What the Death of Osama Bin Laden Taught Me About Twitter

I was trying to relax and watch a movie with friends Sunday night after hearing about Osama Bin Laden’s death. It was big news, but after hearing the details and the president’s (fairly dreadful) speech, I realized I was about to be inundated with days of superfluous coverage and needed a break already. However, having deluded myself into thinking I’d add to my thesis during the movie, I kept my laptop with me and found it hard to stay off of Facebook and Twitter. The information and debate I found on Twitter compelled me, even though I wasn’t particularly interested in the overarching topic. The reactions on facebook? Not so much. Why the contrast between the media? Here are a few guesses:

1. Those I follow on Twitter are just more interesting/unpredictable than my facebook friends

I’ll cop to this being the obvious explanation for the discrepancy. Because of this class and other reasons, I follow experts on the Middle East, who in turn are able to curate the most interesting responses from others in the know (Andy Carvin and Mona Eltahawy are the the best examples of this, and Mona being down at Ground Zero particularly.

I learned more about some non-Middle East-related figures whom I follow on Twitter. Comedian/author/general genius John Hodgman, who has built a career on a complex and detached comic persona,  on Sunday night tweeted various unqualified patriotic and weighty statements (“I’m glad his fate is complete”), but alternated them with retweets of more tempered reactions (“No Joy. Just Relief”). Seeing someone like Hodgman’s tweets helped to convince me of something I’d been skeptical of before, that New Yorkers of all stripes seem have a viscerally different reaction to the figure of Bin Laden than others do.

Most importantly, there is just a different etiquette for who needs to be followed on Twitter than who I need to be friends with on Facebook. It would be rude of me not to be friends with people I genuinely like on Facebook, even if they never have anything interesting or intelligent to say on the internet. On Twitter, there is no such consideration of outside friendship, which after all is not the point. Which leads me to…

2. The people who tend to be on Twitter (at the moment) are different

Information and opinion, in abbreviated forms, seem to still be why people log on to twitter. People go to Facebook, it seems, for posturing they’d prefer not to do in person. Twitter’s popularity will continue to grow, but it seems to hook the people who genuinely want to learn about something from someone they otherwise would never have a chance to hear from. That doesn’t mean people don’t posture or communicate in ways they probably should do in person on Twitter, but the system of lists and blocking make it easier to ensure you see an interesting, informative exchange of information on Twitter.

3. The formats make for different kinds of debate

Siobhan’s fear of putting up a quote status which people would “like” the killing part of the news rather than the phrase Obama used shows pretty well the silliness of Facebook, particularly in a post-“like” era. Facebook comments, like various comment cultures which exist on some of my favorite sites, seem to often be about attack and one upsmanship for everyone to see, particularly when the most vocally and famously progressive or conservative Dickinsonians make some kind of a provocative remark. Long debates are less easily visible on twitter, and so they encourage less quick research and sniping back and more cleverness and ingenuity (Again, there are many exceptions). This also has to do with the character limit: If you need to sermonize, you’ll have to do it in person or over an embarassingly long string of tweets no one will keep up with.

As word of an impromptu and well attended, lets call it a gathering, at the center of campus got to me, I chose to express my conclusion to everyone’s reaction (that this event was playing out like a giant Rorschach test for Americans, revealing all of their own projections and desires and maybe not the objective reality of the situation). I wouldn’t have put that as a status on Facebook, for fear of having to explain, being taken out of context, having people hastily like it without thinking about it, and it getting lost in a sea of a million more confrontational statuses. That’s Facebook in 2011 for you.

Is Saudi Arabia Part of an “Axis of Stability?”

Blake Hounshell of The Atlantic has tried to answer one of the most obvious questions surrounding the gulf region and the 2011 wave of Arab protest: why have Qatar and the UAE been largely bereft of popular anger at the government?

He does a fairly good job. He recognizes that these oil-rich sheikdoms have the unique ability to provide very generous benefits to all their citizens and that the equality this creates blunts what otherwise would be a more personal and visceral demand for democratic freedoms (which has been close to what’s happened in Yemen, Egypt and Libya).

