Paul C. Adams
University of Texas at Austin, Texas, USA
In the introduction to Political Matter, Braun and Whatmore argue: “From cell phones to stem cells, stuff of all kinds increasingly makes us what we are” (2010: x). This is not to say that our relationship with the material world is deterministic, as if politics were controlled by matter itself, any more than humans are able to drive the entire people–matter interaction. The relationship is reciprocal: As we act on the world with things in our hands, over our eyes, and in our ears, we continually rediscover ourselves as agents. What it means to be a person changes in tandem with our material culture (including communication technologies) and there is no one in charge of this process except for an always already hybrid agency.
Viewed historically, the progression of artifacts from sharpened stones to touchscreens is, at the same time, a progression of actor networks (Couldry 2008). Understood in this context, media are not merely matter, however complicated – they are structured opportunities for things to happen. For political scientist Jane Bennett, more-than-human agency includes the efficacy of things as diverse as a cast-off bottle cap, an abandoned glove, and a dead rat caught on a storm drain, which together have an “energetic vitality” (2010: 39). Like Bennett, I find that political agency can coalesce around assemblages of matter and dead bodies, but my analysis sticks closer to conventional notions of political power, exploring how mediated agency outlasts the death of a human martyr’s body. In particular, I show that social media have played a role in political processes by reconfiguring human agency in space and time, taking the Iranian protests and the Arab Spring as demonstrations of the political appropriation of new media to extend human agency across geographical borders, linguistic divides, and even the border between life and death.
The discussion starts with media in general. Next, it turns to social media, which offer some special, though hardly unique, affordances for political action. It concludes with a brief discussion of where political geography might be headed as agency becomes increasingly bound up in digitally mediated networks.
An affordance can be thought of as a way of getting things done, insofar as “tools do not determine action, they afford it” (Nielsen 2013: 174). In the words of Biekart and Fowler, technological advances “are not a cause as such, but they have certainly opened up innovative avenues for people to challenge existing configurations of power” (2013: 529). Media affordances facilitate new ways of organizing actions in space and time, and therefore enable the reworking of political action. Agency that involves humans acting in conjunction with technology has also been called technicity (Simondon 1992; Mackenzie 2002) and its subtle complexity pushes us to think beyond the binary logic of access/lack of access to technology. Technicity envisions a more complex and multidimensional set of relations between technologies and people, where appropriations of media are “an exteriority that is necessarily also an interiority” (Braun & Whatmore 2010: xix). What this means is that just as we circulate through and inhabit the nested containers that make up an architectural environment – including a building’s outer and inner surfaces, entryways, halls, and rooms – we also circulate through and inhabit communication technologies, occupying each medium in a range of volitional, sometimes resistant, but always multivalent ways.
If we set aside the habitual division of the world into humans and non-humans and view the “person” as a heterogeneous network, the inhabitation of media can be seen as enabling the formation of dynamic, spatially extensible actors (Adams 2005; Latour 2005). Extending geographical agents through space and time – whether through the use of parchment, paper, Instagram, or Facebook – mediated technicity shapes what can (and cannot) become political, whether standard and “normal” for our time and place, or creative and resistant. Perhaps the “rise of ‘digital activism’ has shaken the existing relationships between state, markets, civil society and citizen action by developing new and networked ways of thinking” (Shah 2013: 666), but we should interpret these “new ways of thinking” in a modest fashion by attending to the precise changes occurring in how people achieve political goals, whether in terms of the articulation of grievances, discovery of opportunities, leveraging of resources, or formation of identities.
