional journalists; this is a structural issue. Too few journalists are covering too varied stories and this forces them to stick together to well-beaten paths).

However, as we saw in this story, online cascades can also be a kind of pack behavior as well. Al Shorouk got echoed by Al Jazeera which got echoed by Andy Carvin, which got echoed by even more news outlets, which got echoed by many of us. Hence, when triangulating, it is important to make sure that it is not an echo chamber but genuine multiple reporting – and that can really be best done by incorporating more citizen journalism as well as more professional journalists into the mix.

2-      Evaluating personal confirmation at cross-cultural, cross-linguistic transition point remains the weakest inflection point. In this case, I was aware that Al Jazeera’s reporting was not independent; however, Alaa’s sister seeming to confirm the case was a clincher for me. It turns out to have been a possible misunderstanding.

Thus, when communicating with people in different cultural/linguistic settings over social media, there needs to be better ways of evaluating the information and also being more explicit about needing more sources. Traditional journalism doesn’t always do that well in this regard either, but the process is more opaque and less visible (good journalists, however, are the ones who do this well). The visibility of the process in social media-based journalism makes it more open to criticism about errors, which are also more visible. This transparency should be seen as a moment for improvement, not for returning back to the days of more opaque, unclear paths.

This is a potential moment to address one of the biggest weaknesses in foreign-news journalism, that journalists are not part of the story they are writing and are, almost by definition, lacking in understanding of the context, by combining it with traditional journalism’s greatest strength over citizen journalism, that journalists are not part of the story they are writing, and thus are in a position to better evaluate multiple points of view and  news with careful verification and a skeptical eye.

Whether citizen or professional-journalism based, the greatest threat to developing a factual, contextual narrative across borders and cultures occurs at that inflection point when news, information and viewpoints are being transferred from one country/person to another country/person, especially through a language barrier. (Yes, I’d love to see more Arabic speaking American journalists who specialize in covering Egypt, for example.)  Social-media based journalism makes that point much more visible and scrutinizable. Such scrutiny should be welcome and stronger methods developed.

3-      Traditional journalism is one more source (often a good, but not perfect one): Too often, many of us treat traditional journalism as infallible even though we know better. For example, many people got taken in by fake blogger “Amina” because the Guardian published an interview with “her” with a Damascus byline – without failing to mention that it was not an interview in person; rather it was conducted over email. Traditional news organizations should be treated as important but not infallible sources of news, especially when reporting about social-media based reports as some their reporters may be lacking key skills in operating in this new medium. (It is not a coincidence that Amina was unmasked firstby Ali Abunimah and Andy Carvin and Liz Henry, all of whom are experienced in evaluating social media information, and not traditional news organizations.)

4-      Process Journalism vs. Product Journalism.  The key difference between a traditional news organizations and social-media reinforced journalism is often in the visibility of the process versus the presentation of a final product.

One reason that social-media journalism comes under fire more often is that the process is more transparent, and necessarily includes more explicit errors, which are almost always corrected rather quickly, but through a messier process. While traditional journalism, too, admits their errors, the news is presented as a product, not a process. Hence, when New York Times made egregious errors in the reporting of the alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, errors it was challenged on *at the time* as it was making them by many experts and other news organizations but which the Times ignored, the consequences can be devastating as many other news organizations take the lead of New York Times and also because many people trust it.

While these errors were corrected many years later, and the New York Times issues a lengthy apology, the war was done and hundreds of thousands of lives were lost or destroyed. Errors in social media, however, tend to get corrected much more visibly and quickly as the challenge itself is more visible and apparent. Hence, it’s just not the case that product journalism, which presents products in an infallible-seeming manner is always the best journalism. Integration of visibility into the process (less reporting about what “senior unnamed sources leaked” for example, as that is an obscuration and should be done very, very judiciously rather than as a routine process) and more explicit integration of factual challenges would improve all journalism.

However, process journalism has significant issues as well:

5-      Process journalism is more demanding from the audience. Even long after correct information about Alaa’s charges came out, tweets replicating the earlier, incorrect information were reverberating through social media. There is a two-fold problem here, one which replicates problems with traditional journalism and one which goes beyond it.

First, in traditional journalism, too, corrections are seen by fewer people than those who see the original incorrect information. However, in social-media based journalism, since the process is more transparent, there are bound to be more error-corrections. At the moment social-media based journalism requires great effort and attention to follow.

For example, the number of people who retweet an original tweet are often far greater than the number who will retweet a correction. Considering that a tweet may then be re-re-retweeted through a network, it becomes hard, if not impossible, to ensure a correction reaches all those it should. (In the Turkish press code, which is hardly exemplary in other respects, court-ordered corrections have to be issued *in the same place with the same font* as the original story. That should be true for all corrections whether in traditional or social-media based journalism but how to achieve that remains elusive).

In other words, while many people may just want to eat the sausage, social-media requires that not only one watch sausage being made, one watch very carefully. That is not a reasonable expectation if a more democratic, wider and correct information diffusion is a goal as systems requiring more effort almost always increase inequalities. The rich –those with attention, time and know-how– will likely get richer while others will be left behind confused.

Yes, we need more people to understand better how the sausage is made, and sometimes watch how it is made, it is not reasonable or a positive contribution to the public sphere if only the people who have the time, attention and resources to watch and understand the whole process are able to enjoy its fruits.

Some suggestions:

So, should we give up on social-media based journalism because it is messier and more demanding? On the contrary, as I argued, it provides us with a important resource to address some of the shortcomings of traditional reporting. I propose three avenues to explore:

1-      Journalists like Robert Mackey, Andy Carvin and others who straddle worlds of social-media generated citizen journalism and traditional journalism are key to ensuring that this emerging resource is made accessible. Often, Mackey’s “The Lede” blog and Carvin’s feed become key sources of important news which is otherwise not covered much, if at all, by the traditional sections of the organization. It’s not that we need social-media journalists, but beat journalists who know how to incorporate social-media as a key resource.

