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New media, old politics

Introduction

With the advent of ‘the unexpected phenomenon’ of Arab Spring (Al-Sharif,-2013), that

broke out across the Middle East in 2011, many analysts and commentators tended to

champion the role of new digital technologies in driving the socio-political change in the

region (Diab,-2010;-Hauslohner,-2012;-Smith,-2011;-Trew, 2013). Their portrayal of the

new media as a ‘radical change’ in the media-politics relationship subscribes to a

technologically deterministic view of the role of new media in society. This paper considers

new media to be any mobile or web-based technology that ‘allows the creation and

exchange of user-generated content’ (Dewey-et-al.,-2012).

However, the changes that new media brought about to the media and politics are

indeed remarkable, this paper argues that these changes have been ‘more evolutionary than

revolutionary’ (Laughey,-2009:-136), as the virtual sphere extends ‘our channels for

communication, without radically affecting the communication itself’ (Papacharissi,-

2002:-21). To put it another way, ‘The Internet itself will not be a historical light switch

that turns on some fundamentally new age of political participation and grassroots

democracy’ (Hill-and-Hughes,-1998:-168).

Since this article considers new media as ‘merely tools’ (Morozov,-2011), they are

poised to produce different outcomes in different contexts. Therefore, this essay argues that

new media cannot be considered themselves as a radical change in politics or media. Thus,

to accurately assess the role of these technologies pertaining to politics and media, the

technological deterministic perspective should be abandoned, and a contextualist approach

should be employed instead. Contextualism does not merely scrutinize the technical

competencies or the social consequences of new media, but it also integrates analysis of

economic, cultural, social and political contexts in which these technologies operate within

a specific time frame (DeRose,-2009:-Wolfsfeld-et-al.,-2013).

To develop these arguments, this article is structured into two sections. The first

section sets a framework for analysis of new media’s role in changing politics and

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traditional media. The second section discusses changes in news media, activism and

democracy in the digital age.

Contextualism as a framework

To begin with, the technological determinism is a theoretical framework that assumes that

technology changes the society (Comunello-and-Anzera,-2012:-458). This approach

comprises both the cyber-enthusiastic (utopian-or-evangelist) and cyber-pessimistic

(dystopian-or-skeptic) views of technology. While the cyber-enthusiasts see the internet as

a liberating force that enhances freedom of expression, democratizing the media, and

empowering the underdogs (Castells,-1996;-Grossman,-1995;-Rheingold,-1993;-Saco,-

2002), the cyber-pessimists view it as a negative force that could ‘disconnect […] us from

each other’ (Wellman,-2011), favors the hegemonic powers and helps entrenching the

world social and economic inequalities. Arguably, this dichotomous vision does not

provide the most valid accounts of the new media-related changes in politics or traditional

media, because it ignores taking into consideration the political and social contexts that are

significant in shaping the outcomes of new media.

For instance, ‘the social media played an instrumental role’ in the success of the

January 25 revolution that swept Egypt’s Mubarak from power on 11 February 2011 (El-

Tantawy-and-Wiest,-2011:-1207). However, with the political and social changes in post-

revolutionary Egypt, the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) implemented these

technologies to tarnish the revolutionaries’ image and impede the democratic transition

(El-Khalili,-2013). This example elucidates that the context and time frame variables can

determine whether the new media could bolster the revolutionaries (utopian outcome) or

the military rule (dystopian outcome).

Therefore, this paper suggests that moving beyond the utopian/dystopian binary

perspective and adopting a context-based approach could pinpoint the true nature of the

outcomes of new media technologies which ‘are both context and themselves

contextualized’ (Silverstone,-2007-in-Gottlieb,-2009).

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News media, activism and democracy in the digital age

News media in the ‘digital first’ era

Encouraged by the ‘immediacy in news coverage’ (Fenton,-2010:-7), and in response to

the increasing popularity of online news (Ghannam,-2011:-7), many news organizations

have adopted a digital-first strategy (Jarvis,-2011) – in other words ‘they break news as it

happens online, rather than holding it until the next edition’ (Oriella-PR-Network,-2013:-

2). Their online presence rather than the print editions has become their first priority. For

instance, the Arab media outlook report (2009:-10) stated that ‘Digital media will thrive in

the Arab market because the market has a large, technologically accomplished

demographic group—its youth—who are comfortable with it and will customize it to their

own requirements.’ This forecast proved right as some Arab media outlets ceased their

print-formats-and-switched-to-web-based-editions-(Arab-Media-Outlook,-2010).

