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Who controls the Internet? Student movement organizations and protest in the digital age
Autor
von Bulow, Marisa
Institución
Resumen
In July of 2011, a Chilean student, with no ties to any political or movement organization, posted a call on the Internet to organize a “Gendikama” flashmob. Viralized through Facebook, a few days later thousands of students participated in massive choreographies in various cities across the country, including the square in front of the Presidential palace, in the capital Santiago. Inspired by the Japanese televised series Dragon Ball, it featured the main characters fighting for better education in Chile. This initiative was part of what has become known as the “Chilean Winter”, the most massive wave of protest seen in the country since the mobilizations for democracy at the end of the 1980s (Segovia and Gamboa, 2012; Somma, 2012).
Examples of “do-it-yourself” online activism such as the Gendikama flashmob abound. Based on this rising phenomenon, a widely shared premise of the literature on digital activism has been that individuals have become more empowered to act autonomously through the use of online tools. There are now new and more varied participation gateways that can be easily activated even by those without a previous history of activism and without ties to political organizations.
For at least part of this literature, the empowerment of individuals has gone hand in hand with the assumption that formal organizations have become less relevant in collective action2. According to this view, web-based platforms enable activism in such a way that organizations´ roles as incentive and resource providers have become less meaningful and even less effective.
On the other hand, various authors have recently questioned these arguments. There are limitations as to when and how initiatives such as the Gendikama flashmob can be viralized online and implemented offline. The flexible network structures which can hold together a disparate coalition of protestors around a single, simple demand—“Mubarak must go” or “better education in Chile” —are typically far less effective at articulating specific, nuanced demands in the negotiation process which follows success. Most importantly, social movement
1 This paper presents part of the preliminary results of a broader research project that took off in March of 2013, entitled “Web in Movement: the student movement in Chile and the uses of the Internet” (Fondecyt Project 1130897). Our general goal is to understand the impacts of new digital technologies on collective action. More specifically, the research focuses on the analysis of the process of adaptation of social movement organizations to the new possibilities of communication and political engagement that are enabled by online platforms. We seek to understand how and why this process of adaptation affects power relations as well as repertoires of contention within a social movement, by identifying the mechanisms used by individuals, networks and organizations to promote their goals through digital media. For more details about the goals and the methodology, see the documents available in the Project’s website www.webinmovement.cl/webinmove/
2 See, for example, Shirky 2008.
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organizations can transform their roles rather than disappear or become irrelevant. In doing so, some of them may become even stronger, instead of weaker3.
This is a complicated debate, not only because of the novelty of these trends, but also because the empirical evidence available supports both sides of the argument: the empowerment of individuals and self-organizing communities, and the transformation of formal organizations. We argue in this paper that these should not be analyzed as contradictory processes. Both may occur in parallel, sometimes arising tensions, sometimes complementing each other.
An analysis of the case of the Chilean student movement gives us the opportunity to better understand this double process. It allows us to study how a long-standing social movement adopts new practices and adapts to the changes in collective action coordination and participation that we see happening in the so-called “digital age”. More specifically, it allows us to study the impacts the use of digital tools may have on power relations within the movement. Are new types of collective action and contention repertoires arising? Are relationships between grassroots and leadership changing? How do actors control (or attempt to control) the Internet?
This paper shows that, between 2011 and 2013, activists and organizations increasingly (but selectively) incorporated various digital platforms and applications in their daily actions, creating a set of digital gateways for those interested in information on the movement as well as for those interested in finding ways to participate. For students and their organizations, this process of incorporation of digital tools had begun in 2006, during the Penguin Revolution4, with platforms such as fotologs and, of course, the use of emails and mobile phones. However, when the new cycle of contention began, in 2011, technological possibilities available to them were both new and challenging.
The boundaries of the student movement are understood here as being comprised not only of formal student organizations and their corresponding set of elected leaders, but also of the various activist groups that seek to influence the movement, and the students as a whole. Thus, our level of analysis is at the same time organizational and individual. With respect to organizations, we include the many (formal and informal) groups and “collectives” that are part of the movement. If we did not cast such a broad net, we would miss out on important ways in which the Internet is being used and their impacts on power relations. We would also turn a blind eye to the relevance of the so-called do-it-yourself activism (which will be the focus of a
3 As argued, for example, by Bimber et al. 2012.
4 As in other countries, Chilean students have historically been key actors in social protest. The previous wave of protest occurred in 2006, and was known as “The Penguin Revolution”, because of the black and white uniforms used by high school students, who represented the majority of the participants at the time. It is interesting to note that many of the university students that participated in the 2011-2013 protests were also a part of the Penguin Revolution in 2006. For an analysis about the links between the 2006 mobilizations and the current ones, see von Bülow and Bidegain, forthcoming.
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different paper). We thus follow Earl et al´s cautionary note to avoid the implicit bias in the literature about who can produce protest, which emphasizes the role played by social movement organizations (2010, p. 441).
We understand the new technological era as a new and important but nondeterministic context for collective action, meaning that different actors may respond to it in different, contingent ways. Furthermore, these actors also change the way they use digital tools through time. This may sound obvious, but it is important. We have few systematic studies on the dynamics and variation of digital media use, perhaps because most of the literature focuses on a single platform and in short periods of time. Our research proposes a longer time frame, seeking to understand the process of incorporation of various digital platforms by actors through a period of three years. Furthermore, we understand social media platforms as arenas of power struggle. Whether they lead to greater individual autonomy, to less hierarchy within organizations and therefore to decentralization of power, are all empirical questions.
In this paper, we focus on only one of these platforms. We compare the Twitter behavior of student leaders, formal student organizations and other student political organizations, during 26 weeks of major protests, between May of 2011 and November of 2013 (see the appendix for exact dates). However, the patterns of engagement in Twitter cannot be explained without referring to both offline dynamics as well as to how the student movement uses other online platforms. The broader research project this paper is a part of seeks to understand the impacts of the use of multiple platforms (including Facebook pages, Facebook groups, YouTube and webpages) and their interactions on power relations within the student movement5.
This paper is structured in two sections. We first characterize the student movement and present its main demands, followed by an overview of how digital tools have been incorporated by actors through time. The second section analyzes how our case study helps us make sense of these debates, by presenting data on Twitter behavior during protest events. The paper ends with a brief discussion about our future research agenda. 28