Journalism schools need to classes which teach these skills, and news organizations have train people on them. Some of these skills echo those of traditional journalism, while others are novel ones. (How to detect sockpuppets (developing a “sockdar”), how to triungulate citizen reports, how to find conversations about a particular topic, etc., for example.)

2-      We need better technical tools as well as more people using them. Tools such as “storify” which allow one to “make a story” out of tweets are useful but are barely the tip of the iceberg of what’s needed. For example, it would be great if one could “tag” tweets as “if you accept this tweet, you also accept one more tweet to be sent later.” This could be an opt-in feature and be limited to one tweet per original tweet. I certainly wish I was able to reach everyone who might have seen my earlier, later shown to be incorrect tweets.

Many tools are needed and someone needs to create them. I was happy to recently hear that Columbia school of journalism has five students majoring in journalism and computer science. May this model spread, and may developing new platforms for journalism also be seen properly as journalism–as it requires a proper understanding of the craft and process of journalism, not just how to code, to create these tools.

3-      Pack behaviour of traditional journalism is sometimes being replicated in the cascade behaviour of social-media based journalism. This can be fought against by incorporating *more* citizen journalism and openly encouraging challenges. @Mostafa and @Rashaabdulla, in the end, were the ones that did the journalistic leg work in this story and neither are professionals but both are known as careful and trustworthy individuals. This brings us back to the importance of beat –I trusted Rasha’s reporting, for example, because she is a a fellow professor, social scientist and a colleague and I know her to be careful with facts. For me, it wasn’t about “oh, here’s a tweet” but more about “oh, here’s a person with a solid reputation.” This is no different than what traditional journalism does.

In the end, I’m arguing for neither pure process journalism, which is cumbersome for the audience and will likely increase inequalities in the public sphere, nor product journalism, which hides its errors and process under the rug, but a new merger which is aware of its strengths and weaknesses, with strong commitment to factual reporting, context, triangulation, evaluating of sources, claims and facts, as well as an explicit welcoming of challenges, and, above all, welcoming the visibility of errors not as a reason to abandon contributions from citizen journalism, but as an opportunity for improvement and enrichment.

#FreeMona

It was a calm, quite night, almost nine o’clock, on the eve of Thanksgiving holiday when, out of the corner of my eye, a tweet shook me:

Egyptian-American writer and my friend Mona El Tahawy, who had cut her trip in North Africa short to join the exploding Tahrir protests in her native country, had just sent that out. Short, uncapitalized, clearly written in a hurry. And with that, she went silent.

As a scholar and a concerned citizen, I had been following Egypt’s revolt closely. I knew that the security apparatus in Egypt had, in some ways, grown even more arbitrary since the ouster of long-term autocrat Hosni Mubarak after 18 days of intense protests in Tahrir. About 12,000 civilians had been detained and were subject to “military trials”. Since the eruption of new protests, at least 35 protestors had been killed and thousands injured. A few weeks ago, a prisoner, Essam Atta, had been tortured to death in prison.

At worst, Mona’s life was in danger. At best, she would likely be subject to beatings, sexual abuse.

As I stared at the tweet as my mind raced back to my conversations with Mona about her days in the American University of Cairo and her lifelong, outspoken opposition to Egypt’s autocracy. Because she was a Guardian columnist, a prolific tweeterer and a public speaker, she was identifed with the Egyptian uprising by many. She would certainly be in trouble with her country’s military rulers.

Her tweet stream indicated that she was near  Mohammed Mahmoud street, where clashes had been going on for days between protestors and CSF, the paramilitary police. Most likely, I thought, she was apprehended by people who did not know of her global standing, but saw her as a woman out in the street late at night involved in protests–and I knew this too would be a big danger to her. Soon, though, mid-level higher-ups would discover that she was relatively well-known–and her treatment from then on would likely depend on public reaction to her arrest–both in Egypt and globally.  Prominent Egyptian activist and my friend Alaa Abd-el Fattah, who is now in prison under the military trials regime, was also arrested in 2006 and spent six months in Mubarak’s jails. Alaa later stated that the global campaign to free him probably caused him to spend more time in prison, as the regime realized they had a valuable target, but also spared him from torture.

When activists are arrested, in some cases, it is best to keep it quiet. In some cases it is best to kick up a big storm. Worst option, however, is to kick up a small storm which irritates the powerful, but without enough strength to nudge them to action. Considering the options, I thought Mona needs the latter, and probably cannot be quietly freed anyway. As a woman, she’s in danger from the low-level police who now have her at their mercy. She needs to be plucked out of there, and that requires high-level intervention. As a prominent dissident, she is in danger from those higher-ups who might want to make an example of her the way they are currently doing with Alaa.  Mona needed a huge  campaign which made  it costlier to keep her than to release her.

A few decades ago, contemplating launching a global campaign like this would require that I own, say, a television station or two. I hadn’t even unpacked my television set when I moved to Chapel Hill to take up a position as an assistant professor in University of North Carolina. Heck, I dodn’t even have a landline phone. But, “I” wasn’t just an “I.”  Due to my academic and personal interests, I was connected to a global network of people ranging from grassroots activists in Egypt to journalists and politicians, from ordinary people around the world to programmers and techies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. My options weren’t just cursing at a television set –if her arrest had even made the news in the next few days. I could at least try to see what *we* could do, and do quickly.

Concise, fast, global, public and connected was what we needed, and, for that, there is nothing better than Twitter.

I immediately reached out to Andy Carvin, NPR journalist extraordinaire who’s been covering the Middle East uprisings, and a friend of many years going back digital divide efforts, a topic which I’ve long studied as a scholar. I was very happy to see he was online and, of course, similarly aghast at Mona’s situation.

