Fragmented Forms and Shifting Contexts
How Can Social Media Work for Human Rights?
David Palumbo-Liu
Social media presents a huge opportunity to advance human rights work; it also can interfere with it and even harm it. In this exploratory chapter, I will argue that what might be seen as one of its deficits can in fact contain a hidden benefit. But before I launch into the main part of my argument, it is important to distinguish my comments about social media and its potential to forward human rights activism from the common ways social media has been seen to facilitate political activism. Here I argue that the two projects are very different.
After “Arab Spring” erupted in late 2012, a broad perception took hold, and was trumpeted by both the mainstream and social media: Arab Spring could not have occurred without social media. Those analyzing this claim point to two main functions that social media fulfilled in a unique manner. First, it allowed the production and circulation of knowledge more quickly and more widely than ever before. The more information is available, this theory holds, the more people will participate. In his article, “The Political Power of Social Media,” Clay Shirky (2011) mentions the case of the Philippines in 2001:
As the communications landscape gets denser, more complex, and more participatory, the networked population is gaining greater access to information, more opportunities to engage in public speech, and an enhanced ability to undertake collective action. In the political arena, as the protests in Manila demonstrated, these increased freedoms can help loosely coordinated publics demand change.
(2011)
Not only does information flow more broadly, but collective action is also enabled as activists use social media as “coordinating tools for nearly all of the world’s political movements” (Shirky 2011). And most importantly, according to Shirky, this coordination creates and sustains a virtual Habermasian public sphere:
As the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas argued in his 1962 book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the printing press helped democratize Europe by providing space for discussion and agreement among politically engaged citizens, often before the state had fully democratized … . Political freedom has to be accompanied by a civil society literate enough and densely connected enough to discuss the issues presented to the public.
(2011)
For Shirky, it is the internet that now provides that dense connectivity.
Similarly, Catherine O’Donnell provides this quote from Philip Howard, a researcher at the University of Washington:
[P]eople throughout the region were drawn into an extended conversation about social uprising. The success of demands for political change in Egypt and Tunisia led individuals in other countries to pick up the conversation. It helped create discussion across the region.
(Howard quoted in O’Donnell 2011)
Finally, Eltantawy and Wiest likewise speak of social media as a community-building mechanism:
Social media technologies have been used especially in organizing and implementing collective activities, promoting a sense of community and collective identity among marginalized group members, creating less-confined political spaces, establishing connections with other social movements, and publicizing causes to gain support from the global community.
(2011: 1207)
I have no argument to make against these statements – rather, what I am interested in here has less to do with pragmatic building-up of rational communicative societies and more to do with what might best be called “irrational” attempts to piece together fragments of social media expression. That is, instead of focusing on the relatively straightforward dissemination of information (“meet at the Square, west corner, 6 pm”) that facilitates the work of political activism, I am interested in how affective communities are created whose initial function is to both cast out into the ethernet fragments of verbal, imagistic, and graphic signs, and then participate in the piecing together of those fragments into provisional attitudes, stances, and judgments. I will be venturing the hypothesis that it is precisely this interpretive and judgmental aspect that links this aspect of social media to a key component of human rights work. What we see in social media is the posting, reposting, decontextualization, and recontextualization of posts as they circulate both linearly and nonlinearly across the Web. A legacy of narrative “bytes” may accrete (or not) depending on the user’s position and the way they move from one source to the next, offering (or not) their own comments, or simply putting information together differently. On the one hand, one can easily see the downsides of this open system – how can one say that human rights could ever benefit from something so flexible, or mushy, atmospheric, unsettled? And yet, on the other hand, if we shift our focus from a desire to find a narrative enclosed and purposeful, but rather to a concern with entertaining multiple and possibly conflictual assertions of truth, value, and meaning, then in sifting through these fragments in a self-reflective manner, we could potentially become engaged in a project that leaves itself open to recognizing rights-worthy instances – cases of injustice and possible ways of seeing rights – which would have been invisible otherwise, simply because they did not fit neatly into (or at least did not fit in well) a properly recognized and purposeful “story.”
