Could online and offline protests be coupled?

In 2009, one of the most fashionable events in terms of online protest movements was, without a doubt, the Iranian Green Movement. There are, however, many misconceptions around what was happening in Iran prior, during and after the electoral process (Clay Shirk, for example, argued here that the Green Movement was ‘the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media’).
If you followed the Iranian protests online. you could have thought that a popular movement was set to bring down Ahmadinejad's 'totalitarian’ and ‘repressive’ regime. If you were paying attention to Twitter (one of the few places producing live content during the protests), it would have seemed that the whole Iranian cybersphere was reacting and organizing against the Ayatollah regime. However, fortunately, the online realm has not taken over reality yet! Stories built on what happened in Iran based on the Twitter streamline, were misleading. Most of the online protest was fueled from outside the country. And, the ones that were indeed tweeting from Tehran were not representative of the whole Iranian population.
We should also take into account Internet levels of penetration in the Islamic republic. While Iran has higher levels of penetration than most other countries in the region, most of its population is still unconnected. Those that protested online, belonged only to one particular age and population group: middle-class, young professionals and students from the main Iranian cities. What I am trying to say here, is not that there was not a huge social conflict in the aftermath of the elections, but that the online noise was not representative of what was happening.
Online activists that were not really organized on the ground were the ones that mainly fueled the hype; perhaps, they were not even in Iran. There are many commentators arguing that yes, indeed, the online side of the Iranian protest was essential to the movement. Amongst these are many Twitter loyalists that claim that Twitter had a central role in the Iranian movement. The myth over the power of ‘social mobilization’ tools was also fueled by people like Clay, who, while sitting in a sofa at TED (playing the western universalist addicted to CNN and Twitter), believed that tweets and retweets account for the beginning of a revolution.
An analysis of online activity around the hash-tag #iranelection could suggest that there was considerable online organization (what does online organisation stand for in cyberspace, anyway? Could there be organization in cyberspace? Or, does the very structure of cyberspace provide only for disorganization?) Anyway, for the analysis of what happened around those days, it could be useful to think to what extent the hype around Twitter was fueled from the United States. Two things are true: there were demonstrators in the streets of Tehran (they were not controlled or organized from the online realm) and there were hundreds of thousands of tweets about the Iranian election. However, all the hype around the power of Twitter to organize civil society could have well been promoted from the US as a marketing campaign. There is no doubt that after the Iranian protests the only winner of the revolution was, indeed, Twitter.

Online protests are not always political

When we think about online protest movements we usually think about political activism. However, there are many cases of online protest activity that are not precisely political. Nowadays, the interconnectedness of the web provides the possibility for any minor situation to become a bigger social issue. Take, for example, the case of Evan Guttman, who in 2006 decided to help his friend Ivanna find the phone she had forgotten in the backseat of a New York City cab. Evan and Ivanna circulated the offer of a reward for the return of the phone, via e-mail message. Getting no response after a couple of days, Ivanna bought a new phone and had the phone company transfer the data stored in the old phone to the new contrivance. A few days later, Ivanna discovered that some mysterious photos had appeared in her new phone. These photos had been taken in the time between losing her phone and when the company transferred the data to the new one. Sasha, the girl that found the phone, had taken photos of herself and her friends and emailed them around using the phone and her email. So, Ivanna was able to see Sasha’s photo and know her email.

Evan (Ivanna’s friend), emailed Sasha asking for the return of the phone, but Sasha replied that she ‘wasn’t stupid enough to return it’. This led to a week-long, back-and-forth email exchange in which Sasha’s brother got involved and even threatened to teach Evan a lesson if he didn’t lay off. Evan’s response was to create a simple webpage including Sasha’s photo (the one she had taken with Ivanna’s phone and had sent around using her email), and a brief description of the events so far. This small action became a catalyst for the story of Ivanna’s lost phone which involved allegations of theft and harassment. As millions of users ‘digged’ the story, NYPD, New York City officials were forced to get involved - even Military Police reviewed some threat allegations related to the issue. NYPD’s refusal to treat the case as a theft prompted so many public online complaints that the department later reversed its decision and ended up arresting teenager, Sasha, for 'possession of stolen property in the fifth degree - a misdemeanor'.
This story (which you can read here and here or in the first chapter of this interesting book) is evidence of how online protests are not always politically motivated. Furthermore, it could also be presented as evidence of how, in cyberspace, small and unimportant issues can become disproportionately large and affect real people’s lives.

On Online Protests

In the last few years, most social and political movements have forged a space on the internet. From mullahs preaching against globalisation, to Colombians organising demonstrations against the FARC, from presidential candidates campaigning, to grassroots associations promoting the legal use of medicinal or recreational drugs, almost everybody has had the chance to express their views online. One of the direct consequences of the starting of political activity on the web was, of course, social and political organisations based primarily on virtual exchanges – the creation of communities, groups and forums.

A little bit later, through the development of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, discussions that were once relegated to online forums became, in many cases, the source of real life social activity, and in a few cases, protests. Yes, it is now certain that the web (and specifically web 2.0) has revolutionised the ways in which humans interact with each other. The internet, which I would define as a the shared mirror in which human imagination reflects and interacts, perhaps represents one of the greatest sociological transformations in human history. However, having said that, and as with all historical social transformations, there seems to be a huge deal of confusion around how virtual communication affects our traditional ways of acting in real political and social life.

Since its emergence, the internet has been hailed as the ultimate democratising tool. The advocates of this view seem to believe that the web provides a space in which civil society could build a stronghold against repressive, authoritarian regimes. It is a fact that the internet’s media environment has facilitated communication, enhancing the ability of those who share common values or ideas to unite. Based on this, many a commentator has praised the internet for its spread would bring regime change to hopeless and oppressed lands – something highly debatable if we pay attention to the ways in which authoritarian governments have been dealing with the internet (check out Evgeny Morozov’s hopeless views on the internet as a democratising tool). However, online protests have been considered as the forefront leading arm in this democratising process brought about by the web – so far an elusive process.

The idea of online protests is closely linked to the idea of empowerment of the people through the web. We are still in the early stages of online protests history, and yet we have witnessed some of its potential. Yes, it is highly difficult to prove to what extent social networks have influenced developments in real life (real-time) protest movements, like the one currently happening in Thailand – or last’s year massive protests after the Iranian election, check out this interesting discussion. However, we should not yet underestimate the power of online protests as a vehicle of organised social activity. In terms of international politics, over the last year we have all witnessed a day-by-day growing relationship between online protests (or online organisation) and real life protests (or offline activity).

Of course, there are several kinds of online protests and not all of them deal with political issues. There have been protests organised by workers to gain rights or increased wages; online protests have sparked the virtual arena of internet games (check out what happened when the Chinese government tried to regulate Azeroth). Second Life, and different sorts of commercial activity have also witnessed how online protests can inject an element of change in a given situation.

More examples and deeper analysis will be provided in following posts.