Political actors are always embodied, but precisely because of the political importance of the body we must avoid a false opposition between mediated experience and embodied experience, or, worse yet, a dichotomy wherein media are reduced to vectors of oppression while embodiment is cast as resistant. The embodiment of mediated communication and the communication of embodiment are flip sides of a hybridity that actively attaches scales to political projects (Sharp 1996, 2000; Whatmore 2002; Dittmer 2007: 405; Dittmer et al. 2011). It may help to think of the moral and ethical characteristics of new media in terms of “a human ‘gesture’ upon the space suggested by newer media” (Papacharissi 2010: 9), and in this media-configured space individual and collective political action “is not only about jumping pre-existing scales, but also about producing them” (Mamadouh 2004: 483). The most obvious recent example of this is in the Middle East and North Africa, where “a growing middle class with access to decentralized technologies, shaped through a global flow of ideology and capital, questions the sovereignty of the territorial state and looks at new forms of governance and organization” (Shah 2013: 666).
Political geographers have most often addressed the politics of media in connection with popular geopolitics (Ó Tuathail 1996). This work has directed worthwhile attention to the political roles of radio (Pinkerton & Dodds 2009), television (Luke & Ó Tuathail 1997), film (Dodds 2003; Carter & McCormack 2006), newspapers (Adams 2004), magazines (Sharp 2000), comics (Dittmer 2007, 2013), and the internet (Dodds 2006), among other things. Hybrid politics are in no way restricted to new media, however. The fact that we have lived for a long time as media hybrids is generally written out of our accounts of history and modernity (Latour 1993: 13–48). I will therefore start to explore these hybrid, mediated politics by showing a few historical links between media innovation and political transformation. After that, I will engage with the political dynamics observed in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in the first decade of the twenty-first century, with particular attention to social media.
As a social order based around one set of media gives way to a social order based around a different set of media, actors seek to increase their extensibility – the span of sensation and agency – through the creative use of new technologies. Inevitably, these replacements cause “distributional changes” (Deibert 1997: 31–37), new geographical manifestations of political action, by reinforcing certain forms of power at both organizational and individual levels while weakening other forms of power. We can think of these distributional changes as the political opportunities and limitations inherent in the spatio-temporal affordances of each new medium. James Carey (1988) adopts this perspective when he argues that to study the historical impact of the telegraph we should
attempt to demonstrate how this instrument altered the spatial and temporal boundaries of human interaction, brought into existence new forms of language as well as new conceptual systems, and brought about new structures of social relations, particularly by fostering a national commercial middle class.
(1988: 204)
Reaching further back, the changes we label “the rise of civilization” are often attributed to a social surplus that fed non-farmer specialists whose existence gave rise to a complex social hierarchy (Childe 1950). More subtly, civilization arose with the increased ability to extend actions through space and time (Innis 1951). Writing and its predecessors fixed language, making speech acts durable and portable (Adams 2009: 18–28), and the resulting actor networks incorporated not only scribes, emissaries, priests, and rulers, but also materials such as clay, stone, bone, and papyrus used to record meaning in symbolic form (Adams 2010). In Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica, the development of the fixed word (including what we might call predecessors to writing, such as Mesopotamian tokens and Inca quipu) led to distributional changes in power relations involving new spatio-temporal patterns of organization (Schmandt-Besserat 1996; Crowley & Heyer 2010).
A more familiar story explores the distributional changes associated with the printing press, which “favored the strategic interests of the Protestant Reformation and scientific humanism to the detriment of the papal-monastic network” (Deibert 1997: 203). The power of printing had much to do, of course, with what was written, but aside from questions of content (patriotism, dogma, treason, heresy), its political potential arose from a radical increase in the availability of books, which fostered an increase in literacy, in turn stimulating critical thinking, creativity, public intellectuals, and new models of leadership (Eisenstein 1979: 136–159). Benedict Anderson’s influential study of nationalism and nation-building employs the term “print capitalism” to capture the way in which an emerging print-based economic order materialized particular meanings, values, and, above all, collective identities (1991). Distributional changes arose again with the diffusion of electric and electronic communications such as the telegraph and telephone (Marvin 1988: 107), and television subsequently helped change both official politics and the politics of everyday life (Meyrowitz 1985: 67).