During the massive Israeli assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014, as the number of innocent civilian casualties – many of them children – continued to rise each day, so too did there appear on the Web more and more photographs of the dead and maimed. These were often immensely graphic and horrific – the most poignant, perhaps, of a young father cradling his infant son, the back of whose head had been blown away. The caption told us this man was speaking to his child – as he stared into that chalk white visage and blank eyes, the man begged his son to wake up.
I was horrified by the image, but enraged by the killings. The Israeli air strikes were so disproportionate to those feeble rockets fired by Hamas against the almost impenetrable Israeli air defense shield. I began to post those photos on my Facebook wall, over and over again. At one point, a friend wrote me a very sincere and gracious direct message. They said that while they understood why I was posting the photos, they themselves suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and the photos were simply too much. They said they had no intention of asking me to stop showing the photos, but that they had to unfriend me for that one reason alone. They wished me well.
While not divulging the author’s name, I posted on Tumblr:
It’s important for the others of us to look and register the horror. Netanyahu famously has accused the Palestinians of purposefully using photos of “telegenic” corpses to political end. That enormously cynical statement just shows how, for him, everything is first and foremost political. The ethical and human element clearly is an after-thought. If thought at all.
#HumanizePalestine is precisely an effort to re-endow the Palestinian people with their humanity. And part of that is to see the violent, vicious, merciless way that the Israeli war machine and all its enablers have deprived the Palestinians of their humanity and their lives.
It is far too easy to just process this horror in terms of ciphers and figures, cold calculations. Yet even using figures, in a comparative way, evinces in clear detail the disproportion: nearly 1000 Palestinians killed, the vast majority civilians, the vast majority of those children. So far about 40 Israelis have been killed, mostly soldiers, with 2 children.
Every death is horrible. Especially knowing now that Hamas was not responsible for the deaths of the 3 Israeli youths. Especially knowing that the Israeli State knew nearly from the moment of their kidnapping that the boys were likely dead, and that the massive attack on Gaza, that preceded the counter-attack from Hamas, was undertaken with the pretext that the boys’ location and status were unknown.
In showing these photos I mean not to horrify, but to humanize, and make the cost of staying silent or complicit clear. Much like the reason why I fully support a no-exemptions draft in the US. Until people know exactly the cost of war, they are only too willing to engage in it.
(Palumbo-Liu 2014)
The response to that post was significant. Some sided with the person who did not wish to be confronted with the images, but a large number of people said they were disturbed by my posting the photos for another reason. They worried that, without proper contextualization, the photos could be used for all sorts of bad, manipulative purposes. I agreed. Context is certainly important, and photographs splashed across our screens are only given the barest context, if any at all. The point of this chapter is that mass Web media, and social media in particular, are as bereft of context as they are immensely powerful provokers of affect. One might even argue that there is an inverse relation between the availability of context and affective power. The question then becomes, how can brief, fragmented social media, lacking deep context but often possessing immense affective power, help push people towards thinking about human rights? It is important to note here that I am not necessarily thinking of empathy, which plays such a fundamental role in human rights discourse. Empathy in conventional human rights discourse has a clear and purposeful trajectory – one empathizes and then one acts in a specific manner. My valuing of affect does not depend on a certain, precise outcome, some proper ethical rights-enhancing result – it does not guarantee or vouchsafe a particular narrative conclusion. It holds such notions in abeyance, for in treating social media I emphasize the social aspect. Affect circulates – it morphs as it does so, and each participant, in the best-case scenario I sketch out, thinks about rights in a qualitatively different manner than they did so beforehand. It is important to note that I am interested in not just the information that gets passed on in social media, but also the ways that one adjudicates the significance of information, makes choices, adds judgment, and then passes that on. There is no foreseeable consequence, and I think this is a good thing.
Social media “lives” by interaction. If not retweeted or shared, a tweet or post simply dies, or at best lies latent, having had its moment in the sun of the Web. On the other hand, if picked up, it can go viral – which oddly means it becomes vibrant, alive, provocative. Social media solicits a reaction, a response, a statement of either affirmation or negation. It is a fragmented form that demands to be formed and reformed by a crowd. These smart and not-so-smart digital “mobs” form affective communities in disarray and contention.
