Social Media and Contentious Politics

This chapter aims to re-examine the complex relationship between social media and contentious politics following the 2011 uprisings in Egypt and Syria. The chapter explores the contingent, differentiated, and contradictory roles social media played in each of these cases. The authors combine critical theoretical approaches to the internet and situated ethnographic accounts to make sense of this issue along the different phases of mobilization and its aftermath. They argue that the alternative hierarchies of power and visibility engendered by digital activism and facilitated by social media are an essential vehicle when it comes to establishing an effective connection between the street and the networked public sphere in the mobilization phase. In the post-mobilization phase, however, the logics of social media begin to hinder the ability of social movements to coalesce and transform the energy of the street into political decisions or leverage. Finally, they also argue that in the aftermath of mobilization these alternative online hierarchies of power and visibility tend to quickly lose their legitimizing function, which rested upon their, now severed, connection with the street.

The Dichotomy of Public/Private in the New Media Space

Today we exist in a situation in which the new media environment has resulted in paradigm shift in our conception of reality, altering public spaces and communities, as well as functional modes and mechanisms of the private sphere, through the creation of new digitally-intermediated methods of communication. In a mediatised culture, the boundaries between public and private have been fundamentally transformed. Multi-screening has created a new mode of visibility for social cultures and subcultures, which, if it does not exactly abolish the boundary between private and public, at least allows us to rethink this dichotomy. Having thus established a new mode of visibility, the advent of new media has led to the sphere of private life being absorbed by the public sphere, in the process not only of facilitating discussion, but also in becoming a means by which control is exerted by the state, the market and advertising. In turn, in coming under the domination of specific private or group interests, the public sphere itself has been transformed. While, in coinciding with the interests of other groups, these interests may achieve temporary commonality, they cannot be truly public in the original universal sense. The use of multiple Internet portals in living reality creates a distinct or alternative level of virtual publicity. No longer requiring the usual physical spaces to regulate his or her inclusion in both virtual and traditional public spheres, a user of contemporary gadgets creates a remote and individually-tailored model of public interaction. This process of virtual individualisation indicates the ambivalent nature of the networked public sphere. While, on the one hand, in engaging in collective interaction and concern for common affairs, politically-active people need the presence of others, on the other, the fact of being rooted in their own experience results in the creation of burgeoning personalised and fragmented hierarchies.

Social Media and Youth’s Political Activism: Emergence of a Networked Public Sphere in Pakistan

Social media has become a central component of modern society and politics around the world including Pakistan. The paper attempts to examine the influence of political activism among social media-savvy youth in highlighting the political issues of Pakistan. This paper examines how Pakistani youth’s political activism via social media gives rise to an emergent-networked public sphere. A survey questionnaire was distributed to 403-university students aged 18-29 to examine their social media use and political engagement. Findings of the survey show that public discourse on social media, driven by Pakistan’s networked youth, is a growing force that political players and pundits must reckon with. The paper concludes that politically active youth make use of social media to discuss political issues, highlight problems besetting the country, which generates a public discourse, put pressure on government and politicians to take action that ultimately bears influence upon politics and governance in Pakistan.

Mapping Right to be Forgotten frames: Reflexivity and empirical payoffs at the intersection of network discourse and mixed network methods

Networks are almost ubiquitous in the social sciences, in terms of method and structure. Dominant discourses around networks–concerning their purported democratic, progressive values and capacities–also impact how they are approached in research. This article illustrates the potential of this impact by tracing the trajectory and findings of a project focused on networked discussion of an Internet privacy debate. Using mixed methods—hyperlink network mapping, textual analysis (qualitative and quantitative), and semi-structured interviews—I examine online framing of a controversial data protection concept, the Right to be Forgotten. Initial, more “traditional” research approaches allowed for insight only into the most central and visible frames and sources. This led to a reorientation of research approach. In attempt to diversify sources and framings, I began focusing on the margins and off the “networked public sphere.” This article thus also recounts the significant empirical findings that resulted from such reflexivity and reorientation.

Hashtag narrative: Emergent storytelling and affective publics in the digital age

This article investigates the role that narrative plays in the emergence of cultural movements from the networked interactions of users with the algorithmic structures of social media platforms. It identifies and anatomizes a new narrative phenomenon created by the technological affordances of Twitter, a phenomenon dubbed ‘emergent storytelling’. In doing so, it seeks to explain: (a) the multiple concepts of narrative that operate at different levels of hashtag movements emerging from the dynamic forces that circulate in and through Twitter; (b) the interplay of narrative cognition with stochastic viral activity and the invisible design of social media algorithms; and (c) the varying rhetorical purposes that narrative is put to in public discourse about viral movements. Using #MeToo as a case study in the generation and reception of ‘affective publics’, it clarifies how iterative appeals to the experiential truth of individual stories manifest as narratable social movements in the networked public sphere.

Social Networks, Media, and the Egyptian Revolution

The utilisation of social media in Egypt has irrevocably changed the nature of the traditional Egyptian public sphere. One can see the Egyptian online society as a multiplicity of networks. These networks have developed, transformed, and expanded over time, operating across all areas of life. Audiences started to utilise social media platforms providing detailed descriptions of Egyptian street politics, generating public interest and reinforcing citizen democracy. This trend changed the way audiences consumed news, with media organisations starting to expand their presence online so that, as well as providing news content, they also provided audience a ‘space' to interact. This chapter establishes understanding on the role of social media in developing an Egyptian networked public sphere. Further, the chapter discusses the role social media plays in post 2011 revolution democratisation process. This study employed qualitative ethnography (nethnography) and network analysis on 20 Egyptian news and social media newspapers and websites to monitor online deliberation.

Theorizing Social Media with Elias: Status Displays, Mutual Monitoring, and the Genesis of New Sensibilities

Making sense of interaction in digital spaces is one of the key challenges for contemporary sociology. Our paper makes a contribution to the sociological theorization of social media. It suggests that the dominant framing of social media in terms derived from communications scholarship, particularly the concept of the public sphere, proves unhelpful when trying to make sense of what people overwhelmingly use social media for in their everyday lives. The networked public sphere prism suggests that unbridled opinion exchange and political debate are what characterize social media and thus define our age. This has been part of the utopian investment in networked forms of communications, and has proven an important aspect in the context of recent protest mobilizations and movements for accountability in which social media played a highly publicized role. However, outside of such normative ideals and exceptional contexts, social media are rarely vehicles for opinion exchange or disruptive movements. Rather, from the perspective of everyday life, social media are more often aligned with order than with disruption, and with the display of status rather than reasoned debate. We propose drawing on the work of Norbert Elias to develop an alternate theorization of social media. Elias' early work on the court society, his analysis of the civilizing process, as well as the larger "figurational" approach to the study of human society he founded, are helpful not just in making sense of the status-seeking behavior of social media users, but also the new needs, desires, sensibilities and practices that emerge at the interface of social media and the spaces of everyday life. From Elias' work, we derive structural pressures as well as new sensibilities that emerge in social spaces ordered by an overarching system of rank. While the court-like sociality of social media tends to reinforce rather than challenge social order, this does not rule out that social media can become aligned with movements for social change. In these cases, however, activists have to actively work against pressures toward conformity, so their successes should be seen as exceptions, not as paradigmatic.