However, he concedes that just because no dispossessed mob is ready to tear down all those hideous buildings in Dubai, there is still tension over freedom, particularly among “the politically aware.” Hounshell does well to recognize that when you create such prosperity and global awareness among many of your citizens, you run a great risk of demand for liberal reform. Allowing this to happen might allow Islamists into power, which is even worse than liberal reformists for a gulf dictator. It’s a very delicate balance the UAE and Qatar need to strike, and they seem to be doing it well.

Does Saudi Arabia as well? The Kingdom is another obvious example of an oil-rich gulf state which has been on the quiet side of the Arab Spring. Like those other countries, they fear liberal reform and its effect on the ruling family’s economic and political power, but fear Islamist movements and their potential influence even more. One thing I think Hounshell misses, which is vital in KSA, Qatar and especially UAE, is the political standing of the large South Asian guest worker populations. I’m not an expert on what kind of government benefits are afforded to guest workers in these countries, but surely they do not have the economic standing of citizens. In Saudi Arabia, the government has had to strike a balance between maintaining an ethnically Arab national identity and keeping this guest worker population, which has been there for generations in some cases, from becoming a politically viable force.

Part of the stability club?

Surely there’s some explanation, besides the “concessions” offered at the time of the Bahrain uprising, for why Saudi Arabia has also escaped popular protest, but I don’t think it’s attributable to the same formula as the UAE and Qatar. Saudi Arabia is way too big to spread its massive GDP around through benefits and still have substantial power and wealth be in the hands of the ruling family. Thus, social and economic inequality among citizens is higher than in the sheikdoms. The sophisticated control through censorship of the media, particularly, is a way that public opinion is blunted in lieu of economic satisfaction, but “fear barriers” have been broken in other countries where they were similarly imposed.

Those of you in 260, remember when we were ranking the populations we thought were mostly likely to think democracy is generally the best form of government? We all ranked the Saudis last, and were right, but why? There’s some reason for the relative lack of democratic challenge to the regime, but it probably doesn’t fit with Hounshell’s economic-centric thesis about the UAE and Qatar.

International Public Spheres and Narratives of Identity in MENA

Despite having a lot of interests in common with IS majors, I don’t think I could ever study international relations. There’s just too much emphasis on what happens at the the level of states, with the exception of very new subfields such as critical security studies. Then again, that may be just the time that I’ve grown up in, in which the internet, terrorism, globalization of economics and media and other trends have so undercut the power of (many) individual states to control the political and cultural sphere within their borders.

Lucas’ model of when public opinion influences foreign policy struck me as fitting with a very old school view of international relations. I don’t think his criteria for what spurs governments to consult public opinon is particularly off, but his conception of “the public” is identified way too closely with the nation state. In many regions, particularly the Middle East and North Africa, international public spheres have been created out of transnational media and other factors. Elites find the facts and narratives which would in another era shift public opinion in a favorable (for their purposes) direction are now much harder to disseminate when media is no longer as manipulatable.

Narratives of identity and belonging seem to mean everything in the Israeli/Palenstinian conflict. The textbook controversy which led to an Israeli ban last year shows the degree to which Isreal and the Palestinian Authority not only a desire to reproduce faithfulness in traditional narratives of ownership of the land in their respective populations. It strikes me that it is not only the other narrative they fear, but the idea behind this particular textbook: starting a conversation about belonging, personal history, and national identity rather than treating history as something objective and static. The Riz Khan episode exploring identity and heritage between Israeli and Palestinian youths is another example of this transnational conversation, defying control by the state (it should come as no surprise that it is Al Jazeera again undermining narratives of states and creating a larger conversation and story which resonates with people more personally).

Take our case study topic Saudi Arabia as another example of a state desperately trying to maintain specific narratives in an era of transnational identity and conversation. There are no shortage of social cleavages in KSA: class, religion, citizenship, region. The ruling elite have stayed in power by heavily censoring that which greatly transgresses the state’s take on Islam, on government reform, international issues including oil politics, etc. More important than any of those for maintaining rule, however, is controlling historical narratives so that the House of Al Saud has popular legitimacy of absolute rule over a land which the family took complete control of no more than 80 years ago. Any historical narrative which openly calls into question the King’s version of history brings the tension that comes with the stark social cleavages to the fore, underlying the state’s somewhat tenuous hold on its population. Palpable Saudi fear of Al Jazeera betrays a feeling that it might create a new conversation it will be impossible to control.

