Introduction
There may be different views about the influence of social media on the people’s lives, but it is absolutely evident that in the contemporary world the types and modes of communication became sophisticated due to the rapid technological process. The launch of the social media such as Facebook, Twitter or Reddit might have been one of the greatest technological breakthroughs in the 2000s. In 2006, Time magazine recognized the importance of the social media and wrote the following phrase on the cover of the “Person of the Year” edition: ‘You. Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world’ (Grossman, 2006). Undoubtedly each of the social mediums that were named above is unique and is targeted at the different audiences. What is common for all these mediums is that they help to spread the information around the community, the country or even the world and thus they create the imagined public that the social media users perceive they are interacting with. This paper will address the issues of public sphere and imagined public. Additionally, the Occupy movement will be analyzed in detail in order to show how social media contributed to the rise of this protest movement.
Imagined Public
One could observe a very large number of protests in the different regions of the world in the late 2000s – early 2010s. In all of the protests social media were used as a vital tool for communication between the participants and the public that was following the events on the internet. At the very beginning of the book Tweets and the Streets the author Paulo Gebraudo describes his experience of being at the Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt in 2011 when the protesters were being beaten by the police troops. He was surprised to see a young woman that was snapping photographs of the cruel scenes and posting them online (Gebraudo, 2012: 1). Why did she do it? First and foremost, nowadays the functionalities of the social media allow users ‘develop presence, connect with others and share content according to the diverse aims’ (Panagiotopoulos & Bowen, 2015: 20). Perhaps the young woman wanted to ask for help or show what was happening in the capital of Egypt to the rest of the world. In both cases she had an imagined public to whom she addressed her message and photographs. One may suppose that the imagined public is a notion that refers to the way the social media users conceptualize the other social media users that they want to communicate with. The conceptualizations of the imagined public depend on the features of the social media that are being used by a person. For example, Gebraudo cites one of the activists from Egypt that said that ‘Facebook used to set the date, Twitter used to share logistics, YouTube to show the world, all to connect people’ (Gebraudo, 2012: 3). Facebook provides opportunities for direct interaction between the user and the relatively limited circle of people. In most cases such interaction is visual. On the contrary, Twitter is mainly textual and there is disconnect between the user and his or her followers. On Twitter much more attention is given to the use of hashtags and the content of the concise messages. So the ideal follower is the one that has similar views and will retweet or mention the user’s tweet. In other words according to Marwick & Boyd ‘the ideal audience’ on Twitter is the ‘mirror-image of the user’ (Marwick & Boyd, 2010: 5). In terms of YouTube, this medium is like a personal TV channel that millions of users may have access to. Imagined public on YouTube includes those users that are interested in the events which are shown in the video. Nowadays the imagined public may be significantly extended if the different social media are streamlined or used together. During the protests several kinds of media are used in order to increase the media outreach and encourage different people to support the protests.
Public Sphere
Beside the imagined public, one more notion that has to be rethought due to the growing popularity of social media is the notion of public sphere. This notion was introduced by Jurgen Habermas and means a ‘network for communicating information and points of view’ (in Gebraudo, 2012: 25). According to Habermas, the public sphere should be based on the freedom of speech and assembly, and the other fundamental civil rights, but at some point the public sphere was occupied by the media companies that introduced ‘manipulative consumption and passivity’ (Kellner, 2000, p.6). As the result, traditional media that belong to the private or state companies shape the public discourse, but do not contribute to the active participation of the citizens in the political life of the country. Nevertheless, nowadays thanks to the social media the public sphere partly depends on the individuals and now the media companies have to adjust to the new reality. American sociologist Barry Wellman compares the people with the portals that can set up ties with the other people no matter where they are (in Gebraudo, 2012: 34). Social media make the creation of the virtual networks between the people simple, but there are some side-effects. The most significant side effect is that communication became too fragmented and therefore there are fewer possibilities for the people to act collectively (Gebraudo, 2012: 35). Nonetheless, the public sphere has not reduced the importance of the public place. Tahrir Square in Cairo, Maidan in Kiev, Zucotti Park in New York, Taksim-Gezi Park in Istanbul are the places that were often shown in the news in the past 10 years. What is more, a lot of film-crews and writers - professional and amateur - documented the historical events that occurred in these places. The public places are full of symbolism, but probably nothing would have happened or would have happened in a very different way if the proper public sphere and media exposure had not been created by means of the social media. Social media did not only encourage the people to participate in the protests, but also helped to spread the news about the protests in the other countries. In the book The Rise of the Network Society (2011) Manuel Castells describes two types of communication that especially benefited from the technological progress. They are interpersonal and mass communication. The latter may be either interactive or one-directional (Castells, 2011: 54). During the protests that were presented in Gebraudo’s book, mass communication was carried out via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Tumblr and was both interactive and one-directional.
