In the wake of Egypt and Tunisia's popular uprisings, much ink was spilled about the political power of digital media as a grassroots mobilizing tool. Many commentators credited social networking for these uprisings - even proposing that Facebook and Twitter, and the associated mobile technologies, were naturally suited to the political projects of insurgent social movements. Correctives to this narrative eventually began to circulate; some scholars historicized the protest movements in order to dispute social media's centrality, while others reminded us of these technologies' flexible nature, including the ways authoritarian states have employed them as PR platforms and tools for tracking political dissidents.
Yet both the digital democracy narrative and its corrective shared a myopia around social media and the digital archive - its particular workings, circuits, and effects. More often than not, the mainstream Western media and many academic commentators instructed us to read digital tools as transparent conduits for political ends. Pictures shot by mobile phone and the digital platforms/archives housing them (Flickr, Instagram) were offered as strictly evidentiary forms and repositories. In turn, many of us geographically distant from Middle East events were encouraged to revel in the virtual 'being-there' that new technologies seemed to enable. Missing from these conversations and structures of feeling was any sense of the digital sphere's highly mediated nature - mediation that belied the prevailing notion of the evidentiary - or of any attention to the particular technical terms and effects of the digital sphere and its archives.
Anthropological and cultural studies of social media have recently moved away from such evidentiary claims regarding digital documents and archives. In this panel, we join this new generation of interdisciplinary scholars in thinking through the highly divergent, mobile and flexible ways that digital archives and their contents - with unique infrastructures, micro-temporalities, modes of storage and preservation, aesthetic grammars, contents resistant to curation - come to mean and function in the hands of diverse networked Middle Eastern communities. Drawing on new work in media studies, this panel will focus on these methodological and hermeneutical questions: What new kinds of narratives, modes of representation, interpretive strategies, and communities are made possible by such social media archivesl What roles might researchers play in enabling their sytematization, preservation, and publicityn Finally, might these new digital archives, and the novel methodologies and research opportunities they occasion, open up new scholarly directions in Middle East Studies l
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Dr. Negar Mottahedeh
A stark distinction can be drawn between how the films for the French New Wave are preserved and circulated and how, by contrast, the Iranian New Wave lives its after-life. While the French New Wave has been preserved and digitized, the Iranian New Wave films are held in sun-drenched libraries, and, one or two, in remote and inaccessible film archives in Germany. A few stray Iranian New Wave films may show up on YouTube from time to time, then taken down, but in general, few International film series and retrospectives have had access to these exquisite productions of the 1970s in 35mm or 16mm. My paper asks what it may mean for students and historians of the 1970s pre-IRI era to only have access to these films pixelated YouTube formats? This is an urgent discussion to have, especially while the filmmakers who are still living and have valuable prints, deny access and screening rights to International film curators who in some cases may acquire funding to repair and restore old films before screenings. Take for example the case of Asia Society’s recent Iranian New Wave series in 2013 and Ebrahim Golestan’s open denial of screening rights to Forough Farrokhzad’s infamous poetic documentary on the leper colony, The House is Black. And again in the case of Asia Society’s film series where the curator received prints that have been kept in unsuitable places for film preservation: Bahman Farmanara’s Tall Shadows of the Wind arrived at Asia Society smelling like vinegar, the 35mm reels falling apart completely. What happens to the history of Iranian cinema and its scholarship when the only archive we may be lucky enough to have is YouTube? What happens to the history of cultural products and practices in an era whose modernity coincides with cinematic practice and circulation of modernity itself? Where, what archives other than film archives, in other words, can these be studied? What happens when, on YouTube, the curatorial practices associated with the organization of screenings and festivals, occur by way of YouTube’s algorithms? To what extent can we rely on YouTube to provide an archive, an archive for valuable national cultural products that gave shape to Iranian modernity, no less? Does the trade-in in formatting matter? My paper asks how these measures, that force YouTube to serve as an archive, may affect not only curatorial practices but, also importantly scholarly research on Iranian modernity?
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Dr. Ted Swedenburg
This paper emerges out of my recent research on Maghrebi music, especially Algerian rai. I have discovered all sorts of previously impossible-to-find music, plus photographs of musicians and albums, stories about artists and recordings, and transcribed and translated lyrics, posted variously on music blogs, Youtube, podcasts, and SoundCloud. All this new data has been invaluable in my research on rai's history in the sixties and seventies.
But it would be a mistake to treat this material as simply raw data. For one, information, interpretations, and meanings of posts are frequently discussed and debated in comments, sometimes heatedly. Comments are continually being added. Youtube users sometimes post a "rare" recording as a "response" to a previously-posted "rare" recording. The "data," then, is constantly evolving and never unquestioned by users.