Of course, this hasn’t happened yet, for any number of reasons. It could be that states are still worth studying in order to understand the world’s political order, even in MENA. However, it seems there has never been a better time to look transnationally to see new historical narratives and challenged identities which will undermine that order, sooner or later.

Making Facebook “Safe for Activists”

Cory Doctorow, discussed in a previous post as someone whose “net to dissident’s advantage in revolutions” point of view is about half way to digital utopianism, discusses in this Guardian video a fundamental drawback to social media’s potential in MENA uprisings: lack of privacy at present.

Doctorow’s topic  here is privacy more generally. I think his idea that kids should be instilled with a respect for their own privacy as opposed to a fear of transgressing the internet bounds their parents set for them is absolutely the right one.  It is a way to train a generation which will be socially conditioned to have a much narrower sense of privacy even than my generation does to be skeptical of coercion into submission of information.

On revolutions, Doctorow has very immediate fear that regimes will data mine effectively enough to really put down a wide swath of resistance that would otherwise be vital to organizing effectively. We’ve studied internet shutdowns and IP address registration and tracking (which has made true anonymity a quaint dream  for bloggers under rulers such as Mubarak), but the debate over social media and revolution always seems to be about relative impact of those media as a whole, and not about how particular platforms of dissent such as possibly Facebook are still subject to manipulation due to privacy.

The most cynical, but ultimately true, statement Doctorow makes is that Facebook is not built as a safe place for revolutionaries, and for as big and global a brand as Facebook, as for any other giant, multinational corporation, the object is good PR and a steadily good  bottom line. Even before Facebook opened itself up to advertisers with their eyes on marketing directly to individuals, no one ever envisioned its most fitting use was political, and so it appears to have been difficult to adapt its settings quickly when thousands in the Middle East are dependent on this happening.

It can’t be all Facebook’s responsibility, as Doctorow points out. Activists and revolutionaries need to take the same precautions as anyone else dispensing information over the internet, and one of those precautions may be choosing networks other than Facebook. Doctorow is ultimately quite positive about progress being made towards protecting these users, but I wonder whether this is something Facebook can prioritize as it has little bearing on its larger goals (that is until it becomes visible enough to create a PR nightmare). If not, perhaps activists will look elsewhere for a platform of organization which fits their needs.

Reflections on Islam and Second Life

I enjoyed having the chance to hear Rita J. King and Josh Fouts reflect upon their Report on Islam in the Virtual World, which examines possibilities of expressions of religion, Islam in particular, in Second Life. I’m left convinced about Second Life as a unique format for religious and political expression. My concern for our purposes, which others expressed, is the question of how available it is to the MENA region in terms of bandwidth and, more basically, familiarity with the program in the short term. Among technologies it’s important to think about with regard to the Middle East, I would classify it as something worth keeping in mind as a potentially transformative technology (in terms of identity and cultural exchange, particularly), but not in the class of communication-based technologies like Twitter in terms of having influence today.

A few things that stuck with me from our conversation today:

The first has to do with the degree to which religious spaces and ceremony are treated as truly sacred within the confines of Second Life. Rita’s story about being able to ask about ijtihad during a virtual Hajj and still be respectful is a telling one, but it leaves me with a few questions, too. If religious sites and virtual ceremonies are open places for religious exchange and instruction for outsiders, what value do they have for believers who choose to explore them? Are they sacred or not? This gets back to the question of taking off virtual shoes in a virtual mosque, which almost seems like a zen koan. Perhaps with further development of Second Life, we’ll get a better sense of how mosques, synagogues, and the virtual hajj are actually used: for “religious tourism,” for genuine devotional purposes, or both?

Secondly, the issue of Second Life and “authenticity” kept coming up. I’ve been thinking about Rita’s idea that “authenticity is an expanding concept,” which would suggest we shouldn’t condemn “deceptiveness” in identity or information as wrong (although we have all been subject to conditioning on the issue of people using different identities on the internet to nefarious ends). What the freedom of the Second Life format might actually do is to function as  a critique of the idea that the physical world is not full of the same amount of information and identity deception.

