[-empyre-] New Media and the Middle East

[horit herman peled]

Ulises,

Yes, indeed, the uprising is human, not technological, in an era of
neo-liberalism. However, if the “Leica Revolution” claimed 2 million lives,
what we are witnessing in the ME (and, admittedly, we are still in the midst
of it) is much less violent. I would argue that the restraint imposed on the
state’s use of violence is one paradoxical/contradictory result of the
panopticon effect of digital technology. It is within these
paradoxes/contradictions of technology that media artists, and not only
artists, might be able to use the advanced tools of digital technology in
order to subvert the inhumanity of the powers that be.  And this is where
the virtual social networks do play a significant positive part.  Horit







On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 9:19 AM, Ulises Mejias <ulises.mejias at oswego.edu>wrote:

> I'm looking forward to learning more about the work this month's guests are
> doing.
>
> In light of how the demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt (and Iran, earlier)
> are being labeled Twitter or Facebook Revolutions, I'm interested in the
> ways in which these Web 2.0 tools are incorporated into artistic practices,
> and the tension this creates between the interests of the public, the
> artist, and the corporations that own and control these tools.
>
> To clarify where I am coming from, I would like to share the following
> statement, which I think is pertinent to our discussion. For hyperlink
> citations and images, see
> http://blog.ulisesmejias.com/2011/01/30/the-twitter-revolution-must-die/
>
> THE TWITTER REVOLUTION MUST DIE
>
> Have you ever heard of the Leica Revolution? No?
>
> That’s probably because folks who don’t know anything about “branding”
> insist on calling it the Mexican Revolution. An estimated two million people
> died in the long struggle (1910-1920) to overthrow a despotic government and
> bring about reform. But why shouldn’t we re-name the revolution not after a
> nation or its people, but after the “social media” that had such a great
> impact in making the struggle known all over the world: the photographic
> camera? Even better, let’s name the revolution not after the medium itself,
> but after the manufacturer of the cameras that were carried by people like
> Hugo Brehme to document the atrocities of war. Viva Leica, cabrones!
>
> My sarcasm is, of course, a thinly veiled attempt to point out how absurd
> it is to refer to events in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere as the
> Twitter Revolution, the Facebook Revolution, and so on. What we call things,
> the names we use to identify them, has incredible symbolic power, and I, for
> one, refuse to associate corporate brands with struggles for human dignity.
> I agree with Jillian York when she says:
>
> “… I am glad that Tunisians were able to utilize social media to bring
> attention to their plight.  But I will not dishonor the memory of Mohamed
> Bouazizi–or the 65 others that died on the streets for their cause–by
> dubbing this anything but a human revolution.”
>
> Granted, as Joss Hands points out, there appears to be more skepticism than
> support for the idea that tools like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are
> primarily responsible for igniting the uprisings in question. But that
> hasn’t stopped the internet intelligentsia from engaging in lengthy
> arguments about the role that technology is playing in these historic
> developments. One camp, comprised of people like Clay Shirky, seem to make
> allowances for what Cory Doctorow calls the “internet’s special power to
> connect and liberate.” On the other side, authors like Ethan Zuckerman,
> Malcolm Gladwell and Evgeny Morozov have proposed that while digital media
> can play a role in organizing social movements, it cannot be counted on to
> build lasting alliances, or even protect net activists once authorities
> start using the same tools to crack down on dissent.
>
> Both sides are, perhaps, engaging in a bit of technological determinism–one
> by embellishing the agency of technology, the other by diminishing it. The
> truth, as always, is somewhere in between, and philosophers of technology
> settled the dispute of whether technology shapes society (technological
> determinism) or society shapes technology (cultural materialism) a while
> ago: the fact is that technology and society mutually and continually
> determine each other.
>
> So why does the image of a revolution enabled by social media continue to
> grab headlines and spark the interest of Western audiences, and what are the
> dangers of employing such imagery? My fear is that the hype about a
> Twitter/Facebook/YouTube revolution performs two functions: first, it
> depoliticizes our understanding of the conflicts, and second, it whitewashes
> the role of capitalism in suppressing democracy.
>
> To elaborate, the discourse of a social media revolution is a form of
> self-focused empathy in which we imagine the other (in this case, a Muslim
> other) to be nothing more than a projection of our own desires, a
> depoliticized instant in our own becoming. What a strong affirmation of
> ourselves it is to believe that people engaged in a desperate struggle for
> human dignity are using the same Web 2.0 products we are using! That we are
> able to form this empathy largely on the basis of consumerism demonstrates
> the extent to which we have bought into the notion that democracy is a
> by-product of media products for self-expression, and that the corporations
> that create such media products would never side with governments against
> their own people.
>
> It is time to abandon this fantasy, and to realize that although the
> internet’s original architecture encouraged openness, it is becoming
> increasingly privatized and centralized. While it is true that an internet
> controlled by a handful of media conglomerates can still be used to promote
> democracy (as people are doing in Tunisia, Egypt, and all over the world),
> we need to reconsider the role that social media corporations like Facebook
> and Twitter will play in these struggles.
>
> The clearest way to understand this role is to simply look at the past and
> current role that corporations have played in “facilitating” democracy
> elsewhere. Consider the above image of the tear gas canister fired against
> Egyptians demanding democracy. The can is labeled Made in U.S.A.
>
> But surely it would be a gross calumny to suggest that ICT are on the same
> level as tear gas, right? Well, perhaps not. Today, our exports encompass
> not only weapons of war and riot control used to keep in power corrupt
> leaders, but tools of internet surveillance like Narusinsight, produced by a
> subsidiary of Boeing and used by the Egyptian government to track down and
> “disappear” dissidents.
>
> Even without citing examples of specific Web companies that have aided
> governments in the surveillance and persecution of their citizens (Jillian
> York documents some of these examples), my point is simply that the emerging
> market structure of the internet is threatening its potential to be used by
> people as a tool for democracy. The more monopolies (a market structure
> characterized by a single seller) control access and infrastructure, and the
> more monopsonies (a market structure characterized by a single buyer)
> control aggregation and distribution of user-generated content, the easier
> it is going to be for authorities to pull the plug, as just happened in
> Egypt.
>
> I’m reminded of the first so-called Internet Revolution. Almost a hundred
> years after the original Mexican Revolution, the Zapatista Army of National
> Liberation launched an uprising in southern Mexico to try to address some of
> the injustices that the first revolution didn’t fix, and that remain
> unsolved to this day. But back in 1994, Subcomandante Marcos and the rest of
> the EZLN didn’t have Facebook profiles, or use Twitter to communicate or
> organize. Maybe their movement would have been more effective if they had.
> Or maybe it managed to stay alive because of the decentralized nature of the
> networks the EZLN and their supporters used.
>
> My point is this: as digital networks grow and become more centralized and
> privatized, they increase opportunities for participation, but they also
> increase inequality, and make it easier for authorities to control them.
>
> Thus, the real challenge is going to be figuring out how to continue the
> struggle after the network has been shut off. In fact, the struggle is going
> to be against those who own and control the network. If the fight can’t
> continue without Facebook and Twitter, then it is doomed. But I suspect the
> people of Iran, Tunisia and Egypt (unlike us) already know this, out of
> sheer necessity.
>
> [Ulises A. Mejias is assistant professor at the State University of New
> York, College at Oswego. His book, The Limits of Nodes: Unmapping the
> Digital Network, is under review by publishers.]
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20110210/026286d0/attachment.html>