At the same time, the new media equipped internet users with the facility to produce

and disseminate news (Burnett-and-Marshall,-2003;-Foot-and-Schneider,-2006:-12,-67).

Consequently, the conventional top-down paradigm of media power has been challenged

by the new media-induced bottom-up pattern, in which individuals and groups are able to

generate journalistic, or quasi-journalistic, contents (Gottlieb,-2009). The individuals’

capability of reporting directly on events they witness or participate in render the online

news more free and unmediated; that is it has not been filtered to serve special interests

(Abramson-et-al.,-1988).

Arguably, this privilege of unmediated news is an embodiment of Paul Duguid’s

first reductive ‘futurological trope’ of the experience of modern media which is ‘the idea

of increasing transparency’; the hypothesis ‘that each new medium actually mediates less’,

thus it successfully ‘frees’ information (see-Gitelman-and-Pingree,-2003:-xxi). This notion

of transparency enhances the possibility of the new media as a prospective public sphere.

According to Jürgen Habermas, the ‘public sphere’ is a conceptual layout of a space ‘in

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which citizens debate and deliberate about their common affairs’ producing and

circulating-discourses-‘that-can,-in-principle,-be-critical-of-the-state’-(Fraser,-1990:-57).

Duguid’s second trope is the idea of supercession. In other words, every medium

‘vanquishes or subsumes its predecessors’ (Gitelman-and-Pingree,-2003:-xxi). However,

it does not seem that this trope reflects the reality of the digital age, in which ‘old and new

media collide’ and ‘the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer

interact in unpredictable ways’ (Jenkins,-2006:-259-60). This cultural convergence is

supported by Hänska-Ahy and Shapour’s (2013) study who’s reporting the protests?,

whose findings proved that the collaboration between citizen and professional journalists

generated changes in the journalistic practices and attitudes towards the user-generated

content (UGC) in the newsroom, along with increasing the ‘journalistic literacy’ of the

citizen-journalists-(Hänska-Ahy,-2012).

Furthermore, Beckett and Mansell (2008:-93) suggest that, with the emergence of

networked journalism, the ‘news process itself […] changes from linear to a networked

process.’ This suggestion validates Gillmor’s (2004:-45) argument that ‘The rules of

newsmakers, not just journalists have changed.’ An instance of these changes is the

increasing reliance of journalists on social networks like Twitter, Facebook to source and

verify their stories. According to Oriella PR Network’s study (2013:-6), ‘51 per cent of

journalists worldwide’ say they use the microblogs to gather new stories, while 42 per cent

resort-to-these-website-to-verify-stories-they-are-working-on.

The hope was that increased participation of those ‘formerly known as the

audience’ (Rosen,-2008:-163), could reinvigorate democracy and revive the online public

sphere. However, some could argue that new media ‘remediate’ old media. In other words,

new media appropriate ‘the techniques, forms and social significance [of other media] and

[…] refashion them’ (Bolter-and-Grusin,-2000:-65). Moreover, the fragmentized nature of

digital technologies hinders it from creating a coherent discourse that could challenge the

hegemonic order, as ‘[new] media is shattering the world into a billion personalized truths,

each-seemingly-equally-valid-and-worthwhile’-(Keen,-2007:-17).

Notwithstanding the hope and the hype of the potential of new media in evolving

traditional media, new media is still a medium that operates within a globalized capitalist

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system (Papacharissi,-2002:-18). These digital technologies are subjected to the same

forces that originally distorted the nature of television and radio: media once hailed for

providing innovative communications (Carey,-1995). In addition, Laughey (2009:-136)

argues that ‘new-media ownership mirrors patterns of ownership and control in traditional

media sectors’ as only five corporations dominate the UK broadband internet market. This

argument is supported by the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2013, which reveals

that the most popular sources of online news in UK are the traditional news brands

(Newman-and-Levy,-2013:-53).