Hurling Tweets at Dictators: Digital Utopianism Without Digital Utopians

Here’s an impressive video, not only for its great animation, but because it supplies the metaphor everyone’s been looking for in explaining Qaddafi’s staying power in relation to that of Ben Ali and Mubarak. Qaddafi, despite being neither popular nor an occasional friend of the West, seems to have built the walls of his regime of ultimately sterner stuff than his neighbors did. What really interested me about this video was the way it uses the idea of the “social media revolution” or in this case just the “Twitter revolution” in visual form.

Surely little Twitter birds sent careening towards North African dictators is just a shorthand for the many processes that went into the revolutions (and a way for the video to imitate Angry Birds). I think what that image speaks to is how often that “social media revolution” shorthand is used in the media, particularly in visual art forms such as cartoon, design and video.This can be a helpful shorthand in describing the mostly accepted role that social media played some role in enabling Middle Eastern revolution, and this is generally how it’s used. But we should make sure that the repetition of this trope does not communicate a digital utopian message to those not familiar with the Middle East or the complicated world of social and political movements.

Does this image communicate Twitter's role in revolution or show Twitter as revolution?

I agree with Prof. Webb that it’s quite hard to find a full-fledged digital utopian among scholars and observers of media and politics today. I would describe a digital utopian as someone who believes that the introduction of internet access or mechanisms for digital organization (such as Twitter) automatically leads to revolution or a radical change in the responsiveness and accountability of government. Deen Freelon identifies a group who see social media as inherently to “the dissident’s advantage.” Cory Doctorow, Nate Anderson, and Stephen Balkam all see the platforms of Twitter and Facebook as of, in Doctorow’s words, “disproportionate benefit to dissidents and outsiders,” but stop short of describing those platforms as inherently revolutionary in places not already primed for revolution. It seems that no individual, no matter how bullish on the long term liberalizing effects of blogs and social media, is willing to attribute the bulk of the credit for Egypt and Tunisia primarily on social networks to the exclusion of civil society networks, satellite television, and a collective sense of outrage based on various kinds of dispossession. No one’s putting Biz Stone up for the Nobel Peace Prize, then, which is good to know.

So who is going too far? It’s not just visual images such as the above cartoon and the one at the top of my blog, in fact, which communicate the message of digital utopiansm. It seems to me that for Western broadcasters, particularly cable news “commentators” to whom Freelon refers, invoking the Twitter Revolution trope as a way of escaping reporting on both the complicated reasons that an individual revolution comes about and bringing viewers background on Middle Eastern societies, and reporting on the (even in the cases of Egypt and Tunisia) experiences of protesters organizing “on the ground.” My fear is that an important opportunity for exploring in more depth the experiences of those putting their lives on the line for democratic reform is somehow missed by those fed the Internet Revolution narrative. Like the “western, secular” vs. “religious, conservative” dichotomy, it only functions to distance and simplify the experiences of Middle Easterners for Westerners.

When Censorship Backfires (and When It Doesn’t)

This short article about a Mexican documentary from The Economist reminded me of some of the issues of censorship we’ve been talking about in the context of Middle Eastern regimes in the past few weeks. “Presumed Guilty” is specifically the story of Antonio Zuniga, a Mexico City computer repairman who is astonishingly convicted of a murder for which he has an alibi, no connection to the forensic evidence and only highly suspect eyewitness testimony counting against him.

The film is as damning of the Mexican criminal justice system as anything could be, depicting a farce of a mistrial and twenty to a cell prisons. Two weeks after “Presumed Guilty” opened it was abruptly banned through court order, ostensibly because of a “dubious complaint” of privacy invasion by a prosecution witness. The ban appears to all to be politically motivated, however, and represents a feeble attempt at marginalizing a potentially politically powerful piece of cinema. In this case, that proved nearly impossible, in large part due to new media and new technology (during the ban, the film was widely sold as a pirated DVD and succeeded in making it onto YouTube). When the ban was finally overturned recently, the underground chatter that the ban had caused led to a million tickets sold.

