This Time it is Different: Social Media, Networked Activism and the Long Cycle of Dissent

Abstract

Rallies against sexual harassment in Tahir Square, the visceral expression of public anger against the Delhi bus rape, and the surprise support in Israel’s 2013 election for Yair Lapid’s Social Justice Party, “There’s a Future,” winning second place in the Knesset on a platform of injustice and inequality, are but a few recent examples of a cycle of dissent spreading its wings. The push back from the under-thirty risk-takers, who see no future in a status quo world, is at the core of this turbulence. Many are university graduates, they are tech savvy but jobless. The immediate danger for the movement and for researchers is that the effects of social media are being oversold by its champions, while paradoxically, its transformative capacity and full potential remains underutilized and misunderstood. It is something of a cliche to point out the obvious that ‘the revolution cannot be tweeted’ and that people are at the epicentre of all this change, not new information technology. But, the global use of social media technology makes possible mass messaging and mass mobilization on an unparalleled scale, and this definitely is a transformative change that is innovative, irreversible and far-reaching. Web 2.0 is a high-powered system of mass messaging that has transformed millions into active producers of information and ideas. Code 2.0 is the hardwired infrastructure, which runs the World Wide Web and creates the unique communications environment that puts the user in the driver’s seat with a virtual megaphone (Lessig, 1999). What is more, they have devised new ways to occupy public space and construct common goals. The enigma addressed in this chapter is what sustains these broad social movements in the post 9/11 world both theoretically and practically? Has globalization entered into a long cycle of dissent?