At the time of this writing, pundits are struggling to make sense of the dramatic politics events in Egypt --- three weeks of escalating mass protests, inspired by the successful revolution in Tunisia, which culminated in the fall of the autocratic Mubarak regime. The conceptual challenge for many analysts concerns the role that social media -- particularly Facebook, Twitter, and cellular technologies – have played in these historic events. Both the Egyptian and the Tunisian case, like the so-called 'Twitter Revolution' in Iran, have drawn international attention to the ways that social movements and mass protest can be enabled by new media -- by which we mean digital, computerized or networked information and communication technologies. All three cases also evidence the eagerness of Western media to thank Western technology for pro-democracy revolutions in the region (what some have dubbed “revolution 2.0”) – a narrative of technological determinism that tend to gloss over prior histories of popular protest and technology-enabled repression alike.
Taking our cue from the current conjuncture of revolution and technology, this panel will investigate the various ways that new media articulates with political movements, ideologies, and institutional projects in various locations and for various populations in the Middle East. Presenters on the panel will turn to the cases of Iran, Tunisia, Palestine and Israel (respectively), to ask what, if anything, new media has changed about the political sphere and modes of popular political engagement in these sites over the course of the last decade, and to critically reconsider the narrative of “revolution 2.0” for what it obscures about political transformation in the Middle East in the current moment. In the early years of the alliance between politics and new media, many scholars touted the possibilities for "digital democracy" by means of novel public spheres and tactics for dissent (Barrett 1996; Margolis and Resnick 2000; Shirky 2008). They heralded the growth of citizen journalism via blogging, and the increased reliance of social movements on Internet technologies (Tsagarousianou, Tambini et al. 1998; Everard 1999). Yet the spread of these technologies has also been met by a broadening of their user base and political function. Papers in this panel will seek to complicate the digital democracy narrative by considering the varied ways that new media are employed by varied populations in the region; and countering technological determinism, they will consider the mobile function and ideological valence of digital media, the ways they can be employed by repressive states and popular social movements, alike. Authors will also historicize the usage of technology as a political tool in each given site and case, talking about the histories of usage and engagement that precede the current moment.
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Dr. Negar Mottahedeh
Inspired by the innovations witnessed in the protest chants of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 and in the 2009 post-election protests in Iran, this paper engages in a comparative analysis of Iranian protest- and revolutionary chants over three periods of unrest in the modern era: 1953, 1979, 2009. In studying these chants closely, the paper asks: How is the nation called into being in each period? Indeed, how is the nation re-imagined in each instance? What media, technologies and what sources are used to form the chants in each period? What is revealed in the comparisons? Since different media are utilized in each period, how do the media that transmit the chants transform their meanings and messages and how do these in turn call into being a different nation? The project, more specifically, works through the sources of the revolutionary chants of the 1979 period, the chants of the Chilean and the Cuban revolution-- as they were transformed and transmitted by the cassette tape in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and performs an analysis of appropriatory chants of the 2009 uprising (including the nightly protest call of Allah-u-Akbar from city rooftops] and their transformation of hegemonic discourses to call for a regeneration of the nation by means of social media networks and YouTube videos.
The paper, then, will be a comparative analysis of chanting as a means by which Iran as a nation is re-imagined in the modern period. While voice and chanting has been a devotional part of the tradition of nation building in particular during Muharram rituals, very little work has been done on the question of their performative technologies and media. The paper contributes not only the translation and preservation of the tradition of Iranian chanting in the modern period, it also offers a comparative analysis that suggests the ways in which the nation is reconstituted in each period of transition by means of aural analogue and digital media.
Selected Sources:
Staging Revolution Hamid Dabashi, Peter J. Chelkowski
The invention of communication Armand Mattelart
Radiotext(e) Neil Strauss, David Mandl, eds.
Personal archive of post-Iran election 2009 chants
Personal archive of posts on Twitter from the 2009 post-election period
Youtube.com and http://www.citizentube.com/
Tehran Bureau http://tehranbureau.com/iran-updates/
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Dr. Amahl Bishara
In this paper, I examine how new media – especially community news websites – mediate the complex relationship between Palestinians in the West Bank and Palestinians inside Israel. These two groups share a national identity, a language, and many cultural characteristics. They are geographically proximate to each other. Each group struggles against constraints of Israeli authorities regarding land use, criminalization of political activity, and full political representation, although these struggles are certainly different in each location. Together they comprise a sizable proportion of the territory under Israeli control. Yet, these two groups do not interact extensively with each other, largely because Israel has erected legal and physical barriers to contact that have generally grown only more severe over time.
