In January 2011, anti-government protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square were in urgent need of medical supplies. Sixteen hundred kilometres away, a pharmacy student used Twitter and Google Docs to organise the delivery of essential provisions to ten field hospitals that had been hastily constructed to patch up those injured from conflict with security forces. The account, @TahrirSupplies, raised $40,000 (£32,000) to buy two surgical machines to treat tear-gas injuries. The inspiration for the relief effort? A cupcake store's viral hashtag campaign. For academic and author Zeynep Tufekci, this was another example of how digital tools are changing protest.
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Tufekci grew up in turkey, an increasingly authoritarian state where censorship is commonplace. When the internet arrived there, its potential for activists was clear. "This was going to change everything," she says. But it didn't. "I think the turning point came around the Gezi Park protests in 2013," says Tufekci, who now lives in the US and works as an associate professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina. The protest was taking place as Edward Snowden laid bare the power of state surveillance, but that wasn't on the mind of many in the crowd. "I was in the middle of this large-scale protest where everybody is just so happy that their phones allow them to circumvent censorship," says Tufekci. "And on the other hand you're seeing this news of massive surveillance. These things were starting to collide."
The internet has enabled protest on a scale like never before - whether the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street - but it hasn't led to proportional change. Answering why is the crux of Tufekci's latest book, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. Tufekci's upbringing offered her a position to watch the collision of the internet and activism. Born around the corner from Istanbul's Gezi Park, she experienced a coup and its after-effects while growing up. As a programmer working for IBM in the 90s, she circumvented Turkey's censorship to hear global news via the company intranet before the internet had arrived in her home country. Now she uses WhatsApp to keep in touch with people she's met via social movements: Occupy activists in New York's Zuccotti Park; the Tunisians who sparked the Arab Spring; and the Egyptians who filled Tahrir Square.
Yet the scale of those protests, and the more recent anti-Trump marches, Tufekci argues, matters less than it once did. "It doesn't mean the same thing in 2017 as it did in 1963," she says. "Don't look at things that are easy to compare with the past, such as the number of people. Those are misleading." Instead, she says, compare capability. The march on Washington in 1963, featuring Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, and the Alabama bus boycotts were feats of organisation only made possible because of years of hard-won experience and community links. While modern, internet-enabled protests might be larger, they're not building as much capability for future action. "You're developing your biceps, but not your legs. There is no shortcut to doing the work. It's like being an athlete. You have to exercise to build your muscles."
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For Tufekci, attending a protest is always a first step. To have real impact, march organisers could encourage attendees to put their postcode on their placards and organise by geography to encourage like-minded neighbours to introduce themselves. "The social change, in the end, comes down to local people that you meet," she says. "That's the capacity you need to build if social change is what you want, and the upside is you get to meet local people who agree with you. Instead of 20 million signatures, I'd rather have 50 people in one zip code connect with one another, in every zip code," she says. "That's where power lies."
There's a coda to that conclusion - and her book. Last year, Tufekci travelled to Antalya for a holiday before returning to Istanbul to complete the final edits on Twitter and Tear Gas. Her return flight was grounded because of a coup against president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. But rather than clamp down on the internet, Erdoğan used it, addressing the nation via FaceTime as mobile operators topped up customers' data to keep them online. "I was like: 'OK, I need to change my ending,'" she says. The final, extra chapter is titled "The Government Strikes Back". Activists are wrangling with how to make the web work for them, but their adversaries are catching up. Nicole Kobie technosociology.org
Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest is out now.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