This glimpse of the history of media suggests that if digital media have prompted a profound sense of novelty, then ironically this sense of newness is nothing new. Media diffusions repeatedly bring into focus a “perceptual and semiotic economy that they then help to transform” (Pingree & Gitelman 2003: xii). History recapitulates a paradox wherein the political agency of actants is extended, but also surpassed and transformed by the new media assemblages in which they are enrolled. Let us narrow this discussion to the so-called social media, keeping in mind that their disruptive character echoes the distributional changes introduced by older “new media.”
Even if we start with the modest assumption that new digital media, and social media in particular, are “not so much creating new forms of protest [as] amplifying traditional forms of protest, such as street demonstrations” (Valenzuela 2013: 936), they still hold great political importance. Simply reposting or retweeting an image or snippet of information can be a political act (Lotan et al. 2011; Conover et al. 2013). Public engagement from private space is one of the hallmarks of social media (Papacharissi 2010). In addition, social media combine three distinct functions that have been identified by numerous writers: access to information, means of expressing opinions, and tools facilitating activism (Valenzuela 2013: 920). Theocharis (2013b: 1477) similarly refers to the informational, interactive, and mobilizing features of the websites used by students involved in the 2010 university occupations in the United Kingdom, while Mamadouh identifies three related functions in websites by and for Dutch Moroccans: “group news media targeting a specific group … a platform for exchanges between group members” and a means to “increase the general public’s awareness of the existence and the position of the minority group” (2003: 201). We can summarize the affordances of social media as sharing information and other meaningful communications, building and modifying social networks, and engaging in discussion and debate as part of multiple publics.
The first of these affordances is most evident in the online sharing of status updates, photographs, videos, jokes, and quotes. Examples of social media that emphasize sharing of content include Flickr, Instagram, YouTube, and Vimeo. This aspect of social media overlaps with the functionalities labeled “Web 2.0,” indicating user-generated content posted online in a collaborative web environment.
The second is indicated through protocols such as “friending” and “following” (Wellman 2001). This affordance is most obvious on Facebook and Twitter, where content sharing is eclipsed by the function of maintaining a connection to others. Much attention has been devoted to the question of whether the weak social ties that dominate such networks are socially relevant, and indeed whether such “friends” are not in fact mere acquaintances. Yet, this debate misses the point. Insofar as digitally mediated social networks include both weak ties and strong ties, they permit the formation of “small world” networks, allowing information to percolate through social and physical space with remarkable ease (Granovetter 1973; Watts & Strogatz 1998).
Third, social media are used for the purposes of discussion and debate, as people reflect on current events, images, and ideas. Political discourse encompasses more than just commenting and forwarding, so social media political forums often leave something to be desired. Instead of critical thinking, one finds ad hominem critiques of other participants and diatribes “flaming” those who disagree. Nonetheless, the internet does offer forums for protracted discussion and, while most online discussion forums are exclusive (requiring membership), this does not make them entirely unlike the cafés that formed the archetypal public sphere (Habermas 1989 [1962]). Both physical and social contexts can support politically efficacious counter-publics (Fraser 1992; Warner 2003).
Particular social media emphasize one or another of the three affordances – social networking, information exchange, or debate/dialogue – but all three are generally present. Blogs, for example, primarily support political discussion, but they also permit the sharing of user-generated and borrowed materials, the development and maintenance of social networks, and linkage to other media. Facebook’s primary affordances are in the areas of social networking and the sharing of content, but the site supports a limited sort of political debate.
Building on these arguments, what makes internet-based assemblages political is that they structure communication, knowledge, and action in what Langlois et al. (2009: 416) call “the coming into being of a public.” A simple example is the creation of a “tweet” linked to an amateur video captured with a cell phone, showing protestors dancing in the street. In this case the act of physically occupying urban space, the act of making a video, and the act of tweeting an embedded link to this video are interdependent; each inflects the meaning of the others. This digitization of the public sphere involves a blurring of the “lines between production and consumption, between making media and using media, and between active or passive spectatorship of mediated culture” (Deuze 2007: 74). There is, of course, literal work involved in using any medium and people sometimes feel obligated to maintain their online social capital (Dijck 2013: 51), but social media facilitate pleasure and creativity as much as obligation and necessity (Kitchin & Dodge 2011: 111–134).