One challenge of new media environments is that they scatter attention and consequently tools and channels which can unite and focus attention are key to harnessing their power. Hashtags and trending topics are one way in which people can focus among the billions of tweets floating in cyberspace. In fact, a key dynamic in  “social media” is that it works best when coordinated with “focusers”: trending topics, Al Jazeera, Andy Carvin (whose stream is widely followed) are all focusers, albeit very different ones (Well, one is a satellite TV channel, one is a cool guy with a very cute, huge dog, and the last one is an algorithm). Hence, the “Occupy” movement was deeply disappointed when Andy Carvin did not cover them, as his beat was Middle East, and as he already works about seven days a week. Occupy activists knew that without Carvin, they had lost a potential focuser. (Police brutality and overreaction solved that problem for Occupy movement by garnering traditional media coverage which served as a crucial focuser).

So, first, I knew we needed a hasthag. A focuser.

Wanting a short one due to Twitter’s character limits, I proposed “#Mona”. Andy quickly checked and realized that it was already in use and suggested “#freemona.” I tweeted out an agreement and opened a column in my Tweetdeck to check only tweets tagged “#freemona”. In about a minute, the column started flowing too quickly for me to read everything.

20 minutes later, #freemona was trending worldwide.

Ok, that’s the global campaign, I thought as I marveled at how quickly it had taked off with barely a nudge. In the pre-social media world, it might have taken weeks and a lot of luck to achieve even a sliver of such awareness globally.

But that wasn’t the only leg of our frantic,  crowdsourced efforts. @Cairowire, curated by @sarahbadr, contacted the US Embassy — and informed us of this fact on Twitter so we could avoid flooding them with calls. She live-tweeted her call so we could provide as accurate information as we knew in response to questions from the Embassy.  Was she a US citizen? I knew she was, and others chimed in. Where was she seen last? What was her birthday? I looked it up and answered. Who was she with? People chimed in with what they knew.  @Cairowire told us the embassy had taken down the information.

Many times, the most dangerous moment for a dissident or an activist is the police station where low-level functionaries can have impunity to do the worst. The combination of her gender, personality, citizenship and her role as a media person was a very dangerous mix for that “police station” phase. We needed to try for very high-level intevention to pluck her out–and it was almost 4am in Cairo and a holiday in the United States.

With very similar thoughts –and we were constantly conversing–, Andy Carvin and I both reached out to Anne-Marie Slaughter, prominent Princeton professor and former advisor to Hillary Clinton. She’s probably better known to most people as Twitterer extraordinaire, @SlaughterAM where she can be regularly found mixing it up with high-level politicians, activists, ordinary people around the world. To my relief, she was online. She jumped to action. Soon, she  reported that she had reached out to her contacts at the State Department, and that this was being dealt with at the highest levels as the urgent situation it was:

Egyptian activists on the ground, who had been organizing against the arbitrary arrest and detentions, were best placed find her and to provide her with legal and other resources. Cairo never sleeps, and, sure enough, many of them were online. Shahira Abouellail, @fazerofzanight, who works tirelessly with the no military trials campaign responded quickly and informed us of the likely sequence of events, places she might be at and that she would make sure that lawyers would start looking for her early in the morning. (In fact, all through last week,  Shahira had been talking about all the people being detained, beaten and abused as the protests grew).

A similar outreach effort was launched, especially to the tech community, to  see if Mona’s tweets, or tweets of people we thought might have been arrested with her, contained geolocation information which was available to Twitter (as storified by @katz):

Soon,  though, that turned out not to be the case (although that had been essential in confirming the arrest of Slim Amamou, for example when Slim “checked in” at the Ministry of Interior in Tunisia during the protests.)

Finally, at the same time, global media had started picking up on Mona’s disappearance. I urged my Egyptian tweeps to contact local media as exposure can sometimes be the best protection for a dissident as storified by@katz):

Many people misunderstand the power of publicity on repressive regimes. Just because the power of a state is relatively unchecked by institutional balances does not means that it has infinite repressive capacity, or that it is unconcerned about public opinion. All regimes, even the most repressive ones, are concerned about legitimacy and appearances. In a debate with Andrew Rasijej, Evgeny Morozov tweeted the following:

This, of course, is naïve. Egyptian army absolutely gives a damn about social media. You only need to notice that they have their very own Facebook page and release their “communiqués” solely through Facebook.. Why? Because, like all repressive regimes, they realize that their power rests not just on coercion, but also a degree of legitimacy and acquiescence among the public–and the public sphere increasingly incorporates networked citizenry on social media. Hence,  they are there where they rightly perceive many Egyptian activists and citizens are. In the 21^st century, no regime worth its salt will ignore social media; those who do will find themselves looking for places to retire.

In fact, I know of no better proof about the power of social media to potentially empower dissent than the numerous anecdotes in Evgeny Morozov’s book about the extraordinary efforts authoritarian regimes go to suppress, control and censor social media. If it were actually irrelevant, they would have happily ignored it. Instead, they are on full-alert, attempting to fight social media on all cylinders.

It’s also naïve to think that the Egyptian army does not give a damn about the State Department, especially when it comes to releasing activists. SCAF, like all repressive apparatus, makes calculations about costs and benefits–and keeping a prominent journalist in detention becomes more costly when combined with a global publicity campaign, State Department pressure, Egyptian activists, as well as local and global media coverage.

Of course, such global campaigns also play a role in how State Department acts. State Department is the foreign policy arm of the most powerful country in the world and, as such it will act according to what it perceives as the foreign policy interests of the United States. However, global campaigns can make it harder for foreign policy interests of the United States to align with supporting repressive regimes. (I personally and strongly believe that the true and long-term interests of the United States also lie in this direction and that historians will look at its support for repressive regimes as colossal mistakes). I believe that social media can help us organize to make sure big governments are pushed to do the right thing. Besides, State Department, like any other institution, is composed of people and I am sure some of those people would rather help do the right thing. “The Whole World is Watching” is such a resonant slogan for a reason.

So, it was a perfect storm. A global social media campaign, institutional power, grassroots Egyptian activists, network-savvy global players and traditional media converged upon Mona El Tahawy’s case. It had been merely a few hours and I thought that all that we could do was done. People on the ground were aware and mobilized, global media was covering the event, official attempts were being undertaken, and a global conversation of concern was taking place in the still dizzily flying #freemona column on my monitor. I went to bed, still buzzed from the frantic activity but in need of some rest.