Now how does this form of expression help human rights get articulated, debated, distorted, appropriated, even when not speaking the name of human rights outright? I argue that understanding how social media helps us think through human rights requires us to depart from the idea that “stories” and “life narratives” are the only, let alone the best, ways of not just representing human rights, but also of affecting people to think in ways that help us recognize human rights.
In his famous essay, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” Richard Rorty invests everything in the affective power of leveraging stories:
We pragmatists argue from the fact that the emergence of human rights culture seems to owe nothing to increased moral knowledge, and everything to hearing sad sentimental stories, to the conclusion that there is probably no knowledge of the sort Plato envisaged.
(1993: 118–19)
Similarly, Schaffer and Smith’s fine volume, Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (2004), foregrounds life narratives. They introduce their volume thus:
Human Rights and Narrated Lives, in concert with more recent inter-disciplinary studies, understands “the political” as inclusive of moral, aesthetic, and ethical aspects of culture. It treats life narratives and human rights campaigns as multidimensional domains that merge and intersect at critical points, unfolding within and enfolding one another in an ethical relationship that is simultaneously productive of claims for social justice and problematic for the furtherance of this goal.
(2004: 2)
They specifically assert that “[a]ffective dimensions always attend the telling and reception of stories. Stories may generate strong sensations, feelings, and embodied responses for tellers and their audiences, at times of first and subsequent witnessing” (Schaffer and Smith 2004: 6).
In their second chapter, “Venues of Storytelling,” Schaffer and Smith (2004) list a variety of forms that such stories might take: Handbooks and Websites; Human Rights Commissions and Tribunals; Human Rights Commission Reports; Collections of Testimonies; Stories and the Media; Scattered Venues. What binds each of these forms is the assumption that they yield “stories.” At first, these stories may not necessarily be intact or complete, but through various processes the raw materials for stories are transformed into effective and affective narratives by any number of different agents.
Nevertheless, despite the attested value of life narratives in human rights work, nearly every study of literature and human rights, including Human Rights and Narrated Lives, notes the problematic status of stories thus produced. This is especially true of literary representations. In That the World May Know, James Dawes (2007) includes a telling quote from the literary critic John Treat. Dawes writes that
the “pleasure” of form, [Treat] argues, “is to be distrusted: a belief in the human instinct for form may make us think that the well-executed lyric or novel can restore coherence, through its own internal order, to even a disintegrating world.”
(Treat quoted in Dawes 2007: 195)
Nick Mansfield’s probing essay, “Human Rights as Violence and Enigma: Can Literature Really Be of Any Help with the Politics of Human Rights?” (2012), not only critiques the idea of stories being able necessarily to help with human rights, but also contrasts one form of narrative that does not help do so with one that does. Drawing on the work of Mario Perniola, Mansfield notes:
As an alternate to the logic of the secret, Perniola outlines the structure of what he calls the enigma. In contrast to the secret, in which the focus is on the simple revelation of hidden depths in an act deemed sufficient to provoke outrage and action, the logic of the enigma displays internal conditions that are enduringly problematic and must be investigated, worried, and developed by thought. … In contrast to the secret, in which revelation is the termination of intellectual work, the enigma opens up a necessary field of intense, energetic, and complex elaboration.
(Mansfield 2012: 206)
If we adopt the perspective that human rights work requires an investment in continued work, that it is a project that is not dependent on stories whose secrets, once revealed, have stopped doing their work, then social media might usefully illustrate what a human rights virtual community might produce in terms of “internal conditions that are enduringly problematic and must be investigated, worried, and developed by thought.”
Now surely the status of “thought” on Twitter is unique, as it hardly compares with fully formed, “mature” thought. And that is one of its greatest weaknesses, and strengths. We need to consider Twitter as precisely vacillating between different modes of expression, which each in turn demand different ways of decoding, even as they lead themselves to further unfolding and development. And the informal discursive “community” or group that is created out of the various responses becomes, in its flow and ebb, stutters and starts, an embodiment of human rights thinking. Again, I acknowledge that this is not formal, rational, purposeful thinking, but in not being so it provides a space and occasion for rehearsing precisely the kinds of deliberation and judgment that are not only necessitated by fragmented forms, but also enabled by them.
