Since the first gathering in Beirut in 2008, followed by a second meet-up in the Lebanese capital in 2009, the Arab Bloggers Meeting has acted as a platform to create new relationships and consolidate existing connections between Arab techies, content creators, and activists with different skills, backgrounds, and political beliefs. Several years have passed, and the fourth meeting, held in Amman, Jordan from January 20-23, 2014, had a definitively bittersweet feeling compared to the previous gathering in Tunis in 2011, which was pervaded by a general euphoria for the successful outcomes of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt that had resulted in ousting the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes.

 

Only three years have passed and, after being quickly labeled as the “Arab Spring,” the political upheaval that erupted in the region in late 2010 has been renamed the “Arab Winter,” as a result of the dire evolutions of the uprisings into fully fledged civil wars or military rule. Similarly, media headlines such as the much trumpeted “Facebook and Twitter revolutions” have been changed into “Internet devolutions.” After being exalted as the main catalyst in boosting political movements in the region, social media turned into a factor igniting conflicts, hatred, and sectarian tensions. In both cases, this overemphasis on the technological dimensions of the Arab uprisings reflects a belief that the Internet and networked communications would naturally be technologies of freedom. Consequently, the culture of participation and sharing enabled by these technologies would be considered political by its own nature, and a driving force for implementing democracy.

 

In order to reflect critically on the relationship between networked technologies of communication and political movements, this year the Arab Bloggers Meeting hosted “Mind the Gap: Bridging Knowledge and Practices of Activism.” The workshop, which was developed and organized by Dr. Enrico de Angelis from CEDEJ in Cairo, Amis Boersma from the Dutch NGO Hivos , and myself, grouped together Arab activists and scholars with different academic backgrounds: Jon Anderson, an anthropologist from The Catholic University of America; Jodi Dean, a political scientist from Hobart and William Smith Colleges; Korinna Patelis, a researcher in new media studies from Cyprus University of Technology.

 

Building on their previous research work, each of these scholars gave an original contribution to the debate on how networked technologies of communication inform politics and reshape practices of resistance and mobilization in the context of contemporary social movements. Jon Anderson reflected on how the individual practice of blogging – based on affirming the self and signaling its own world-vision and beliefs to others – could be “refined” and eventually become a “code,” i.e. “a shared experience.” Anderson stressed that blogging per se` is not necessarily informed by politics and should not be confused with citizen journalism, as too often happens in the context of the Arab uprisings. At the same time, the discontent of many individuals converged in the collective slogan of the uprisings “as-shaab yurid isqat al-nizam” (the people want to topple the regime). When individual status messages are refined into a universal code, expressions of individual rage and grievance can generate a collective social movement, the scholar pointed out.  

 

Discussing the role of bloggers in contributing to political movements, Palestinian blogger Abeer Kopty underlined that focusing too much on individuals can seriously undermine the success of a collective mobilization. She stressed that those Arab bloggers who have been turned by mainstream media into “celebrities” are indeed able to reach out to news outlets and have their voice heard. Yet they have also become instrumental to a mechanism that fetishizes individual practices of activism, especially when originated from the formerly “disempowered other”, as Korinna Patelis described the Arab activist that blogs, tweets, and uploads videos on YouTube.

 

Echoing Kopty`s concerns, Patelis underlined that the “hegemonic discourse of global media aims at promoting the idea that social media made it possible for authentic stories to be produced by dis-empowered others.”  These users, apparently re-empowered by social media, are turned into “social story tellers who constantly tweet, blog, and produce more tags and data.” Yet, by doing this, they end up generating thousands of personalized variations of the same script, framed within what Patelis calls “blockbuster software.” “The blockbuster software standardizes the way in which the self is represented by requiring identities and experiences to fit into predetermined spaces, such as the boxes provided by Facebook once a user profile is created.” She warned about this nonstop disclosure of the user`s identity through a process of “stripping, peeling and indexing the self.” 

 

Jodi Dean underlined that this practice is not only a threat for anonymity – particularly in the case of activists who live under authoritarian regimes –  but would lead to producing ideas that are “conceived less in terms of a self-conscious collective than they are as viruses, mobs, trends, moments, and swarms.”  Users end up being caught in an endless process of production for production`s sake; bloggers “seek attention, hits, reblogs, and uptake in the mainstream media;” messages are turned into mere “contributions,” just another “additive factor” to the endless flow of data. Dean`s idea that this mechanism, which is naturally embedded in networked communication technologies, serves to expand global capitalism and, eventually, a softer and more seductive version of US imperialism, was widely discussed by the workshop`s participants.

 

Many pointed out that ideas such as participation and empowerment, both allegedly enabled by social media, are rarely critically questioned. Based on this belief, practices such as digital training, peer-production and sharing are naturally implemented and encouraged by international NGOs working in the Arab world and, “even if involuntarily, by conferences like the Arab Bloggers Meeting,” Ramzi Jaber from Visualizing Palestine stressed. This concern was shared by Lina Atallah from the Egyptian journalists` collective Mada Masr: “I ask myself: why are we doing a training about digital storytelling if we are not even able to write a political communique when your main goal is to get more people to Tahrir square?” Wafa Ben Hassine from the Tunisian web portal Nawaat reflected on her experience in training local media collectives in Tunisia. “After investing in the training we realized that, although more local stories were produced, they didn`t get any attention or visibility of sort.” “We take for granted that we should train more people to produce more content, because it`s good to empower citizens and have more stories out, but… is this really needed?” Walid al-Saqaf a scholar from Yemen, reminded the participants that social media training conducted in the region often does not take into account the needs of local societies: “according to the findings of my research, circumvention is not a big issue here; yet we heavily invest in training on such tools in every single event, conference, gathering held in this region.”  

 

Building on this discussion, participants to the workshop agreed that both digital activism and scholarship on technology and social movements need to avoid to mystifying the Internet, too often deemed the natural place for ideas of participation, abundance and wholeness – which Dean described as “fantasies” spread by communicative capitalism – to materialize.  Rethinking the practices of digital activism and the language of empowerment and participation largely employed to describe these practices, should be part of a critical reflection to be carried forward by activists and researchers who think networks as political technologies, and consider politics in relation to networks.

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For a further reading on the Arab Bloggers Meeting and tech communities in the Arab world, see Della Ratta, D. & Valeriani, A. “Just a bunch of (Arab) geeks? How an elite of “techies” shaped a digital culture in the Arab region and contributed to the making of the Arab uprisings”, in Tarik Sabry and Layal Ftouni (forthcoming) Arab Subcultures: Reflections on Theory and Practice, I.B. Tauris, London.