After a few hours of restless sleep, I woke up and immediately checked my Mona’s twitter feed. It beamed, “I AM FREE”:

  Sexually assaulted, beaten, arms and hands broken, but in high spirits, she was out. Through broken bones, she detailed her ordeal first on Twitter, and later on CNN, BBC and Egyptian local media and beyond:

 Social Media’s Role: Untangling Causality in Social Science

Was she freed because of the global campaign? While it is always important to carefully consider the evidence, in social science, always beware of people who automatically say “But you haven’t proven it!” because that shows they either don’t understand how social science works, or they do and they are disingenuous and are seeking argument for the sake of argument or attention. That’s just now the way it works in social science.

To put it bluntly, there is no way to conclusively prove anything in social science simply because we cannot do real experiments. (Take the identical person, place them in an alternative universe under equal conditions except social media and see how it would evolve. You see the problem: no alternate universe, no time machine, no cloning technology). So the question is never “did you prove it” but rather “what’s the evidence, what more data can we bring to this question, what’s our conceptual model and is it convincing?”

Social scientists do advance knowledge. As always, the more data the better. However, almost always, data remains suggestive and associative (it seems more of X was associated with more of Y). In order to understand a dynamic, we also look at causative mechanisms, narratives, comparative cases and limits — what’s missing and not happening as what’s not happening can be as useful.

Good analysis in social science also requires good theoretical understanding which basically means correctly conceptualizing the dynamics in play. Start wrong, and you aren’t going anywhere.

Most important conceptual point is this: The idea that “social media does help make X happen” DOES NOT mean it was just social media–because that is a theoretical stance which views social media as not part of this word. In fact, critics of social media often fall into this trap as they keep repeating “it wasn’t just social media” as if that were a valid criticism. To state “it wasn’t just social media” is a mere and trivial description of the world, not an analysis of dynamics of how social media plays a role – was it big or small? Was it crucial or trivial? What were the pathways?

“It wasn’t just social media” is not a refutation because as stated, that sentence is devoid of cognitive content.

This theoretical stance is also why I try to avoid terms like “virtual” because it suggests something “not real”. Social media is “real”, as real as anything else out there. Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey call this “augmented reality”. I prefer to call it just reality.

The interesting question is, always, what role did social media play in altering dynamics of an event? And at first level of abstraction, the answer is often, yes, social media played a role because it is now an increasingly integral and important part of communicative infrastructure, part of the formation of the public sphere, part of networked activism, and part of everyday life. In the 21^st century, it will be increasingly impossible to do political analyses without discussing social media dynamics as an integral part of the story.

You cannot tell the story of the Arab uprisings, for example, without including the story of the role of social media. Again, though, that is obviously not the only dynamic–how could it be? As Clay Shirky nicely explains  here, when people say “Social Media did X”, they mean that it played an important role because that is how the English language works. When we say, “A person was shot by a gun” we don’t mean “the gun got up and shot the person” (well, not yet anyway as robotics may change that); rather, we mean that “someone pulled the trigger and that it is important that the weapon was a gun” –a lot more lethal–than say a pointed stick –much less a danger–or a knife– still dangerous but slower and often more survivable. Hence, the full story of the Arab uprisings will include determined activists, labor unions, human-rights advocates, ordinary people, Facebook and Twitter, protests in Tahrir, dissension within the elites, United States and other governments and many other factors. But, it doesn’t include everything so this is not a laundry list. Sword fights, for example, were not part of the equation in the Arab Spring as they would be if it were an uprising in the Middle Ages.

So, to conceptually analyze the role of social media in Mona’s case let’s look at what it did do, as well as comparative cases of its limits and challenges.

Social Media and Dynamics of a Global Campaign

1- Speed. Social media speeds up everything.

Without social media, so many people wouldn’t have known so quickly that she was arrested, beaten. With one tweet, she reached out to tens of thousands of people all at once. In the past, there would have been a response, but it would likely have been much slower. A campaign by Amnesty International in the old days might take days to organize, especially during Thanksgiving. And “slower” and “faster” are just not the same dynamic for multiple reasons. In other words, something faster doesn’t give you what something slower would give you, just quicker. It results in a different conclusion. Faster is different.

2- Social media allows for complex, diverse ad hoc networks to come together:

I cannot fathom getting a such diverse group of people ranging from journalists to Egyptian activists to State Department officials responding to the same situation, in a coordinated fashion, so quickly, without Twitter (and a few emails. It was almost all Twitter). Even simple questions can be a nightmare to organize. Who will call the embassy? What’s her date of birth? Who’s arranging the lawyer?

3-Social media is integrated in an increasingly global, networked public sphere:

Once again, people from Japan to Brazil to Australia to China talked about her disappearance. There is simply no analog to such grassroots-powered intervention in the public sphere, at a global level at that, pre-social media. Yes, it is not one big happy family but it is a level of integration that simply was not there a mere decade ago. Along with all the fractures, divides, inequalities, and conflicts, a networked public sphere has emerged. And it is global.

4-Social Media fosters personal interaction:

Because Mona was a prolific tweeter, she had interacted personally with many people in the past and that was probably important in her visibility. Before days of social media, she would be just a face on a newspaper column–still powerful, but not as personal. And personal connections matter deeply for human beings. And, yes, personal connections can flourish online as well as online/offline. She wasn’t just a face or a columnist or a public speaker– she was Mona to tens and tens of thousands of people.

5- Social media works for prominent people better (rich get richer):

Social media, like almost new tools, can differentially empower the already connected (rich get richer) as opposed to the completely or weakly unconnected. There are 12,000 people who were detained by military prosecutors in Egypt and many languish in jails without such attention.

However, this is not an either/or situation. Whether or not #freemona and #freealaa help others depends on whether they become “charismatic megafauna” –where a prominent example helps the whole ecology– or part of a “celebrity system”–where a few people get the attention in isolation.