Consider just these few examples of different styles or modalities of tweets, each providing more or less context, each demanding respectively less or more contextualization (in all sorts of ways) from its reader, and how in being sent out into the social media sphere, each gathers around itself a community of commentators, interpreters, and debaters:
1. The hashtag screen. Upon searching by a hashtag, users open onto a screen that provides a snapshot of multiple on-going conversations. Users are at liberty to pick and choose whichever conversation they want to join, and in whatever way they wish to extend it. The tweets that contain links to news stories lead users out to them, and users can reenter the Twitter stream to agree, disagree, etc. In this process of selection, commentary, extension, or negation, users often are not only judging a story, but also augmenting it.
2. Analytic tweets that solicit agreement or disagreement. Consider the following tweet, which was retweeted 17 times after being posted for 16 hours:
Bea @Bea4Palestine
Israel Declares War On Palestinian Banks. Palestinian economy STRUCTURALLY dependent #GazaUnderAttack #BreakGazaSiege
This Tweet makes an assertion that solicits, in its emphatic quality, agreement to stark disagreement. Depending on whether one agrees or disagrees, one then extends, or bifurcates, this line of argumentation.
3. Judgments that solicit agreement.
#NoJusticeNoPeace @PalsJustice
In #GazaUnderAttack Israel Killed 598 Children & Injured 3374. Now the Siege continues to punish them #BreakGazaSiege
Is this an act of punishment or self-defense that inadvertently kills innocents?
4. Assertions and illustrations from other documents. Tweets also allow users to embed images in them so that they appear either in other users’ Twitter feeds or in hashtag searches. The following tweet had accompanied with it a political cartoon depicting a member of the Islamic State (ISIS) holding a kirpan and demanding that two lighter-skinned men with their hands tied behind their backs, one wearing a priest’s clerical collar, “convert to Islam or die!” One of the men is looking up at the ISIS member and replies, “You first.”
Grinner Wolf @Afaiz_Rahman
Nothing Islamic abt #ISIS,agents of Dajjal/anti-Christ,created by US/Israel 2divert attention from #GazaUnderAttack pic.twitter.com/qcehD9HLhk
The commentary that accompanies the embedded tweet is an instance that allows the reader to make various judgments on one or another of the claims made by either the political drawing or the claims made in the text of the tweet itself.
5. Concise assessments and conclusions.
Samer Badawi @samwithaner
#Gaza’s children returned to school today. There was no summer vacation to speak of, no lesson left to teach. #GazaUnderAttack
This is a highly poetic tweet – stark and bare, it demands the reader to step into that distinctly unnatural world.
6. Tweets that led into other media.
ronnie barkan @ronnie_barkan
Portraits from #Gaza, photography by @AnnePaq
electronicintifada.net/content/portrai…#GazaUnderAttack#StopArmingIsrael
Tweets like these lead into a more substantial and sustained body of material, not just to a news story. It leads in fact to the next and final tweet of this series.
7. That media world that contains photo, context, and/or first-person narrative. Tweets that lead to various media may lead to photos with or without context, with or without first-person narratives provided alongside them. In the link from the tweet above, users open onto a page with the picture of Dr. Nasser al-Tatar, director general of al-Shifa hospital, standing in what remains of his home and private clinic (Paq 2014). Although still not a full form, still only a snapshot of a “story,” the image from the gallery provides richer context, a detailed mini-narrative, a testimony, and evidence of the rightness and depth of that testimony.
Social media alone cannot do much in real practical terms. However, it is by now a fact of life, and part of our repertoire of knowledge. It has to be recognized for what it is – a distinct form of discourse, rhetoric, and semiotics. It performs a different set of tasks than do the other forms that Schaffer and Smith (2004) catalog. It may in fact be too different to be used in any way that is similar to our conventional means of storytelling, and that is because it does not tell a story. It instead solicits us to make context for it from disparate sources, and it asks us to lend our voices to the telling of an unfolding and unlimited meditation on rights and wrongs, truth and lies. Since social media depends on users’ active regeneration of material, it means that users are empowered, and feel that way, but only to the extent that they participate in the continued animation of images and texts. Jenkins et al. note that
as early as 1932, Bertolt Brecht imagined the transformation of radio from a technology supporting passive mass audiences to a medium of collective participation: “ … The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life … if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as to hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him.”
