Internet and Democracy

March 27

Digital tools are seen as playing a major part in political activities and revolutions around the world from the Green Revolution in Iran to the recent events in the Middle East and North Africa. In this class, we'll explore the role of the Internet in political organizing, social movements and popular protests, and the potential impact of digital tools on governance.

Readings

• Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New Theory for the Foreign Policy Frontier: Collaborative Power

• Zeynep Tufekci, The #freemona Perfect Storm: Dissent and the Networked Public Sphere

• Alexanyan et al, Exploring Russian Cyberspace: Digitally-Mediated Collective Action and the Networked Public Sphere

• Zeynep Tufekci, #Kony2012, Understanding Networked Symbolic Action & Why Slacktivism is Conceptually Misleading

• Gilad Lotan, KONY2012: See How Invisible Networks Helped a Campaign Capture the World’s Attention

Additional Resources

• Malcolm Gladwell, Why the revolution will not be tweeted.

• Etling, Kelly, Faris and Palfrey, Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture and Dissent

• Etling and Kelly, Mapping Iran's Online Public

• Faris, Etling, Madison and the Smart Mob: The Promise and Limitations of the Internet for Democracy

• Rosebell Kagumire, Kony2012; My response to Invisible Children’s campaign

• Sara Weschler, A Letter From Uganda on #Kony2012

Class Discussion

March 27: Internet and Democracy Just Johnny 17:11, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

I had read the Gladwell article before and just seeing his name in the list of readings lead me back to it first (who doesn't always want to read a Gladwell piece?). I also generally agree with his conclusions about the limitations of social media and had arrived at roughly the same place in some of our earlier class discussions. As a result, I feel like my reading of the other materials was mostly through that skeptical lens. I very much agree that the degree of effort, true commitment, and genuine impact is extremely different on Twitter vs. in real life, and while that should be quite obvious it sometimes seems like it gets disregarded during our current age of adoration of social media and Twitter in particular. His explanation of how strong vs weak social connections play into that difference in true commitment was an interesting next step in understanding protest and activism both through social media and in our physical daily lives.

That all being said, I still was very impressed by the #freeMona campaign and its results. I like that the various pieces we read on it acknowledged that it was more or less a perfect storm of connected individuals and important relationships along with Twitter and that Twitter was not the be-all end-all savior in a vacuum, but it still seemed undeniable that this was the power of Twitter in action. The main point to me is that Twitter was used as the connective piece; a hashtag alone did not free her. What it did was inform and motivate a large group of people, and included in that group were a few with the existing power and connections to allow them to call the state department, arrange to send help, etc., and in the end that freed her. AlexLE 13:31, 26 March 2012 (UTC)