Charismatic megafauna is how ecologists refer to popular animals such as the Panda or tigers–powerful symbols which help move people to preserve vast amounts of landscape. Ecologists aren’t just interested in playing with cuddly panda or tiger babies, and would like to save the whole ecosystem — but carefully and deliberately put faces of pandas and tigers on their campaigns because of the the way human brain and human societies work. It is just very hard to move large numbers of people without powerful and sympathetic symbols.

Mona and Alaa are both such powerful and sympathetic symbols and they are both aware of this. In spite of the fact that his wife is about to give birth to their first child, Alaa refused deals which would have gotten him released if only he would accept a few limits on his speech because he realizes the powerful symbolic position he occupies. In her very first interview, Mona immediately talked about her fellow detainees and how those less privileged than her face much worse fates. Still, though, it is not just up to their efforts whether attention bestowed only upon them. Activists and concerned people must be cognizant of this fraught negotiation between using the power of the spotlight on one person versus using it shine it on wider swaths.

This can’t be done just by complaining about the “celebrity” or “star” system as not only is that not going away (because it is a deep human impulse), and it is often the best way to start a campaign. The problem is making sure it doesn’t stop there–and that remains an open question and constant struggle.

6- Personal networks, unsurprisingly, remain the underlying key anchors of the global social media networks (hubs matter and hubs tend to be dense and interconnected among each other):

The strength of personal networks is in social movements and campaigns unsurprising. However, the point needs to be made explicitly because so many people still talk about “social media” as something virtual, or something “not real”. My observations and studies from the Arab Uprisings show that most of the key “hub” activists had deep personal connections among each other – connections which often started on social media, sometimes migrated offline, sometimes did not–but were nonetheless strong and deep. In other words, “strong ties” are important: the fallacy is thinking these ties are not aided by, or sometimes solely lived through social media. Such personal, powerful but relatively small networks also raise important questions about how things might have been different if either Andy Carvin or Ann Marie Slaughter were mashing sweet potatoes instead of being online that night? (The answer isn’t an automatic “totally different” as dynamic networks can both exhibit “hub-and-spoke” structures and  replace “hubs” quickly if one is taken out. Still, the question is an important one to consider)

7- Traditional big interests remain powerful and, along with dynamics of the attention economy, social media cannot overcome all obstacles (Bahrain. Bahrain).

Egypt and Tahrir have managed to capture the world’s heart and interest. The ongoing protests in Bahrain –a smaller, less-populated country where U.S. and Saudi Arabia have much deeper entrenched interests and somewhat more complicated by ethnic tensions– remains mostly off the radar in spite of prominent online organizing and broad participation in protests.

That is not to say that social media played no role (it almost always plays a major role) in the Bahrain’s protests. In fact, most of the country is online and the battle for legitimacy is raged both online and in the streets. Without the Internet, the opposition in Bahrain may have never managed to organize and mount such a campaign. With the Internet, it can mount such a campaign but cannot overcome the limits of being a small country in the world’s oil-producing region, hence very big interests aligned against it. (As this story is ongoing, it remains to be seen how it all plays out). I would still argue that social media has made it harder to suppress Bahraini citizens’ aspirations for more democracy and participation. A more complex case is unfolding in Syria (not going into that as this post is long enough) where lack of organized dissent before the uprising makes it very hard to use social media to organize.

8-Just like pre-social media, it remains easier to organize for “no” harder to organize complex discussions:

Again and again, social media have proven very useful in organizing single issue campaigns “Down with X” or “Release Y” but it is a lot more complicated to organize a complex course of action. This, of course, is not a feature of social media but a feature of life — a “no” is more simple and only requires agreeing to a single point whereas the space of all possible versions of “yes” is vast and complicated. Social media does not magically solve this problem. Wikipedia is a very important example in this regard, both to understand the possibilities (pretty useful, fairly accurate entries are produced most of the time) and the limits (Wikipedia is a high-conflict, mostly-male environment with powerful “wikignomes” who wield a lot of power.)

In the end, did the #freemona campaign help free Mona? My conclusion is that it quite likely played a key role, as analyzed in the above multi-layer mix. Without a social media campaign, she might have languished in jail for days or months the way thousands of people on whom such attention is not bestowed in Egypt are languishing in jails. As a U.S.-Egyptian dual citizen, as a columnist, as a prominent social-media personality, and as someone with many personal connections who could be mobilized to help her, she was well-positioned to be helped by these efforts. I also don’t doubt that the attention her case is getting will help bring more attention to the problem of arbitrary detentions, arrests and military trials in Egypt – again, compared to a pre-social media world where there would be zero to no attention, this is a massive step forward. (Added: By no means this is enough–I am comparing with the past rather than making a normative statement).

As always, though, a complex mix of causal factors, from protests in Tahrir and elsewhere in Egypt to international geopolitics will structure the future of Egypt. It is also clear that the networked public sphere is now an integral, causal dynamic in this multi-dimensional, multi-causal system. This makes it even more important to move beyond trivial denounciations –“it wasn’t just the social media”– to a deeper understanding which looks at specfic actors, dynamics, networks and beyong to understand, and also, to change this world.

PS. Edited the evening of Friday, Nov. 25 to correct typos, add links, and slightly clarify a few sentences which were missing words. May continue to edit for typos and for adding links. On Monday, November 28th, I added a few more tweets using the excellent storify by @katz which can be found here.

Guest post by Susannah Vila

This post draws from over 30 in-depth, semi structured interviews conducted with coordinators of and participants in the Egyptian revolution between March and August 2011. 

By late July, Egyptian protesters in Cairo had been camped out in Tahrir Square for nearly 3 weeks. Though the mood was jovial, it was clear that residents of the square were considering an approaching end game.

During this wind-down of the 3 week sit-in, I met Ahmed Maher from the April 6th Youth Movement a few blocks from Tahrir at a coffee shop. April 6 (hereafter A6Y) is perhaps the most well-known network of young people coordinating actions during the years before January 25^th. In recent months a spate of new, wired revolutionary youth movements, many of which were formed by Egyptians that were politically activated by the winter’s uprising, have also emerged.