(Jenkins et al. 2013: 160)
Today, the technology of the internet might offer such a chance.
One of the most remarkable social media events was created by ordinary people from around the world. While the mainstream media covered the largest demonstrations that occurred in well-known metropolitan cities, the site TheWorldStandsWithPalestine also documented much smaller but still impressive demonstrations in tiny hamlets, suburbs, and towns around the world. People simply uploaded photos of their own local demonstrations – whether they were in Paris, France or Tucson, Arizona. Each became part of a narrative that did not so much tell a story as represent a series of simultaneous moments that were linked in spirit and intent, as well as affect. There was no closure, simply because the “story” has led into others that continue it. The enigma, to use Mansfield’s term, persists in our not yet knowing what holds each in relation to the other.
In this sense, we can finally come to the purpose behind this volume. As much as social media contains much that is puerile and worse, it also contains the kinds of pedagogical moments that I have described above. Each of the tweets I have described calls on us to reflect back on ourselves and to make judgments, but also to ask ourselves which judgments make sense to us. For that we often cobble together context from disparate sources, both on and off the Web. In other words, we are not presented with a ready-made context and a foundation for our judgment. And there is no authority to demand that we pay attention to one context rather than another. This sifting-out and recombinatory process asks us to take responsibility for making sense and, often, for taking a stance.
Further reading
Berlant, L. (2014) “Faceless Book,” berfrois, December 20. Available online at www.berfrois.com/2014/12/lauren-berlant-performs-clicking/ (accessed January 5, 2015). (Considers how Facebook invites intimacy grounded in the sharing of quotidian events.)
Johnson, G. T. (2013). Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles, Berkeley: University of California Press. (Analyzes political and spatial struggles of – and between – Black and Chicano communities in Los Angeles from the 1940s to the present.)
Nixon, R. (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Examines a wide range of literature that takes up the disproportional effects of environmental degradation on the human rights, broadly conceived, of the poor.)
References
Dawes, J. (2007) That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Eltantawy, N. and Wiest, J. B. (2011) “Social Media in the Egyptian Revolution: Reconsidering Resource Mobilization Theory,” International Journal of Communication 5: 1207–24. Available online at http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/viewFile/1242/597&a=bi&pagenumber=1&w=100 (accessed November 30, 2014).
Jenkins, H., Ford, S. and Green, J. (2013) Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, New York: New York University Press.
Mansfield, N. (2012) “Human Rights as Violence and Enigma: Can Literature Really Be of Any Help with the Politics of Human Rights?” in E. S. Goldberg and A. S. Moore (eds.), Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature, New York: Routledge, pp. 201–14.
O’Donnell, C. (2011) “New Study Quantifies Use of Social Media in Arab Spring,” University of Washington News, September 12. Available online at www.washington.edu/news/2011/09/12/new-study-quantifies-use-of-social-media-in-arab-spring/ (accessed November 30, 2014).
Palumbo-Liu, D. (2014) “Why Show the Dead? To Give a Human Face to #Gaza #GazaUnderAttack #HumanizePalestine,” palumboliu, Tumblr, July 26. Available online at http://palumboliu.tumblr.com/post/92925286005/why-show-the-dead-to-give-a-human-face-to-gaza (accessed January 12, 2015).
Paq, A. (2014) “Portraits from Gaza,” The Electronic Intifada, September 12. Available online at http://electronicintifada.net/content/portraits-gaza/13852 (accessed January 12, 2015).
Perniola, M. (1995) Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art, London: Verso.
Rorty, R. (1993) “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” in S. Shute and S. Hurley (eds.), On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993, New York: Basic Books, pp. 112–34.
Schaffer, K. and Smith, S. (eds.) (2004) Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Shirky, C. (2011) “The Political Power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change,” Foreign Affairs, January/February. Available online at www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67038/clay-shirky/the-political-power-of-social-media (accessed November 30, 2014).
Treat, J. W. (1995) Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.