This is part of a series of posts highlighting the Theorizing the Web conference, April 14th, 2012 at the University of Maryland (inside the D.C. beltway). It was originally posted on 4.2.12 and was updated to include video on 7.11.12. See the conference website for

Any study of politics is going to be fundamentally about power, and about who is free to exercise it and how: How policy is made, how the public sphere is constituted and how boundary lines are drawn around it, who has a voice and who is excluded from

discussion or consideration, who is central and who is marginalized. By the same token, the study of contentious politics – as it focuses on dissent and protest – is fundamentally about how those who have been marginalized, denied a voice, and left without power act to seize the things that have been denied them: How activist communities form and frame themselves, how their objectives and tactics change over time, how they seek entry into the public sphere and engage the actors they find there, how the voiceless find a voice and what they use it to say. Moreover, it’s about what is visible and recognized: How we understand political action in light of what’s gone before and what might come in the future.

All of this would be complex enough without communications technology, and what this panel highlights is how technology changes and enriches this already-complicated picture. Communications technology has the potential to change what we understand by “public sphere” and how we construct meanings around events, as well as how different collective actors organize and react to each other. If knowledge and information are vital to the development of a social movement, then understanding how knowledge and information flow is additionally vital.

Given recent and ongoing global protest movements, the intersection of technology and protest is a subject both broad and deep. Rather than attempt to capture all aspects of it, the excellent papers in this panel call attention to more tightly focused corners of the political picture, and in so doing, illuminate further potential avenues for research and exploration. Additionally, the geographical and cultural focus of this panel is truly diverse, allowing us to push back a bit against the American-and-Eurocentric bias that appears too often in research of this kind.

Titles and abstracts are after the cut.

Kira Jumet – “Social Media: A Force for Political Change in Egypt”

There has been much debate surrounding the role of social media in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Though the movement that led to the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak has been dubbed the “Facebook Revolution,” it is not the first time that foreign media has been quick to connect a social networking site with a popular uprising. The 2009 Iranian protests were labeled the “Twitter Revolution,” and ever since there are those who are adamant that social media is a vital instrument for mobilizing the masses while others argue that social media is just a new means of communication in a history of popular uprisings that fared quite well without these new technological innovations. This paper explores the impact of social media on the development of Egyptian civil society and mobilization by the opposition. It shows that while social media is not necessary for organizing revolutions, it served two important functions leading up to the Egyptian Revolution. It aided in building a politically conscious civil society over the course of a number of years prior to the Revolution and it lowered the threshold for engaging in political participation and dissent by providing a relatively safe, easily accessible space for political debate in a country that outlawed gatherings of five or more people.

Theoretically, my paper adds an intervening step to Timur Kuran’s concept of transitioning from private preference to public preference. I argue that online spaces such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs offer a third option somewhere between engaging in preference falsification and openly joining the opposition. While the revolutionary threshold, at which the external cost of joining the opposition falls below the internal cost of preference falsification, may be very high for individuals to publicly join the opposition on the streets, the threshold for participating in the online opposition or simply professing one’s true political opinion online is much lower. Thus, the significance of this paper is that it updates Kuran’s work to include the advent of social media and demonstrates how social media may or may not act as a stepping stone to open political action.

Hadi Khoshnevis – “Web as a Platform for the Global Moral Brain: A Case Study of Iran”

The compression of space and time brought about by globalization, and the consequent intensification of interactions beyond traditional barriers has given rise to global issues which require global solutions. Chief among these are moral issues, which are back at the center of academic debates on the inherited vernacularity or universality of moral values. By deploying and extending the usage of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar to the realm of morality, this paper will draw on empirical data gathered in Iran to argue that human beings are born with a universal moral faculty which underlies human actions and omissions. Virtual space, thanks to its decentralized, rhizomatic and discursive nature – as opposed to the arborescent structures of the state apparatus – is the platform upon which this potentiality can operate. Webs of non-formal learning and networking provide single individuals/communities, from antipodes of the world, the means of communication necessary for initiating an open dialogue beyond institutionalized stereotypes which have traditionally fueled the machines of states’ biased politics. Based on the data collected from an online survey in Iran, the paper concludes that although Iranians, for many reasons, are being detached from and deprived of free movement and interactions, they nevertheless manage to bypass existing barriers and contribute significantly to the actualization of an emerging global moral brain – a process which testifies to the existence of a universal moral grammar.

Paola Ricaurte (@paolaricaurte) – “Mexican cyberactivism: the power of the new digital intelligentsia”

The historical events of recent years have originated many studies about the role of technology as a catalyst for civic organization and social mobilization.  Some authors argue that technology enhances the construction of new forms of deliberative and participatory democracy. It is less common to find theoretical and empirical work about the subjects that take part in these movements. This paper argues that in the case of Mexico, with a significant digital, cultural and economic divide, instead of ‘smart mobs’ (Rheingold 2002) we are witnessing the emergence of a new digital elite. This cyberintelligentsia –composed of educated urban geeks- acts as a main instigator (Kanter 2010) of social cyberprotest. This paper reformulates Putnam’s (1976) approach to political elites and the different capitals (in the sense of  Bourdieu 1983) to explain the emergence of digital elites as key actors in Mexican cybermovements and their role in public policy making. The paper concludes that although technology has opened the possibility for a group of citizens to influence decision-making, this does not entail a quantitative increase of citizen participation in public affairs.

Murilo Machado (@MuriloMachado) – “Hacktivism and Anonymous: symbol of resistance in society of control”

In Deleuze’s society of control, inevitably permeated by cybernetic machines and computers – two exponents of digital culture –, digital communication acts increasingly, on one hand, as one of the main ways we have to keep in touch, create and access knowledge, produce cultural and informational goods; one the other hand, it acts as a way to exercise permanent control through the protocols. This paper discuss how, in this scenario, in which control protocols and cultural softwares are essential intermediaries in our communication, hacker activism (or hacktivism) becomes relevant, so that the hackers, because of their specific skills, become political actors that cannot be relegated. More specifically, we bring some results concerning the “hacktions” of Anonymous group in Brazil. Thus, we discuss the literature related do hacker culture and hacktivism in order to indentify the motivations and ideals of these actors, here perceived as a symbol of a new movement of resistance that, given the current circumstances, occurs not out of them, but through protocols.