Likewise, if the essence of computing is technical control and “the technical is always political” (Galloway 2004: 214, quoted in Zook & Graham 2007: 471), then social media entail a new apparatus of state and corporate control. However, the “means of protest are simultaneously more controlled and anarchic” in the hybrid space that Zook and Graham call DigiPlace than in physical places (2007: 473). The political process in this hybrid space or place “is not simply one of human actors mobilizing communication technologies, but also of communication technologies enabling new patterns of political organization” (Langlois et al. 2009: 420). Digital media therefore alternate between the status quo–preserving function and a more progressive function (Hassid 2012). Novel political threats are mingled with novel opportunities (Castells 2001).
Consider, for example, the interactions of a “Wikipedian” who was involved in updating the Wikipedia entry for Ann Dunham, Barack Obama’s mother, during the 2008 presidential campaign (Rainie & Wellman 2012). This person regularly “encountered vulgar insults about [Dunham’s] sexual exploits and choice in men … Although he had to deal with these allegations on a recurring basis, they were easy to fix with a one-key-click deletion” (Rainie & Wellman 2012: 203). Political contestation was supported by a digital context that brought together the bodies of Ann Dunham and Barack Obama, the agency of “Wikipedians,” software codes, and coded infrastructure. While the preceding example demonstrates a political struggle in social media, increasingly there are struggles over social media. In 2007 Facebook was updated to include Beacon, a feature that monitored purchases made by Facebook users, then inundated their friends with ads for the supplying companies. A struggle ensued, led by MoveOn.org and joined by 50,000 Facebook users who signed a petition and joined in a class action lawsuit (Dijck 2013: 48–60). What was at stake was not only privacy but also a “double logic of sharing,” since the site offers a way of sharing experiences with one’s peers but also provides a means of harvesting valuable information about users, which is then shared (at a cost) with companies that want to target consumers via their social networks (Dijck 2013: 65).
Drawing on Jensen, Jorba, and Anduiza (2012: 8–9), I would argue that three sets of variables bring geographical specificity to these digitally mediated politics. First, there are spatial variations, as indicated by the familiar term “digital divide,” involving not merely quantitative gaps in the availability, accessibility, and reliability of digital communication technologies, but also qualitative differences in the skills, uses, and motivations of individuals and groups in different places as they appropriate digital media for political purposes. Second, places vary with regard to government regulation. Regimes of control and permissiveness aimed at traditional print and broadcast media have been extended to digital media; such governmental control techniques include filtering, monitoring, denial of service, rerouting search queries, planting viruses on “enemy” computers, and attacks on outspoken bloggers (Warf 2013: 47). Third, social media vary with regard to contextual factors such as political party structure and legal frameworks. While movements in relatively undemocratic societies seek to achieve recognition or find a “voice” despite censorship and silencing, movements in democratic societies struggle to overcome the political apathy that comes with wealth and consumerism. Where “freedom of speech” is the rule, speech may nonetheless be limited by the market and the power of money to inundate people with propaganda and entertainment (Castells 2009). We find, therefore, a context-based continuum in tactics, with evasion of censorship and persecution at one extreme and the attempt to shout above the noise of consumerism at the other.
The question is no longer whether social media are involved in political processes, but rather “how and under what conditions these new digital platforms relate to citizen activism and protest politics” (Valenzuela 2013: 921, italics in original). The main theoretical challenges
lie in understanding the uniqueness of social networking sites as assemblages where software processes, patterns of information circulation, communicative practices, social practices, and political contexts are articulated with and redefined by each other in complex ways.
(Langlois et al. 2009: 416)
This social and geographical contingency suggests the need for detailed case studies. Here, I focus on the area that has yielded the most studies thus far: the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
Social media in MENA has quite strikingly illustrated what Theocharis refers to as “a myriad of offline and online tactics” (2013a: 38), small but incremental political activities that constitute publics as participants rather than merely audiences. These tactics include posting, reposting, converting, and “liking.” Starting in 2009, people throughout the region captured quotes, photos, or bits of news in one digital format and forwarded them in the same or a different format, working around the fact that quantitatively speaking they were in a “lagging” region with regard to new media.