Finally, the proper assessment of the role of digital technologies in mediation and

communication is certainly context-based. In an individual-based context, some could

argue that new media enable individuals to voice their opinions and share their stories with

the world, and thus new media empower citizens and democratize the media. Albeit, in a

different context, the evaluation of this role might be different. For example, in a global-

based context or power-based context, some could argue that new media have been co-

opted by the global social and economic order, rather than challenging it. They would also

argue that ‘in a digital age, the relations of [media] power remain on the whole the same to

the increasing advantage of global media conglomerates’ (Fenton,-2010:-13). In a word,

context-matters.

Activism and democracy: The dialectical power of new media

This section presents a brief historical review of online activism, followed by two cases

from the 2011 Arab uprisings to argue that portraying new media broadly as a radical

change in politics might be a problematic generalization, because these technologies can-

generate-different-outcomes-in association with-the-contexts-in-which-they-operate.

Undoubtedly, the 2011 Arab Spring is not the first moment of the innovative usage

of internet technologies in mobilization or collective action. Since ‘the late 1980s’

(Pickerill,-2006:-267) these facilities have been used by activists and social movements to

challenge ‘the main ideas in politics [and society] in a variety of ways’ (Washbourne,-

2010:-138). For instance, in 1995, the UK-based Friends of the Earth movement launched

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a web platform to map the polluting factories in the country based on online users’ reports

(Pickerill, 2003). Also, the Zapatistas movement in Mexico was successful in employing

the internet to draw international attention and solidarity with their local struggle against

the Mexican government (Warf-and-Grimes,-1997:-268). Moreover, in the mid-1990s

online civil disobedience movements, often referred to as hacktivists, started to emerge

such as the Critical Art Ensemble group, which believed that ‘Nothing of value to power

elite-can-be-found-on-the-streets’-(Critical-Art-Ensemble,-1996:-11).

Furthermore, by December 1999, during the anti-World Trade Organization

(WTO) protests in Seattle, and as a protest against the mainstream media, which were

perceived as capitalist tools, Independent Media Center IMC (also known as IndyMedia)

was established by activists to cover the news of the anti-WTO demonstrations. This new

experiment of ‘grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social

and political issues’ has proliferated to form ‘more than 100 IMCs’ all over the world

(IndyMedia-UK,-2003). IndyMedia’s philosophical underpinnings reflect Lyotard’s

(1984) argument that individuality, anarchy and disagreement lead to ‘true democratic

emancipation’ (Papacharissi,-2002:-11-18). This idea is congruent with Poster’s (1995)

conclusion that the internet decentralizes the communication, but ‘ultimately enhances

democracy’-(Ibid).

Contrarily, in the endeavor to create a transparent and non-hierarchical networked

movement, which enhances democracy and celebrates diversity, the activists risk losing

the movement’s collective identity and its coherent discourse. As Jeremey Gilbert, a British

academic and activist, argues ‘If we really want to make the world a better place [we should

take] the courage to accept the risk to our identities which real change always poses.’

(Notes-from-Nowhere,-2003:-510-511). The fragmentation of the activist discourse is also

identified with ‘networked individualism’, which means that the ‘individuals build their

networks, online and off-line, on the basis of their interests […] rather than local place-

based affinity’ (Castells,-2001:-131). This plurality in activists’ preferences helps the

global networking, however, it weakens the commitment to a specific movement or a

distinct-goal-(Pickerill,-2006:-274).

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Despite these challenges, the new social movement organizations continued to

benefit from new media technologies (Negrine,-2008:-190-2), as they allow the social

movement to organize its members and recruit others at a-relatively low cost. Whereby the

movement, especially under authoritarian regimes, could break the media monopoly and

disseminate directly images, texts and videos. As well as reaching out to the outside world

to draw global attention and solidarity (Earl-and-Kimport-2011;-Hussain-and-Howard-

2012;-Shirky-2011;-Tufekci-and-Wilson-2012). New media, according to Della Porta and

Mosca (2005), enabled the social movement to overcome the spatial, temporal and

financial constraints of mass communication; they, therefore, represent a crucial resource

for activism. El Tantawy and Wiest (2011:-1208) suggest that the resource mobilization

theory represents a good entry to better grasp the impacts of new media on social

movements, since this theory takes into account the historical, social and political contexts

of-the-collective-action.