Maher still has a day job, and does all of his April 6 related work after sunset. It was nearly midnight when we got together. He said a few hellos – nearly half of the customers seemed to know him –sat down, and rushed into an account of A6Y’s recent growth.

“There is no split,” he assured me, referring to accounts in the Egyptian and international press of infighting and divisions among A6Y members. This affirmation was partly true. A6Y did indeed turn out to be much more intact than I had expected. It still, however, struggled to communicate its goals and messages to the more tech-savvy revolutionaries that were sitting in mere blocks away.

The fact that it wasn’t hard to find someone in Tahrir who would express disillusionment with A6Y is indicative of the larger challenge that he and colleagues face today: after the political sphere is broken open by uprising, how do you maintain and build upon support among the highly-wired crowd while simultaneously recruiting offline Egyptians? A6Y’s struggle to address this question has left it, as FP’s Marc Lynch put it last week, one of many wired revolutionary movements currently “floundering” and unable to connect either with one another or with the general public. But, as my discussions with Maher and others would make clear, this is not for lack of trying.

Adapting the Organizational Structure for Offline Outreach

In the years before the uprising of January 25th, fear of state repression made offline organizing a difficult feat. The online space – from blogs and YouTube to Facebook- created an alternative public sphere wherein a movement could more covertly engage with, and be discovered by, new supporters. As one Egyptian activist put it, “we couldn’t talk like this on the street…we had to do it online.”

The transformation of Egyptian political culture after Mubarak’s ouster has made it easier to engage and mobilize citizens in the offline space. Taking advantage of its newfound ability to organize freely on the street, A6Y has restructured to allocate more resources to recruitment efforts. Grabbing a pen from the table next to us, Maher drew me a diagram of the 4 committees through which April 6 allocated responsibility before the uprising and then a diagram of the 6 that it consists of today.

Before January 25th , A6Y was divided into a media, political, finance and people’s action committee. Since the work of the people’s action committee – recruiting and mobilizing new members – can now be done publicly and offline, its mandate expanded and its management structure was split it into three committees with separate leadership.

The purpose of expanding and refining its recruitment strategy is to gain further leverage and power in the political sphere. The more loyal, reliable and organized the movement’s membership is, this thinking goes, the more effectively it will be able to hold government accountable.Rather than simply joining a Facebook group, a member must now pay monthly dues and carry an A6Y identification card.

By raising the barrier to entry, Maher hopes to enhance the value of membership as a political currency. “Do we want to be like the Muslim Brotherhood?” he said. “Ask us in 80 years – that’s how long they have had,” referring to the brotherhood’s success in creating (while it was banned from politics) a civil society organization that draws political clout from the loyalty and breadth of its membership.

Building Political Support by Addressing Social Issues

A few days after my meeting with Maher, I spoke with Wael Mustafa (named changed to preserve anonymity), the leader of the street campaigns committee that acts at the center for A6Y’s offline efforts.He was quick to stress that online social networks are not a large part of his day-to-day work.

We go to different neighborhoods and ask people what their problem is – in one area [for example] there is a huge sewage problem, we take in that information, and take it to the [appropriate government] ministry,” he said of his most recent effort, called the “What’s Your Problem?” campaign.

April 6 hopes to use campaigns like this one to grow into an organization that better connects Egyptians with government –lobbying the latter to do the bidding of the former. The fate of the “What’s Your Problem?” campaign may be an important metric for A6Y’s larger success and, with this in mind, Mustafa told me, they had just decided to create a new committee tasked exclusively with interfacing between citizens and appropriate government ministries. They called it, fittingly, the “ministry follow-up committee.”

April 6^th Leadership Still Relies on Facebook to Share Information

Mustafa, as head of a committee, and Maher, as the Coordinator, make up 2 of 25 people who sit at the top of the organization’s hierarchy. A leader in any given governorate spends the day talking to people in his community. He has conversations in the street, on the phone, and at daily local meetings. Then, at the end of the day, he goes to “the kitchen—the name given to the private Facebook group that primary coordinators like Mustafa and Maher have been using since before the uprising.

The kitchen is indicative of a formal hierarchy that previously existed but that has been solidified since February. It is called that because, as Maher told me, “it’s where we are cooking up our decisions.” After deciding on next steps in this online space, primary coordinators channel their decisions back down to localities through the same combination of face-to-face conversation, mobile phones and online media.

Too Many Messages and Only One Facebook Page

A6Y continues to use Facebook and Twitter as it did before the revolution: for both private, group decision-making and to curate and broadcast political news. This doesn’t seem to leave much space to disseminate information about offline activities like the “What’s Your Problem” campaign. For a movement attempting to recruit, their ability to publicize and promote their successful ventures is perhaps still insufficient.

The most dedicated revolutionaries, many of which were not active before the January uprising, know little about A6Y’s efforts at offline expansion. After my initial coffee with Maher, I met up with a member of Egypt’s new “Twitterati” activist crowd. I told her everything that Mustafa and Maher described to me. It was all news to her – and to most others I spoke to in the vicinity.

At the same time, the general public has also lost patience with protesters—including A6Y. As one Tahrir protester(who has nothing to do with April 6) told me “we’ve lost the street because our messaging is wrong, and I attribute that to a lack of a clear roadmap” for the future. Maher agreed, saying: “people are concerned about their salaries and they want us to stop protesting.”

This is compounded by the fact that their main communication tool from before the revolution, Facebook, is not conducive to the more complex methods for information broadcasting that’s required of the organization that it is trying to become. Social media is more useful for disseminating one message – we are fed up and want Mubarak out –to as many people as possible than for targeting different messages to different audiences. Ideally, A6Y would have a Facebook page intended for Tahrir Square types, and one meant for the wider, more reluctant segment of the population that joined the site more recently. (This, of course, is just one aspect of a communications effort that must target the still offline majority).

What’s Next?