The scale-jumping dynamic set up during the Arab Spring could be characterized as “the emergence of highly networked, dense, but also hierarchical information ecology in which newly emergent microcelebrity activists gain access to, and become means of, flow of attention and visibility” (Tufekci 2013: 862). Intertwined in this “ecology” were various actors, multiple languages, heterogeneous communication media (including social media as well as broadcast media), and international media venues. The movement was less about democracy than government accountability, and its roots were more anti- than pro-American (Lynch 2006). Yet, it was celebrated in mainstream US and UK media, in part because of a widespread assumption that the internet is inherently democratic (Schulte 2013: 158).
Already, in the late 1990s, an Arab public sphere had begun to coalesce around Al Jazeera, with its international reach and sponsorship of impassioned argumentation (Lynch 2006). Interpersonal communication technologies brought new kinds of actors into this public sphere (Howard & Hussain 2013). Among them were rebel-celebrities, who maintained a consistent online presence as spokespersons for political movements and also as the embodiment of a more general vulnerability to arbitrary violence. For example, Zainab Al-Khawaja achieved a kind of online fame in Bahrain, serving a set of interlocking objectives: exposure of government-backed oppression, self-protection, domestic political mobilization, and international news dissemination. By early 2014 she had over 30,000 online followers, whose attention assisted her in spreading her political perspective while protecting her from the violent intimidation and long prison terms that the monarchy used to suppress dissent. In Ethiopia, the Facebook page “We are all Eskinder Nega” showed solidarity with a dissident journalist and blogger who had been persecuted and imprisoned. Social media helped such microcelebrities (to borrow Tufekci’s term) circulate within various counterpublics (Warner 2003), break into “the public” via broadcast media, and cross geographical borders to gain sympathy and solidarity from foreign audiences. At some point, such political actors may transition from having local followings to becoming internationally recognized figures like Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai or Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef.
Closely related to such celebrities are those whose damaged bodies are converted into digital form – grisly photographs taken just before or just after death. These images become testaments to arbitrary and unjust authority. The resulting actor networks can circulate a martyr whose identity continues to act in political ways although the body is no longer alive. Martyrs of this sort include Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia, Khaled Said in Egypt, Hamza Ali al-Khateeb in Syria, and Neda Agha-Soltan in Iran (Amin 2009). In regard to the latter:
Bystanders captured her last moments on a cell phone, and within hours the grainy, low-resolution footage was uploaded to the Internet and soon spread virally across the globe. With links to the video posted on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, the amateur clip eventually harnessed the attention of the mainstream media, grabbing headlines on CNN and in the New York Times.
(Amin 2009: 64)
A simple story of innocence and victimhood, an unjust end, a gut-wrenching image of a young woman at the moment of her death – such were the elements of Neda Agha-Soltan that circulated as a resistant actor network opposing the reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009.
The technologies used to capture, reframe, and propel the stories and images of martyrs are heterogeneous, including the increasingly ubiquitous cell phone, the internet (as inaccessible and unreliable as it is in some parts of the world), and broadcast media such as Al Jazeera (Howard & Hussain 2013). Media convergence has political implications, as “multiplatform connectivity was clearly important to the success of the revolution and to the revolution’s reception around the world” (Schulte 2013: 158). Collective life supplies the rest: the communication vehicles and discursive packages for martyrs who circulate in a kind of political afterlife, and the experiences of suffering that cease to be merely personal and become collective injuries that call out to be avenged.