This is no doubt an example of the feebleness of a legally imposed censorship regime, particularly censorship of film in the YouTube era, but could this story have happened the same way in the context of an authoritarian Middle Eastern regime? Quite possibly, but in the case of Syria, as we’ve been studying it this week, I think it would not be likely. Presumed Guilty‘s runaway fame seems to have been made possible by a democratic, if commonly corrupt, society in which cultural production is mediated by the courts or government only after the fact. The success of Syrian censorship is that everyone knows where the line is between innocent education or entertainment and what is adjudged to be politically incendiary- critiques of specific policies or government officials will be met with the full measure of punishment from the state, while more anonymous settings or characters allow for some critique of government- and everyone self-censors along these lines.

The political power of this documentary seems to stem so much from the specific images of officials behaving terribly- from the uncaring mistrial judge to Antonio’s girlfriend being harassed by prison guards. Mexicans can see specific proof of what needs to change in their criminal justice system, and the belief that the ban was politically motivated only served to double the film’s indictment of Mexican courts. When Syrians look to their public sphere, however, they are only allowed to see metaphor and vague insinuation, and don’t have an opportunity to challenge what their government allows them to see, read and hear. In fact, they likely don’t even know when censorship of a potentially incendiary work happens, because that’s exactly how the regime needs it to be.

More on the West, Framing, and Bahrain

Two Newsnight pieces from the past week have gotten me to thinking about the importance of the issue of protests in Bahrain, even in a week in which Syria, Yemen and Libya dominated headlines.

In one (for which video eludes me but of which you can find no shortage of analysis on the web), a debate between French public intellectual Bernard Henry-Levy, who fiercely supports Western intervention in Libya, and Al-Quds Al-Arabi editor Abd al-Bari Atwan, who is skeptical of Western motives for intervention, the subject surprisingly turned to Bahrain. Atwan’s argument was not an unusual one for the past week: the West only has an interest in protecting innocent civilians from the attacks of dictators who don’t cooperate with them, and although Bahrain would be a prime example of a government’s disregard for its people in the same vein as Gaddafi’s, Bahrain’s modern, orderly, Western-friendly image means it’s put itself in a position in which it can’t be touched.

This leads me to the other piece, which I can’t quite tell what to make of. I think it’s a fairly circumspect explanation of the context for the protests (note how “protests” as a term can be used to distinguish events in Bahrain from those in Libya, which are now described with the vocabulary of war or nation-wide insurrection) which actually explicitly states that the events have been framed in a sectarian way rather than in terms of class or dispossession, which benefits the self-defense claims of Bahrain, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. However, it goes on to, I think, use the exact same framing device in showing a map which plays to the Arab states’ fear of a “Shiite crescent!”

It’s been interesting to see how the news media has been framing the different popular revolts in the region in very sub-region specific ways, which I think plays to the double standard Abd al-Bari Atwan was speaking about. How do you think the framing works in this last piece? Are the cultural and regime-specific differences in each of the countries experiencing revolts justification for covering them differently, or should they all be seen as part of the same democratic desire and the brutal efforts to put them down seen as equal humanitarian crises?

My Haiku Sonnet

Nicholas Kristof: Pulitzer Prize Winner and CHAMPION OF TWITTER with Darfur rebels. From The Harvard Crimson

For anyone directed to this post from Twitter, I’m afraid it is not actually a sonnet made of haiku (the going rate for a real one of those is from me is, let’s say, 40 bucks)  but my title is simply a metaphor for blogging about Twitter.

For my Twitter-centric post this week, I want to expand on Journalism.co.uk’s list of the best examples of Twitter’s use for quality journalism written for Twitter’s fifth anniversary. That piece looked both at feeds which have been the most journalistically important as well as individual tweets which proved influential. I want to add to that list one more tweeter who does a good job not only of providing followers with quality information, but does so in ways appropriate to the medium: Nick Kristof.

It may be because he has been so close to so many of the key events in the wave of middle eastern protests, but the intrepid New York Times reporter/columnist is doing nothing less than redefining the role of the regular columnist in the internet age. Rather than saving his thoughts up for the day his column is due, he engages with his readers constantly while in the process of interpreting world events, allowing that debate to shape his conclusions.