“The Egyptian revolution is unique. In every other one, the person who caused it goes into government right after. We haven’t done that in Egypt,” said Maher. Indeed, from Otpor to the Orange Revolution, this is the first 21^st century movement that has opted to remain a lobbying coalition rather than entering politics.

That not much has changed in Egypt in terms of who wields political power underscores the importance of A6Y’s decision to take on this role. But their expansion holds just as much peril as promise. It is hard enough for a movement to maintain support among an increasingly frustrated citizenry after a political uprising. By formalizing membership and shifting resources towards recruiting the formerly apolitical, A6Y runs the risk of deserting its base of support.

The challenges that the April 6 Youth Movement face today raise bigger questions about lessons learned for revolutionaries after uprisings. How can a movement that largely began on Facebook take organizing offline while also engaging with the younger, more wired activists, who formerly served as an important segment of its base, and are now less likely to know what its goals, plans and activities are – let alone support it?

Ex-CEO of Google Eric Schmidt made waves recently during an interview with NPR’s Andy Carvin where he defended the current implementation Google +“real names” policy:

The Internet would be better if we had an accurate notion that you were a real person as opposed to a dog, or a fake person, or a spammer or what have you.
…And the Internet did not develop this in many ways because the Internet came out of universities where the issue of authentication wasn’t such a big issue. Everybody trusted everybody, you didn’t have these kinds of things.

But my general rule is people have a lot of free time and people on the Internet, there are people who do really really evil and wrong things on the Internet, and it would be useful if we had strong identity so we could weed them out. I’m not suggesting eliminating them, what I’m suggesting is if we knew their identity was accurate, we could rank them. Think of them like an identity rank.

There is a lot to unpack here but let me start by saying this: if the goal is to create a social network, a place where people can socialize, share, chat, argue, organize, and –yes- vociferously disagree, it is true that stable and embedded identities are more conducive to this outcome. Sociological research talks about “deindividuation” –the notion that without being closely tied to individual accountability, individuals may commit acts which are outside of social norms which would otherwise bind them.  Plus, in a reduced-cues environment such as the Internet, it may well be easier say things which are hurtful as one is spared from having to look someone in the eye (and we do know face-to-face interaction indeed taps into powerful and deep parts of our biological endowment as humans).

In fact, thinking about Eric Schmidt’s remarks reminded me of that famous scene in “To Kill a Mockingbird” when little Scout Finch (9 years old) and her lawyer father Atticus face a mob trying to lynch, Tom Robinson, a Black men falsely accused of rape in U.S. Deep South in the pre-civil rights era. As the angry, agitated crowd gathers outside the jail, Scout recognizes one person, Mr. Cunningham, and calls out to him by name. Here’s the event, in Scout’s words:

In ones and twos, men got out of the cars. Shadows became substance as lights revealed solid shapes moving toward the jail door. Atticus remained where he was. The men hid him from view. … They were sullen-looking, sleepy-eyed men who seemed unused to late hours. I sought once more for a familiar fare. And at the center of the semi-circle I found one.

“Hey, Mr. Cunningham.”

The man did not hear me, it seemed.

“Hey, Mr. Cunningham. How’s your entailment gettin’ along?”

Mr. Walter Cunningham’s legal affairs were well known to me; Atticus had once described them at length. The big man blinked and hooked his thumbs in his overall straps. He seemed uncomfortable; he cleared his throat and looked away. My friendly overture had fallen flat….

 “Don’t you remember me, Mr. Cunningham? I’m Jean Louise Finch. You brought us some hickory nuts one time, remember?” I began to sense the futility one feels when unacknowledged by a chance acquaintance.

“I go to school with Walter,” I began again. “He’s your boy ain’t he? Ain’t he, sir?”

Cunningham was moved to a faint nod. He did know me, after all.

“He’s in my grade,” I said, “and he does right well. He’s a good boy,” I added, “a real nice boy. We brought him home for dinner one time. Maybe he told you about me, I beat him up one time but he was real nice about it. Tell him hey for me, won’t you?”

Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in….“Entailments are bad,” I was advising him, when I slowly awoke to the fact that I was addressing the entire aggregation. The men were all looking at me, some had their mouths half-open. …

I began to feel sweat gathering at the edges of my hair; I could stand anything but a bunch of people looking at me. They were quite still.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

Atticus said nothing. I looked around and up at Mr. Cunningham, whose face was equally impassive. Then he did a peculiar thing. He squatted down and took me by both shoulders.

“I’ll tell him you said hey, little lady,” he said.

Then he straightened up and waved a big paw. “Let’s clear out,” he called. “Let’s get going, boys.”

As they had come, in ones and twos the men shuffled back to their ramshackle cars. Doors slammed, engines coughed, and they were gone.

Indeed this is a very moving example of a person being pulled away from a “deindividualized” mob situation back into being an individual, a father, a neighbor, a citizen, a person. I’m sure many school children were moved to tears by Scout’s simple act of humanity–and the human response it provokes. This is also a classic of social-psychology in terms of demonstrating mob behaviors. It seems to bolster Schmidt’s point perfectly… but wait! Who?

Scout? Who’s Scout? Didn’t she just say her name was Jean Louise? Would Google+ terminate her account if she signed up as Scout? What’s on your government issued document, “Scout”?

While Google+ terms-of-service do say you can use the “name you are known by in everyday life”, Google+ has been suspending user accounts of people who signed up with the name they are known by–indeed, who is to say what name you are known by except your social network? If Scout is Scout to her father and to her friends, she is Scout except she can’t ever prove that except to say, here I stand. As Scout.

And my point is that Schmidt is confusing what they want (a troll-lite, spam-free platform in which people interact/share with each other) with a policy of real names, however one can define those. Indeed in response to Andy Carvin’s next question, Schmidt makes a statement which makes me think Google still does not understand what really makes Facebook work (hint, it’s social norms more than its policies):

Question: One of the early controversies around Google+ is you not allowing people to use nicknames. Andy Carvin, who’s over from NPR actually at the festival, is asking on Twitter: “How does Google justify its real names only policy on Google+ when it could put some people at grave risk?”.

