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.

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?

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?

More Thoughts on Turkey and Secularism

Ever since reading Haroon Moghul’s thoughts on Western fantasies of secularism in the Tunisian revolution, I’ve been thinking about the ways in which the word secular can be problematic and simplistic in labeling any group of people or any government. As the readings from this week show, Turkey is an excellent example of this.

According to Moghul, the West seems to Orientalize Islam as an inherently political, groupthink-creating religion the way it does not do other religions: “We still can’t seem to get past this confusion of personal belief with political order, especially since Islam is such a visible religion, and our idea of religiosity assumes that what is visible cannot be uncoerced (and uncoercive).” Turkey, the author rightly states, is an interesting counterexample. Referring to the current government, he writes: “a popular, democratically elected party, many of whose members are individually pious, is using the ballot box to push an unelected secular elite out of its privileged statist position.”

In other important ways, Western projections of Western secularism fail when alluding of Turkey. Ataturk’s Republic was designed to be specifically secular. In practice, that has not meant that the government stays out of the religion business altogether, in fact mosque construction and religious education payed for with public money have never seemed out of bounds. Part of Turkish nationalism has focused on a supposedly common Sunni identity as fundamental to this narrow Turkishness as ethnicity or language. What has made Turkey secular is the discouragement (sometimes by Army force) of “political Islam” as practiced by the more recently influential Islamic Welfare Party. The line Turkey draws between acceptable nationalistically-minded pride in Sunni Islam and dangerous if democratic elements with more strictly Islamic goals is clearly a thin one which changes slightly with the times, and in the US and Western Europe (because of various factors) there is nothing near an equivalent.

Drawing the weeks readings together, I see a connection between understandings of Turkish secularism and the nation’s chances of accession to the European Union. Aside from concerns about Turkey’s illiberal oppression of ethnic minorities, Bassam Tibi seems to think that objection to Turkey as European comes in some part from knee-jerk reactions which are more about whether a majority Muslim country can fit in with a now very vague definition of the “European civilization”  which is both Christian in heritage and progressive and indeed also secular. Fears about this appear to fit in with western understandings of Islam as inherently political (and politically oppressive) which seem to be undermined by the variety of political uses that Islam has and has had in within the Turkish nation-state, including, I think, the recent democratic challenges to an oppressive secular status quo.

Am I right that there’s a tie between Europe’s understanding of Turkey and its understanding of secularism within the Islamic world?