Yet, there are important political and cultural connections between Palestinians on each side of the Green Line. We might expect that new media should play a role strengthening these connections. Internet technologies have lowered the barriers to entry for journalists, and have allowed for the proliferation of Palestinian sources for news on both sides of the Green Line. Moreover, online news sources do not face the same challenges of distribution as have paper publications, which, for legal and other reasons, have historically and contemporarily tended to be confined to one side of the Green Line. Internet news sites also allow for more interaction among news producers and their audiences. Yet, preliminary research indicates that Palestinians on either side of the Green Line continue to primarily read their own publications, and that these publications tend to cover the other side of the Green Line in a relatively cursory way. In this paper, I will examine to what extent new media technologies create have increased possibilities for interaction between the two communities. To the extent that media have enriched Palestinians’ knowledge about Palestinian communities across the Green Line, what elements of news websites has been most effective, and what kinds of information – political, cultural, or economic – tends to generate the most attention? How does each side cover issues of shared concern across the Green Line, such as struggles over land? If media technologies have not been transformative, why is this? What do journalists have to say about prioritizing coverage of Palestinian communities across the Green Line? What does this tell us about the potential of internet technologies and other new media in promoting social and political change?
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Dr. Rebecca L. Stein
This paper studies the Israeli state’s use of new media as a tool of military occupation. More specifically, I will study the ways that YouTube has been employed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as a means of PR dissemination and, arguably, counter-insurgency during two recent military episodes: the Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip (December-January 2008-9) and the IDF attack on the “Freedom Flotilla” (May-June 2010). Launched in the early days of Israel’s incursion into the Gaza Strip, the IDF’s videos showcased black-and-white aerial footage of the Israeli assault viewed from the vantage point of the bombardier – images that functioned to sterilize the air campaign by rendering all persons and buildings as proto-targets. By war’s end, some of these videos would be viewed more than 2 million times. The numerous IDF videos produced in the aftermath of the Flotilla incident were at the center of the Israeli popular conversation about the Israeli commando raid at sea, bolstering the already strong public support for the state-sponsored narrative. Several would be ranked among YouTube’s most popular features during the first week of June.
This paper will analyze both the particular visual conventions and logics deployed in these videos, the ways such logics might be situated within a larger visual history of the Israeli occupation, and the Israeli narratives about these videos and new media tools that circulated in the Israeli popular media at the time of their initial circulation. I am particularly interested in the tension between Israeli state efforts to employ YouTube as a means of controlling the visual field and political message of these military encounters, read against the public controversies and political contestations that the YouTube footage generated, resulting in a digital field rife with divergent readings of the same visual material. Read in light of contemporary theoretical scholarship on new media, this paper considers the ways these technologies are changing the ways the Israeli state manages and conceptualizes its military occupation even as they provide new tools by which to agitate against it.
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Ms. Alyssa Miller
The rapid success of Tunisia’s recent revolution, ignited by the suicide-protest of an unemployed youth in the country’s marginalized interior and culminating in the flight of President Ben Ali after a mere 28 days, has led international observers to hail it as the world’s first “Facebook Revolution”. Indeed, the digital images of protests organized in response to Mohamed Bou’azizi’s suicide, captured on video and posted on Facebook before being picked up by international news outlets, transformed this local tragedy into a transnational media “event.”
Rather than further extoll the democratic potential of new media for organizing opposition in “information-shy” authoritarian regimes like Ben Ali’s Tunisia, this paper will examine the forms of national imagination made available through new media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, with particular emphasis on the role of affect in stoking the collective effervescence of a revolutionary youth movement. At once transnational and intimately local, the auto-affective nature and speed of information-sharing on the Internet provided an incitement to participatory action in Tunisia akin to the systemic circulation of a nervous impulse. Whereas Tunisians have long kept abreast of scandals surrounding the Ben Ali regime through the oral exchange of rumors and trans-national relays of information generated by NGOs and opposition figures abroad, the “immediation” of home-made videos by amateur journalists provided a material substantiation of that knowledge. Although such documentation provided a vital communication link between the capital and the provinces, making the suffering of interior cities like Thala and Kasserine knowable in urban centers like Tunis, the emotional valence of its visual style was often in excess of the information it sought to convey. Through the spectacle of eviscerated bodies in local clinics, guided visits through the plundered opulence of the ruling family’s villas, and exposure of the manipulation of the security situation made at the regime’s behest, Tunisians self-narrated the material evidence of a kleptocratic regime. This paper will both situate new media within longer-standing communication networks in Tunisia, and explore how its participatory nature served to galvanize public feelings during the 2011 revolution.