Common social media practices associated with this circulation include capturing, selecting, forwarding, interpreting, and reinterpreting the image of the martyr, all of which accumulate fertile soil for subsequent political involvement. Forwarding via phone and internet are keys to maintaining the connection between actions on the street and coverage by formal news media such as Al Jazeera (Lotan et al. 2011). Gana captures the dynamic: “Neither social media and Al Jazeera nor WikiLeaks can fully account for the Tunisian people’s grassroots revolt,” but nonetheless:
When the news of [Mohamed] Bouazizi’s self-immolation and ensuing protests in Sidi Bouzid was downloaded on Facebook and on YouTube by field bloggers and Facebookers, and then by Al Jazeera, then the wave of protests quickly reached the major cities in Tunisia and eventually hit the capital, Tunis.
(Gana 2013: 8–9)
Subsequently, the Syrian democratization movement created a YouTube channel called SyrBouazizi. This kind of communication activity can be encapsulated as a martyrology, sustained by “a feedback loop between actions in the street and actions online” (Ziter 2013: 117). Such appropriations of social media depend on continued action on the ground, as well as cross-border flows of inspiration, exemplification, and affect.
Facebook dominated this process, although other social media were appropriated for similar purposes. In Egypt, the Facebook page “We are all Khaled Said” turned the young Egyptian’s brutal beating death into a cause célèbre in 2010 and had over 300,000 likes by early 2014 (although the term “like” in this case is a bit misleading, as it indicates collective disapprobation). The grisly photo of Khaled Said’s mutilated head went viral online and on the streets (on handheld signs) in a diffusion that has been identified as a cause of the Egyptian uprisings of 2011 (Preston et al. 2011). Likewise, as Syrian martyrs in the reigning Baath Party were celebrated in official media to legitimate state power, insurgents elevated a different sort of martyr. Hamza Ali al-Khateeb was a 13-year-old boy captured by government forces during a rally in Daraa in April 2011. His mutilated body was returned to his family on the condition of silence, but activists created a Facebook page entitled “We are all the child martyr Hamza Ali al-Khateeb,” which circulated horrific images among 60,000 friends and many more visitors, and was again printed on handheld signs.
In short, martyrs circulated as political catalysts throughout the region and beyond. Networked dead bodies participated in political actor networks. The transborder diffusion of resistance was standardized to a degree by the creation of Facebook pages in various places that followed the naming convention “We are all…,” which at once signified local collective identities and broader solidarities. The naming convention was extended beyond the individual person as martyr. At least four different “We are all Palestine” pages were created as well as “We are all Al-’Arakeeb,” a page dedicated to a Bedouin village that has been demolished repeatedly by the Israel Land Authority (Schejter & Tirosh 2012: 307). A Bedouin from this village reflected on these politics:
I used to lecture and to call our youth that does nothing “Facebook kids” as a derogatory term … then I used the same words as a compliment … If the Facebook kids of Tunis were able to overthrow their dictator … and then in Egypt, then we can with Facebook wake up our youth and wake up the country.
(Schejter & Tirosh 2012: 309)
It cannot be stressed enough that these places are poor and technologically lagging, and yet the relative lack of access to technology does not constitute an absolute barrier to political mobilization enabled by the affordances of such technology. A low spot on the trend surface of digital media penetration does not necessarily imply that online activism is futile.
These observations in no way imply that the internet is replacing the face-to-face context of political mobilization. Place holds a singular importance in the relationships between political action and social media. For example, the group called Freedom Days posted mock political campaign posters around Damascus and made a short video showing hands pasting up these posters. The video ended “with a tracking shot from a car window showing the oppositional posters on storefronts and walls, pasted over official Party posters” (Ziter 2013: 127). The reworking of place with posters and the circulation of images through an online video came together to constitute a single political action. The video flowed through a space of coded infrastructure, but its power derived from its place-based images and political tactics.
The fusion between place-based action and digital flow takes a particularly striking form in I Will Cross Tomorrow, the final footage shot by film-maker Basel Shehadeh in the Syrian city of Homs: “the camera makes us present in his frantic sprint across a roadway, we hear the explosion that presumably killed Shehadeh, and we share his dying vision of a cloudless sky” (Ziter 2013: 131). Testimonial to both a literal and a metaphorical crossing, this video garnered over 11,000 views on YouTube.
