American Footprints » media

Social Media and Tunisia

Brian Ulrich — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 01:33:24 +0000

I haven’t kept the social science-speak out of this post, though hopefully I did explain it. My apologies.

There’s been a lot of discussion of the role of social media in Tunisia’s revolutionary uprising, with Jillian York posting one of the more comprehensive round-ups. I find myself thinking of a framing I used in this article I published a couple of years ago:

“Arab blogs have caught the attention of Middle East watchers. Much of the attention dedicated to them, however, has dealt with their political importance, whether as a mobilizing tool for activists or as an alternative source of news reporting. Blogging is also interesting, however, as a new and perhaps significant departure in the history of media in the Middle East. By this I do not mean ‘media’ in the common late 20th century usage in which it applies primarily to those who work within unidirectional mass media, but rather as a medium of communication. In particular, I am interested in the way media enables and structures relationships between and among senders and receivers of ideas and information, as well as in the mechanisms of reception of messages and the perceptions of media forms and transmitters which circumscribe their authority.”

That last sentence deals with the social aspects of the transmission of ideas. What is your relation to the sources of information and ideas with whom you communicate, and in what ways do different media forms affect how you perceive information just because of the media through which it is transmitted? In my conclusion, I highlighted the ways in which blogs, a form of social media, create a new sort of space. Being a finicky academic for a moment, I’m no longer entirely happy with the coffeehouse analogy, since I suspect much of what is attributed to Ottoman coffeehouses could previously have been found in bazaars. Beyond that, however, I also wonder how, then, the spaces created by social media lie embedded within the physical world.

Marc Lynch calls attention to the totality of the media environment:

“I would suggest that analysts not think about the effects of the new media as an either/or proposition (‘Twitter vs. al-Jazeera’), but instead think about new media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, SMS, etc) and satellite television as collectively transforming an complex and potent evolving media space. Without the new social media, the amazing images of Tunisian protestors might never have escaped the blanket repression of the Ben Ali regime — but it was the airing of these videos on al-Jazeera, even after its office had been shuttered, which brought those images to the mass Arab public and even to many Tunisians who might otherwise not have realized what was happening around their country.”

I would go beyond that and ask how Tunisians actually used all these media forms, and what role they played together and separately within society. I’ve heard a lot about Twitter, but Luke Allnut’s information that 18% of Tunisians are on Facebook suggests we need a lot more information about the role that played. Does this, however, include a critical mass of trade unionists and rural workers who mobilized their own constituencies, or were they relying solely on al-Jazeera? If, as I suspect, the social media presence is primarily one of the upper middle classes, then what relationship did they have to other elements of the uprising? I suspect the key lies where Lynch puts it, in the use of social media to generate content for integrated media platforms than then spread it in other ways, but until we start to get more fine-grained knowledge of the mechanics of mobilization and information transmission, we can’t say for sure.

(Crossposted to my blog)

But Now I Don’t Know Why I Feel So Tongue-Tied

Eric Martin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:51:25 +0000

A little over a month ago, Andrew Sullivan had a fascinating piece on the evolution of the New York Times’ willingness, or lack thereof, to use the term "torture" to describe, well, torture (for definite lack of a better word). As Sullivan demonstrates, prior to the Bush administration, the Times repeatedly and reflexively referred to interrogation methods such as sleep deprivation, waterboarding, hypothermia, stress positions and physical beatings as torture. No euphemism, no equivocation, no even-handed airing of the torturers’ rationale/argument and no concern for the associated political controversy. It was simply torture.

In recent years, however, the Times has begun to use euphemisms to describe those exact same techniques. What was torture was now "intense interrogation," "harsh interrogation and "detainee abuse" – though recently, and to much self-congratulation, the Times has mustered the courage to call what they once freely termed torture, a "brutal mode of..interrogation." Baby steps for a previously ambulatory being.

Not to single the Times out: other major media outlets such as NPR have embarked on the same self-censorship (NPR opting for phrases like "alleged abuse" and "harsh treatment"). The Washington Post referred to torture-produced evidence as "testimony allegedly acquired through coercion of witnesses." Allegedly coerced - so innocuous.

One of the problems that arises when our major media outlets (and political leaders) partake in this Orwellian exercise in lexical obfuscation is that there is an erosion of meaning across the board. The new linguistic conventions adopted to provide political cover for American policymakers that implemented a regime of torture become a form of political cover for all manner of torturers – foreign and domestic.

Consider, for example, the way the New York Times describes the despicable acts of torture inflicted on Iranian protesters by the Iranian regime in recent weeks: "prison abuse." Not even the new-found "brutal" qualifier. "Prison abuse" is the term used in the title of the article, and six times in the body – almost the only descriptor employed. The only exception is when the Times did go as far as to say that one detainee’s family "said he was being subjected to torture."

Apparently, these acts don’t arise to the level of torture:

Some prisoners say they watched fellow detainees being beaten to death by guards in overcrowded, stinking holding pens. Others say they had their fingernails ripped off or were forced to lick filthy toilet bowls. [...]

Although the government has played down the scale of the prison abuses, some detainees’ relatives have come forward recently to confirm them, mostly to opposition-linked Web sites that have provided credible information in the past, including roozonline.com and gooya.com.

Some deaths have been further documented with photographs or videotapes. Hospital officials have described receiving bodies of those killed in protests, with the total far in excess of 20, the government’s initial figure. It is difficult to confirm such reports independently, given the restrictions on reporting in Iran. [...]

“We were all standing so close to each other that no one could move,” he wrote in a narrative posted online. “The plainclothes guards came into the room and broke all the light bulbs, and in the pitch dark started beating us, whoever they could.” By morning, at least four detainees were dead, he added.

In another account posted online, a former detainee describes being made to lie facedown on the floor of a police station bathroom, where an officer would step on his neck and force him to lick the toilet bowl as the officer cursed reformist politicians.

A woman described having her hair pulled as interrogators demanded that she confess to having sex with political figures. When she was finally released, she was forced — like many others — to sign a paper saying she had never been mistreated.

To paraphrase the Times’ Public Editor, Clark Hoyt: In a polarized atmosphere in which many Iranians believe the nation betrayed its most fundamental ideals in the name of repressing political dissent and others believe extreme measures were necessary to save the very nature of the Islamic Revolution, The Times is displeasing some who think “prison abuse” is just a timid euphemism for torture and their opponents who think “prison abuse” is too loaded.

What’s a journalist to do in the post Bush/Cheney world?

(links via Bruce Etling)

Arab Media & Society

Brian Ulrich — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:47:01 +0000

I don’t have much to say about the role of social media in Iranian politics, or the politics of anywhere else for that matter. If the issue interests you, however, be sure to check out the on-line journal Arab Media & Society. Here’s the blogging tag, and you can get others from the sidebar.

There’s also a piece on BBC Persian.

My own view of some technological issues in society, written from a long-term perspective, is here, though I spend only a little time on the strictly political world.