Schmidt: Well, the first comment is that Google+ is completely optional. In fact, many many people want to get in, if you don’t want to use it, you don’t have to. …. There are obviously people for which using their real name is not appropriate, and it’s completely optional, and if you’re one of those people don’t do it. Seems obvious.

What Schmidt and, presumably, Google+ wants is stable identities embedded in social networks. And it’s true such a platform requires effort and attention. However, a “real name” policy isn’t the way to get there. Neither is insisting that people use a more conventional name or their name on a government issued ID. (Most of the cases I’ve encountered seem to be people who go by unusual names like “Skud”)

The reason that Facebook works is because it is practically non-optional, i.e. it is the place to be and to find friends and family members; it’s where everyone else is. It’s the opposite of what Schmidt says Google+ will become, optional. And in order to be found, people often choose to use a name that they are known by to their social network. Facebook does not work because Facebook is after everyone with a nickname, suspending their accounts: my research shows that, even among college students, about 10-20% use some sort of nickname—however, it’s a nickname they’ve shared with people they want to interact with. That’s the key to Facebook–the embedded, prolonged, sustained interaction, not the exact name or “real” name.

Facebook also launched within relatively encapsulated communities like Harvard and then to other colleges, and expanded town by town, country by country. Usually, there would be a rush to sign up as Facebook opened up in a new college and pretty soon, a large number of people embedded dense networks would be on Facebook (plus, early Facebook had strong privacy protections which helped it attract people).

As a late-comer, Google may not have the same options as Facebook. But at a minimum, it can learn that the key to success is not real names (remember, about 20% of Facebook may be nicknames) but stable, embedded identities in which people have invested time and effort. And the way to get there is to become a non-optional platform, a place where people feel like they would miss out if they were not on. Shrugging, oh, well, our platform is optional is exactly the way to make your platform, well, first an optional place, then a take-it-or-leave-it choice, then a chore, finally a why-bother moment, followed by a platform-death. (Buzz, anyone?).

Google launched among the tech community which tends to have widespread weak ties–and this has it pluses and minuses. (For one thing, it does not completely encapsulate any locale except perhaps Silicon Valley which is a major disadvantage). Further, the tech community tends to be a place many people adopt a chosen name. Instead of being very happy that well-known, well-embedded people like Skud were signing up, Google chose to spend its efforts on trying to cut the very tree whose limb it’s sitting on. (And this is a completely self-inflicted, inexplicable wound: as the Turkish saying goes, the tree being cut is most sad about the fact that the handle of the ax is wood, i.e. also from trees).

So, what should Google do? I think Circles is a very strong feature and a very attractive point. There is clearly a need for such a reasonable way to share; the fact that Facebook is rushing to adapt some of these innovations is a good sign for Google. Hangouts are great. Other community features need to catch-up very quickly.

To make Google+ succeed, the key thing Google needs to do is expand as fast as possible (to get network effects), encapsulate dense communities so people can embed within their natural social networks, and with features which provide what one can’t find on Facebook (circles, quick privacy controls, hangouts) or Twitter (less spam, ability to mix directed and undirected networks, visibility controls, space to write) with killer features on managing the social network which make people want to invest time and effort.

In that respect, Google+ should invest real resources, for example, to keep G+ clear of spammers and trolls – by hiring people who deal with this, for example, and also by setting up an easy way to report/mute/block trolls and spam. It should create an awesome interface to deal with trolls, to mute posters, for example, to partake in conversations in a flexible manner, for thread-owners to have the ability to quickly and easily adjust participation in their own threads. (Don’t anyone cry censorship; it’s my thread and I’m under no obligation to discuss everything with everyone unless I’m acting as a public official, say, but that is not for Google to enforce). I can think of dozens of features that no online platform really has but would actually benefit conversations. That’s a better place to use resources–especially compared with trying to hunt down whose name was what on their birth certificate.

The question of activists under authoritarian regimes is a thorny one (and I’ve written more about it here). However, Google’s stance doesn’t even make business sense. It would be to Google’s benefit (as well as the benefit of the activists) if Google+ allowed for stable identities embedded in social networks masked by nicknames in such countries. (Again, it’s the embeddedness in social networks, not the name which provides the social norms: “Tell him hey for me, won’t you?” Mr Cunningham is pulled into a community; his name is just the rope which pulls him. It doesn’t have to be the name on his birth certificate; it just has to be the name he accepts and recognizes.)

It’s not just good human rights practice but also good business practice because networks succeed if people–yes real people but using names they choose—populate them. And there are millions of people who live under such regimes, and millions of people outside these countries who might like to interact with them as members of large diasporas, as family members, as journalists, as ordinary citizens. If they were on Google+, I’d be there more often, too.

So, Google, you want real people, not “real names.” Real people often use names other than those on their driver’s license or government issued ID for multiple reasons. And people hang out where they are most comfortable, and people are most comfortable when their identity is under their own control, rather than dictated by corporate policies. And online platforms succeed to the degree people spend time and effort to embed themselves in real relationships; and it’s those embedding that creates the behaviors Schmidt says that Google is seeking, not naming policies or draconian enforcement by bureaucracies.

Online platforms succeed if you can establish a reputation to defend; if you have gotten to know people; if you kept your friends; found old ones; if your conversations are not drowned out by spam; if you have solid, easy and intuitive tools to deal with trolls (who may well be using their drivers license names); if you’ve occasionally gotten in flame wars and maybe cyber-kissed and made up; if you’ve shared silly pictures and shared outrage over protestors shot by snipers; and if they’ve become place to be… In other words, online platforms succeed to the degree they become somewhat non-optional to our social existence. (By non-optional, I don’t mean we’d shrivel and die without it, but that our lives are so enriched by the connectivity that we don’t really want to live without the access to each other the platform provides).

Online platforms don’t succeed if, instead, they spend their resources on trying to muzzle Scout Finch. Let her speak, Google+, as Scout or as Jean Louise as she chooses, and it might just be the right business decision as well as the right thing to do.