Empowered by new media and seeking a free and democratic future, thousands of

young Arab activists, in 2011, fervently protested to create what Michel Foucault (1986)

called heterotopias: the rebellious spaces – online and offline – that might emerge and

challenge the hegemonic orders and ideologies. These spaces have intermittently been

created during the Arab uprisings. Such as, in the Bahraini context, the digital pro-

democracy discourse on the web (online heterotopia) and Pearle Roundabout in reality

(offline heterotopia). These flowering heterotopias, however, were either eventually

controlled-or-destroyed-by-the-ruling-regimes-(see Chulov,-2011).

Nevertheless, the 2011 Arab uprisings generated some success stories of harnessing

the social media for democratic change and empowering people. In December 2010, the

Egyptian activists were enthusiastically following the protests in Tunisia. The unfolding

events there served as an ‘instant political education, drumming home a double message:

‘they are powerless,’ and ‘we did it’ (Judt-in-Vaidhyanathan,-2011:-123). Inspired by the

fleeing of Tunisia’s dictator, the Egyptian activists – using the social media – started to

coordinate their messages and unify their slogans in order to take to the street to iterate the

Tunisian experiment and topple the government. ‘The call for a nationwide mass protest

on 25 January 2011 […] under a unified banner protesting against torture, poverty […]

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corruption and unemployment’, Rennick (2013:-12) argues, ‘was a deliberate process of

frame amplification’ to encourage as many citizens as possible to join the protests by

alignment-of-their-personal-grievances.

‘We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to

tell the world’, this is how an Egyptian activist described the role of social media in the

January 25 revolution (in-Chebib-and-Sohail,-2011:-139). In the Egyptian context, the

robust revolutionary cyberspace succeeded to cover and narrate the on-the-ground events

through the social media that diversify the news, and the traditional media to amplify these

news (Jenkins,-2006:-268), and reach wider audiences, thereby trigger attention and

solidarity of millions all over the world (Choudhary-et-al.,-2012). One could not portray

new media as the ‘engine’ of the January 25 revolution, nevertheless, they played a pivotal

role in affecting the actions of skilful tech-savvy activists who initiated the mass protests

(Comunello and Anzera, 2012: 466), that resulted in the fall of Mubarak on February 11,

2011. However, the assessment of new media’s role in the context of post-Mubarak Egypt

is-a-different-story-(see-El-Khalili,-2013).

In contrast to the Egyptian case, the 2011 Arab uprisings witnessed a different

scenario in Bahrain. The warning raised by Amnesty International that ‘Dictators in the

Arab world could crush uprisings against their iron-fisted rule using the same social media

that have been credited with boosting the revolts’ (The-Daily-Star,-2011), manifested itself

as ‘the Bahraini government quickly learned to use social media in its own favour’ (Dewey-

et-al.,-2012:-22). In parallel to the crackdown on the protesters on the ground, the regime

was successful to subjugate the pro-democracy online sphere through tactics that aimed to

threaten the activists, disclose their personal information and launch defamation campaigns

against them. Such as ‘online harassment’ (MacKinnon,-2012) and ‘trolling’ which

indicates, according to Jones (2013:-77), a ‘form of aggressive internet communication

where people using anonymous accounts engage in abusive behaviour towards other users’.

Moreover, the regime hired an UK-based firm called Olton, as reported by some activists,

to be involved in intelligence-gathering and surveillance operations against the anti-

government protesters (see-Desmukh in Jones,-2013:-81). In Bahrain, the hegemonic

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power was successful in using the web technologies to control and shatter the pro-

democracy-online-sphere.