Disapproval of social media
Importance of social media for the creation of the public sphere has been put into question by a lot of researchers. For example, Evgeniy Morozov, who is a researcher that studies the social and political implications of technology, thinks that the ‘technologies tend to overpromise and underdeliver’ (Morozov, 2011: 21). As the result, high hopes are usually ‘crushed by the brutal forces of politics, culture, and economics’ (Morozov, 2011: 21). There were many revolutionary technologies that were praised for the ability to resolve a lot of societal and political problems, but eventually they failed to have a positive impact. In the article Technology Role in Revolution: Internet Freedom and Political Oppression Morozov provides some historical examples. He writes that Karl Marx thought that the updated railway system would eliminate the conservative caste system in India. One more example is concerned with the myth that the television can contribute to the spread of democracy around the world (Morozov, 2011: 21). In Morozov’s opinion, nowadays it is important to switch from cyber-utopianism to cyber-realism and not to put much emphasis on the power of the social media. Indeed, nowadays the social media are not used only by the ordinary people. The politicians and the authoritarian regimes want to control the public sphere and influence their imagined public too. For example, censorship that is applied by the Chinese government is a popular topic in the western media. However, the internet culture is quite developed in China. There are several online platforms for blogging and the grassroots spirit of blogging or sharing information online is very similar to the one that is present in the developed countries. Internet users do not act as the consumers - they are proactive participants in the production and circulation of the information (Yu, 2007: 428). Some users even criticize the government, but they do it in a careful manner in order to avoid repressions. In the meantime, the government is satisfied with such use of social media by the Chinese people, because their posts do not represent any significant threat (Yu, 2007: 431). The case of China shows that social media are good tools for creating the public sphere, but they are not enough for causing societal transformations, because many other factors including the governmental control do not allow that.
#OccupyWallStreet
In Chapter 4 of the book Tweets and the Streets Gebraudo describes development of the Occupy movement and stresses that it was not a tweet that ignited the protest movement. A lot of other factors contributed to the rise of the Occupy movement that eventually led to the organization of protests in more than 600 communities in the USA. At first it was a very weak countercultural protest that was initiated by the Canadian magazine Adbuster. However, after a couple of months of the preparation the movement became more inclusive. Its slogan “We are the 99%” meant that the vast majority of the people suffered from the economic crisis that occurred because of the mistakes made by the American elite that represents only 1% of the total American population. There was a lot of sympathy with the protesters and social media’s main input was that Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr helped to sustain the movement. There was real solidarity between the “internet occupiers” and the “physical occupiers”. 46% of the Americans agreed with the reasons why protesters decided to occupy some public places (Gebraudo, 2012: 103). Gebraudo writes that social media facilitated the gathering of the participants and generated an emotional tension (Gebraudo, 2012: 104). The author disagrees that the movement was spontaneous and leaderless. There were two people inside Adbusters magazine – Kalle Lasn and Micah White – that were in charge of the Occupy Wall Street campaign. Their main goal was to use communication in order ‘to materialize the movement’ (Gebraudo, 2012: 110). But success did not come immediately and social media were not used effectively at the very beginning. The hashtag #OccupyWallStreet became popular only 2.5 months after Adbusters made the first announcement about the protest. There was no any activity on Facebook and 97% of the communication between the participants occurred by means of Twitter. The movement went viral only when the police used force (Gebraudo, 2012: 117). Gebraudo thinks that at the preparatory stage the organizers failed to construct the proper identity of the campaign. Only the Tumblr page appealed to the large masses of people. One could read the personal stories written by the people that suffered from the economic crisis – so there was very strong one-directional communication targeted at the diverse audience. In the meantime, Zucotti Park was a small public place, but it ‘was more like a symbol of thousands of people distributed around the globe’ (Gebraudo, 2012: 124). Finally, all accounts in the social media required a lot of coordination. Approximately 20 people had access to several accounts, but there was censorship and all tweets had to be approved before being posted online. The people that posted tweets acted also as organizational leaders (Gebraudo, 2012: 131). So the case of the Occupy movement shows that it is not enough to have access to the social media in order to organize a protest. There should be a lot of organizational work and focus on the ‘emotional narration’ that will motivate the people to join the protest (Gebraudo, 2012: 12).
Conclusion
Nowadays technological progress is influencing the way the people communicate. Thanks to the social media there is much more interaction between the people. 10-15 years ago one could agree with Jurgen Habermas that media companies occupied the public sphere and made the people passively absorb the information. However, the situation has changed due to the availability of the internet and user-friendly social media. Internet users not only receive the information, but they also produce and distribute it to the other people. This trend is common for the majority of the countries no matter what kind of political regime there is. Sometimes social media are used to organize or sustain a social movement, but there are a lot of researchers who state that social media should be a part of a bigger strategy in order to achieve the positive outcomes. There are plenty of examples when social media helped the people to self-organize and coordinate the protests. Occupy Wall Street was one of such social movements that thanks to the social media grew from the countercultural movement to a popular movement in the USA and overseas.
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