I think the key to his tweets being interesting is that he divides them about equally into three categories: curating (RTing the most interesting news articles from major news sources and citizen journalists alike), first-person reporting (NK went wherever the news in the region was for a while, and  he of course has connections to newsmakers and leaders in many other regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa), and debate and engagement with his followers’ thoughts and criticisms (this can certainly not be said for many news sources/journalists on Twitter). He recently asked his followers to reflect on Twitter through Twitter, asking for Twitter haikus. One cynical but funny one from @treesofyavanna reads:

@NickKristof #twitterhaiku Twitter, five years in/News for the ADD set/Look, there’s Charlie Sheen!

Ironically, if I were to look for a journalistic entity that does not use Twitter effectively, I’d look no further than Kristof’s employer: The New York Times’ feed . Following the New York Times’ main feed is no different than subscribing to nytimes.com  on Google Reader. It’s just headlines and links (since they can’t all be posted, likely the same big stories every other news source will be tweeting at the same time) and there’s no interaction or curating or anything medium-specific going on at all.

When people just follow CNN, BBC News, or the like on Twitter (the main feeds, mind you, organizations of that size sometimes have myriad special interest feeds of higher quality) for their news, they are perpetuating the old, hot, medium of broadcast news. Those people might otherwise be giving themselves the opportunity to engage with the creation of news and  to hear voices otherwise marginalized as they do when they read Nick Kristof’s feed or that of many other excellent reporter/tweeters.

 

Why Can’t the West See Class in Middle Eastern Politics?

In the relatively scant coverage of the anti-government protests in Bahrain, the framing of events in Western news sources has been very narrow. The New York Times, until it amended itself slightly on Tuesday, depicted the conflict as principally sectarian. For example, last week, the NY Times described events this way: “Bahrain’s Shiite majority has staged weeks of protests against a Sunni monarchy, fearing that if the protesters prevailed, Iran, Saudi Arabia’s bitter regional rival, could expand its influence and inspire unrest elsewhere.” The casual American reader is left to categorize these events along with sectarian violence in Iraq, rather than associate them with the same populist democratic spirit from Egypt and Libya.

In his annotation on Diigo, Prof. Webb notes: “A more persuasive framing would be in class terms in both cases, exploited versus ruling class; or in more straightforwardly political terms, democrats versus tyrants. Consider whose interests the sectarian framing serves.” Certainly it serves Saudi Arabia, as they can present their undemocratic actions to the West as being part of a buffer strategy against Shiite (read: Iranian) influence in the peninsula. I suspect experience with covering Iraq might lead western reporters and editors to assume sectarian conflict is always a primary reason for conflict in the region.What this also represents on the part of Western news is something I’ve noticed for a while: Middle Eastern news is almost never framed in terms of social or economic class or any kind of dispossession besides not being allowed to vote.

A part of the problematic Islamist vs. secular dichotomy that the West (and again, the  NYTimes in particular) has placed onto democratic uprisings in the Middle East (which we discussed in the first few weeks of class) is that it assumes that the primary socio-political division among Arabs is relative devoutness or opinion on religion’s role in public life, rather than occupation, hometown, or economic class. Politics in Europe, North America, and Latin America never seem to be covered under this assumption, and it is not only because these regions are less homogeneously religious. Any report on, say, the rise of Dubai brings into sharp focus the disparity of wealth among Arabs, particularly the gulf states, but that (in my experience anyway) does not convert over into reporting on fundamental political divisions being based on economic exploitation, particularly in elections.

This becomes particularly important as Egypt is moving toward elections, and the question of whether or not to continue on Mubarak’s path of economic liberalization. In an NPR story from last week (lost in the depths of the NPR website archives) a story about Egyptian politics which looks at a single prospective voter who is struggling to support his large family in a suburb of Cairo. He listed generosity of government benefits ahead of any religious ideological concern, and so was looking to the Muslim Brotherhood. Previously marginalized Egyptian groups are now forming full fledged electoral parties, which brings full platforms and a greater number of issues on which they have a nuanced position. Hopefully in covering the elections, Western news organizations follow NPR by looking at how economic issues, not just constitutional or religious ones, in explaining the way people are voting.

Do you agree with the premise of my post, or do you see more coverage of class and economics in other places? If you agree, why does the West construct the Middle East in this relatively classless way? Outside of the specific example of Bahrain, what effect will ignoring distribution of resources as a reason for political action have in coverage of the region’s continuing protests?