In summary, political action in the MENA region created a web of relationships between social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and places such as city streets and squares. It integrated digital, social, and spatial flows of microcelebrities and martyrs. These events are emblematic of the ways in which “geographically referenced content … intersects and helps shape the relationships that undergird our lived geographies” (Graham, Zook, & Boulton 2013: 465). Other forms of “augmented reality” are more subtly political (Graham et al. 2013; Zook & Graham 2007), but spectacular political acts such as dying online for a political cause and mundane political acts such as “liking” a restaurant are similar, in that both participate in an actor network that exceeds the agency of the individual person. Both demonstrate hybrid agency that mingles human sensations, thoughts, and interests with digitally mediated networks. And both manifest distributional changes reinforcing certain forms of power and weakening others.
Famous journalist Thomas Friedman argued: “What brought Hosni Mubarak down was not Facebook and it was not Twitter. It was a million people in the streets, ready to die for what they believed in” (2011). There is something geographically compelling about claims like this, but Friedman presents a false choice between the internet and the street, the virtual and the real. Human environments have hybridized over time. The slogan “Reclaim the streets, reclaim the code” from Indymedia more usefully puts “the reclaiming of the digital code by media activists on a par with the reclaiming of the streets by urban protesters” (Mamadouh 2004: 485) and reflects an understanding similar to what Zook and Graham mean by DigiPlace (2007). Manuel Castells corrects the view that the internet is “just a handy tool to be used because it is there” and argues that “it fits with the basic features of the kind of social movements emerging in the Information Age” (2001: 139). This is in part because these movements “need the legitimacy and support provided by their reliance on local groups, yet they cannot remain local or they lose their capacity to act upon the real sources of power in our world” (Castells 2001: 143).
Political geographers are, of course, uniquely sensitive to the fact that “one of the most significant threats to digital activism occurs when cyber protests replace protesting in the public square” (Amin 2009: 65). As Schulte warns, if we credit Facebook or other social media with the ability to act on people in distant places, guiding them “toward self-liberation and self-determination,” then we fall prey to American exceptionalism and technological determinism, whitewash the corporations producing and marketing internet applications, and obscure the “bodies and bodily risk required for revolution” (2013: 163). However, the appropriation of digital technology can be highly effective in conjunction with embodied forms of protest. Political geography has shown that scale is constructed in multiple ways, and the study of media reveals how this construction occurs through both face-to-face and mediated communications, affording greater opportunities for activists to maneuver. Rather than choose between cyberspatial tactics or territorial tactics, the most effective political techniques are both mediated and territorial, occupying cyberplaces and urban places; they use a mixture of both to reconstitute the scale of political struggle.
Digital code embodies “a range of political, economic and cultural imperatives” (Zook & Graham 2007: 480) and people engage in active negotiation with those imperatives. This sensibility with regard to political action may be framed as “Internet-assisted” (Nielsen 2013), “digitally enabled” (Earl & Kimport 2011), or “digitally networked” (Bennett & Segerberg 2012). In any case, what Castells calls “mass self-communication” (2009) is an important force in the early twenty-first century.
Recognition of this situation is important, because the false dichotomy between real and mediated politics leads to the formulation of rather confused arguments. Jon Alterman’s article “The revolution will not be tweeted” (Alterman 2011) exposes “five fallacies” in the argument that social media had an important role in the Arab Spring. However, the title is misleading because he eventually admits:
They filmed events with their cell phones, they created photo montages, they swapped songs, and they combined them and recombined them in countless ways. In many ways, this was the true transformative effect of social media.
(2011: 111)
What Alterman wants to reject is the idea that social media acted autonomously, but his argument shows that the acts people take in conjunction with communication technologies – capturing, combining, and forwarding various types of digital content, within networks of bodies, physical places, and media – are indeed revolutionary. These actions are so powerful precisely because they reconfigure scale. The political actor looks less and less like the introspective Cartesian self and increasingly like an extroverted, extensible, networked self.