The Egyptian and the Bahraini scenarios demonstrate that it is of high significance

to consider the wider political context, which alters and is affected by activism. One

prominent disparity between these cases is the role of the military. While the Egyptian

military abandoned Mubarak in 2011, the Gulf countries’ troops intervened in Bahrain and

crushed the democratic uprising. Therefore, once again the new media cannot be

‘themselves’ a radical change in politics, as they are tools and could generate different

outcomes-in-different-contexts.

Indeed, the context always matters, not only in the case of democratic uprisings,

but also in everyday life. The global number of internet users is constantly growing, albeit,

as of June 2012, there is still more than 65% of the world population outside the virtual

sphere (Internet-World-Stats,-2014). Therefore, if some could argue that digital media

boosts political discussions and deliberation, others could reject this argument as the

internet cannot solve the problem of inequality of access. According to Castells (2001:-

269), ‘The fundamental digital divide is not measured by the number of connections to the

Internet, but by the consequences of both connection and lack of connection.’ While Ward

and Lusoli (2005:-61) suggest that ‘Websites [...] allow MPs to communicate more

frequently, in more depth, and to a wider [...] audience’, Jankowsi and Van Selm (2000),

reserve that online political debates reflect those of real life, seem to be dominated by elites

and-are-unable-to-influence-public-policy-formation.

Finally, the new media support democracy and people empowerment in many ways,

from introducing e-voting to addressing declining voters’ turnout, to extending political

deliberation. Digital technologies bring together different people who would never be able

to politically engage each other offline for different reasons, ‘and that is no small matter’

(Papacharissi,-2002:-23). Notwithstanding, they are alone unable to transform the political

and economic structure that has flourished for centuries. Asserting the firmness of the

global structure, Silverstone (1999:-11-2) puts it ‘The power that we know to be exercised

within global capitalism cannot just simply be ignored once we enter the new media age

and-venture-into-cyberspace.’

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Conclusion

As seen in this paper, the new media are inherently dialectical force that cannot be

interpreted as a radical change in the relationship of politics and media, nor can they be

seen as completely uninfluential. New media should not be solely treated as an oppressor

or a liberator (Stork, 2011). Therefore, to properly evaluate the role of social media in

collective actions, the utopian and dystopian perceptions should be abandoned. Superior to

these technologically deterministic perceptions, this paper proposed contextualism as an

alternative approach to assess the new media’s outcomes. Contextualism provides a more

inclusive analysis as it takes into account the broader social and political context in which

new media operate.

In the digital age, mainstream media organizations are expanding their online news

enterprises at the expense of print editions and other traditional mediums. New media allow

citizens to voice their opinions and share their stories with the world in what came to be

called citizen journalism. The collaboration between citizen journalism and professional

journalism is associated with changes in the practices of newsrooms and citizen journalists.

However, further empirical studies are needed to address some questions related to citizen

journalism, such as should a set of code of ethics regulate citizen journalism? Will the

citizen journalist be a substituent to professional reporter? If so, under what conditions?

Moreover, the new media support activism, democracy and empowering people in

so many ways. They are cheap and effective tools for mobilizing and organizing people.

They allow rapid dissemination of photos, images and videos, also they provide a space for

discussion and deliberation. However, the digital technologies have some limitations. They

cannot solve the problem of digital divide, also they reflect the patterns of control and

ownership of the mainstream media. Given the dominance of global neoliberalism, it is

more likely that the digital technologies will be co-opted by the existing political and

economic structures rather than challenging them. Furthermore, the pursuit of activists to

build non-hierarchical, transparent and vibrant movements celebrate diversity and

differences is a double-edged measure that could enhance the movement adaptability and

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its ability to network with others, but on the other hand it could diminish its collective

identity and fragmentize its discourse.

Finally, two cases of the 2011 Arab uprisings were introduced in order to

investigate how the new media could be contextualized to support democracy in one case,

and to undermine democracy in the other. These cases validate the contexualist approach

as a proper method of analysis of new media contributions to media and politics. After all,

‘The [true] value of the virtual sphere lies in the fact that it encompasses the hope,

speculation,-and-dreams-of-what-could-be’ (Parachrissi,-2002:-23).

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