Social Media and the Politics of Reportage

The ‘Arab Spring’ has been represented in the mainstream media as a ‘social media revolution’; the hyperbole of headlines claims a seismic shift away from traditional news correspondence and towards an era of citizen journalism and social media reporting. Beginning in Tunisia in 2010, the Arab Spring protests spread to Egypt, Libya, Syria and many other areas of the Middle East, toppling governments and/or calling for democratic political change to otherwise authoritarian government regimes. Perhaps one of the more interesting aspects of these protests is the use of social media and alternate digital media technologies to both co-ordinate action by protesters and to report upon the events. Activists, protesters and traditional and mainstream journalists were seemingly innovative in their interactions, digitally sharing each other’s eyewitness accounts of events through interview, reportage, image and video online. This edited collection seeks to both theoretically and empirically consider the social, political and cultural ramifications of these interactions and their meaning in a digital media age.

To say that protests occur ‘on the street’ obscures the complexity of the act. While the importance of those people who brave sanction by participating in public demonstrations on the street cannot be diminished, the protest action does not begin and end there. At its heart, a protest is a communicative action; it communicates the protestors’ will in the most vibrant, dynamic and overt way possible. A protest is meant to be seen, heard and witnessed, but most importantly, the message of the protest is meant to be disseminated to others. Thus, those who bear witness to the protest continue the protestors’ communicative action. In between all of these functions are very complex relationships between various actors, including activists and journalists, to begin and, more importantly, to continue a protest’s communicative action.

Al Jazeera English (AJE) is the global English-language news service of the Al jazeera media conglomerate headquartered in Doha. Qatar. Founded in 2006, it is part of the network that began with the prominent Arabic news channel Al Jazeera. The Qatarl emir finances the company, though it derives some revenue income. AJE set out to challenge the BBC and CNN for international news audiences around the world, in its marketing and public outreach, it claims to offer a new perspective on global affairs, one that gives voice to the voiceless and emphasises global south perspectives long under-reported by the main Western news titans (Youmans, 2012). AJE has slowly built its audience around the world and is now available in more than 250 million households and is easily accessible online (except in the United States). In its short time on air, it has managed to win wide accolades and garner great attention for its close coverage of the popular uprisings that shook the Middle East and North Africa in 2011.

The protests which swept across the Arab world starting in January 2011 increased discussion about the role of social media in the mobilisation of social movements and how citizens become involved in the processes of the production and dissemination of information. In Syria, the role of amateur journalists inside and outside the country has been particularly prominent in ensuring the visibility of the protest movement. New communication tools, especially digital videos, have afforded Syrian opposition activists new opportunities for self-mediation and for bearing witness to abuses committed by the Syrian regime (Bennett, 2003; Bennett & Segerberg, 2011; Cottle, 2011; Hussaln & Howard, 2012; Rojecki, 2002; Shirky, 2011). In order to gain media attention and legitimacy among global publics, activists inside Syria and amongst its worldwide diaspora have relentlessly documented and disseminated information and eyewitness images of demonstrations and regime violence via their social media sites and news networks, such as Shaam News Network and Ugarit (Andén-Papadopoulos & Pantti, 2013; Harkln et al., 2012; Howard & Hussein, 2011: 45; Pantti, 2013; Sadiki, 2012).

In this chapter we challenge the idea that technology is intimately linked to political revolution. We argue that new forms of communication such as Twitter and social networking sites of various kinds act as reinforcements of sociopolitical stratifications, rather than challenging existing political realities. As such, we seek to compare the mass demonstrations that have occurred in Iran and the Ukraine, as well as the recent ‘Occupy’ movements, to critically analyse the political mobilisation supposedly driven by the use of new communication technologies. We will demonstrate Lhat Lhe reinforcement of power relationships, particularly the political mobilisation of subjects in Iran and Ukraine, can be explained as materialisation of the same thing — global governmentality. While technology provides new avenues of communication, it is so heavily biased towards a particular type of user, and so heavily surveilled, that this kind of communication actually acts as a form of governance. Before users of this technology can even begin to enact radical political change, the technology itself already ensures that individuals are part of an existing framework of power relationships. Thus challenging the state becomes an exercise in futility.

The Arab Spring protests, as have been discussed in this book, have provided examples of the complex power relations between traditional and new methods of crisis reporting. This chapter aims to conceptualise these relations of power within the mediated public sphere and in turn discuss future implications of these interrelations. Historically, global crisis reporting has been mainly controlled by mainstream journalists, where audiences around the world receive their knowledge of political happenings through dominant media players, such as CNN and BBC World. Yet the wave of political unrest in the Arab world has somehow tipped the power that such dominant news networks hold and left them struggling to ‘control’ the flow of information. The Arab Spring, therefore, has brought about a shift in power where alternative media ‘reporters^-’ on the streets have risen to play a prominent role in the coverage of these political events. This has been made possible through social media technologies which have allowed alternative reporters, activists and protesters to disseminate information globally. It is therefore necessary to theoretically understand relations of power that have emerged from the interactions between established media and alternative media practitioners, within the mediated public sphere.