In addition, while posters are motivated by the love of old music or the wish to fill in gaps in knowledge, other interests and desires are also at play. Sometimes posts promote musical artists and genres forgotten or suppressed by official, canonizing national cultural histories. Others boost regions or cities whose role in the development of a genre is marginalized (for rai, Aïn Témouchent and Sidi Bel-Abbès). Some music posts advance a multi-cultural vision of Algeria, in opposition to official Muslim-Arab regime narratives, reviving, for instance, Algerian Jews' contributions to national music culture before 1962. The role of Maghrebi artists who recorded and performed in Europe, as well as Maghrebi-focused record labels in France and especially Marseille, are also remembered and advertised. Other posts are occasions to criticize the Algerian regime in its "heroic" liberationist phase, for instance through the recordings of ouahrani artist Ahmed Saber, frequently in trouble with the government between 1962 and 1971 for his satirical lyrics.
This archive also poses novel opportunities and responsibilities for the researcher. It affords new ways to publish (via blog or posts of one's own "rare" music), the potential for reaching larger and/or much different audiences and receiving highly specialized feedback than through academic publishing, and the possibility to participate in collective projects. Yet there are also concerns about the permanence and quality of this archive -- blogs are suddenly taken down, copyright complaints lead to the deletion of recordings, and the longevity of hosting institutions is by no means guaranteed. All these issues call for critical attention on the part of researchers who take advantage of these emergent social media resources.
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Dr. Rebecca L. Stein
In 2007, the Israeli NGO B’tselem launched a testimonial video project in the Palestinian West Bank as part of their efforts to generate visual documentation of Israeli human rights abuses in the territories – documentation aimed chiefly at Jewish Israeli audiences. In the years that followed, the organization would deliver hundreds of hand-held video cameras to Palestinian families in the West Bank so they could document their abuse by Israeli soldiers and neighboring settler populations -- this at a time when few families had photographic technologies, Internet access, or new media literacy. This paper will focus on the infrequent instances in which their footage from the occupied territories went viral in the Israeli media context, with attention to the question of how virality operates, and what it indexes, within the Israeli political landscape.
For in the current Israeli ideological climate, the Palestinian experience of life under occupation is very difficult to see. The issue is not a shortage of visual documentation attesting to such violence. Rather, such abundant visual materials and traces are today effectively imperceivable as either evidence of Palestinian suffering or of Israeli abuse of power. Mainstream Israeli society currently lacks not only the will but also the means to see them in these terms – having been schooled to either overlook such images, or read them otherwise. Today’s paper, then, turns on the following question: given this field of partial vision, how can we explain the viral circulation of this B’tselem video and others like it within the Israeli media context – videos that are quite clear in allocating the roles of perpetrator and victim? To address these questions, I will study the archive of viral B’tselem videos, housed largely on YouTube, and the Jewish Israeli responses to their viral circuits. In the process, I will query the status of the social media archive itself as a political form – posing the question of whether the digital terms of this YouTube archive might help surmount the challenge of Palestinian political invisibility within the current Israeli political climate.
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Dr. Amahl Bishara
This paper examines two kinds of Facebook posts about a wave of Palestinian popular protests in Aida Refugee Camp, the West Bank: posts about the protests themselves and posts about subsequent arrest raids. These two bodies of posts exhibit different logics of mediation that point to the conditions of their production, but they both elicit recognition from networks of local and international “friends” and highlight the refugee camp itself as a space. Together they create a popular digital archive for the residents of Aida and those connected with Aida, especially since the protests were not covered extensively in local, national, or international news media.
In the winter of 2012 and 2013, residents of Aida staged a wave of popular protests, first in response to Israel’s attacks on Gaza in November, and then more directly against the Israeli separation wall that surrounds the camp on two sides. The protests climaxed with the burning and drilling of a hole in the separation wall. Unlike protests of the Arab Spring, they did not catalyze major political change, nor did they attract global – or even national Palestinian – attention.
Posts about the protests focused on the heroics of protesters, the buffoonery or brutality of soldiers, and the suffering of community members. Photographs – most often shot with camera phones – asserted the photographer’s presence on the scene. Murals painted on community walls were important backdrops. Sharing and liking photographs were practices through which people asserted connection to and expressed solidarity with each other.
Soon, Israeli soldiers began nighttime raids to arrest those involved. They were difficult to photograph. One key set of images of arrests came from Palestinian surveillance cameras positioned near the Israeli army base on the periphery of the camp. After an arrest, friends would post – or often re-post – images of political prisoners with notes addressing the prisoner directly. Many of these images also came from locations in the camp and showed the subject doing activities unrelated to protest. These posts were about distance, as with the surveillance camera footage, and about absence and loss. Still, like the photographs of protest, the camp itself featured centrally, and they were a mode of expressing connection both with the political prisoner and with other community members.
Since these events have ended, these images have constituted an important popular digital archive. Key photographs have been re-worked, and many photographs are re-posted on particular days of remembrance or activity.
