How
mass protests around the globe have become the 'new social network'
By
Peter Beaumont
24
June, 2013
The
demonstrations in Brazil began after a small rise in bus fares
triggered mass protests. Within days this had become a nationwide
movement whose concerns had spread far beyond fares: more than a
million people were on the streets shouting about everything from
corruption to the cost of living to the amount of money being spent
on the World Cup.
In
Turkey, it was a similar story. A protest over the future of a city
park in Istanbul - violently disrupted by police - snowballed too
into something bigger, a wider-ranging political confrontation with
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which has scarcely been brought
to a close by the clearing of Gezi Park.
If
the scenes have seemed familiar, it is because they shared common
features: viral, loosely organised with fractured messages and mostly
taking place in urban public locations.
Unlike
the protest movement of 1968 or even the end of Soviet influence in
eastern Europe in 1989, these are movements with few discernible
leaders and with often conflicting ideologies.
Their
points of reference are not even necessarily ideological but take
inspiration from other protests, including those of the Arab Spring
and the Occupy movement.
The
result has been a wave of social movements - sometimes short-lived -
from Wall St to Tel Aviv and from Istanbul to Rio de Janeiro, often
engaging younger, better educated and wealthier members of society.
What
is striking for those who, like myself, have covered these protests
is how discursive and open-ended they often are. People go not
necessarily to hear a message but to take over a location and discuss
their discontents (even if the stunning consequence can be the fall
of an autocratic leader such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak).
If
the "new protest" can be summed up, it is not in specifics
of the complaints but in a wider idea about organisation encapsulated
on a banner spotted in Brazil last week: "We are the social
network."
In
Brazil, the varied banners underlined the difficulty of easy
categorisation as protesters held aloft signs expressing a range of
demands from education reforms to free bus fares while denouncing the
billions of public dollars spent on stadiums for the 2014 World Cup
and the Olympics two years later.
"It's
sort of a Catch-22," Rodrigues da Cunha, a 63-year-old
protester, said. "On the one hand we need some sort of
leadership, on the other we don't want this to be compromised by
being affiliated with any political party."
As
the Economist pointed out last week, while mass movements in Britain,
France, Sweden and Turkey have been inspired by a variety of causes,
including falling living standards, authoritarian government and
worries about immigration, Brazil does not fit the picture, with
youth unemployment at a record low and the country enjoying the
biggest leap in living standards in its history.
Paul
Mason, economics editor of BBC2's Newsnight and author of Why It's
Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, has argued that a
key factor, largely driven by new communication technologies, is that
people have not only a better understanding of power but are more
aware of its abuse, both economically and politically.
Mason
believes we are in the midst of a "revolution caused by the near
collapse of free-market capitalism combined with an upswing in
technical innovation" - but not everyone is so convinced. What
does ring true, however, is his assertion that a driving force from
Tahrir Square to Occupy is a redefinition of notions of both what
"freedom" means and its relationship to governments that
seem ever more distant.
It
is significant, too, that many recent protests have taken place in
the large cities that have been most transformed by neoliberal
policies.
Tali
Hatuka, an Israeli urban geographer whose book on the new forms of
protest will be published next year, identifies the mass
mobilisations against the Iraq war in 2003 as a turning point in how
people protest. Hatuka argues that, while previous large public
protests had tended to be focused and narrow in their organisation,
the Iraq war protests saw demonstrations in 800 cities globally which
encompassed and tolerated a wide variety of outlooks.
She
said last week: "Up to the 1990s protests tended to be organised
around a pyramid structure with a centralised leadership. As much
effort went into the planning as into the protest itself."
She
points to how the new form of protest tends to produce fractured and
temporary alliances. "If you compare what we are seeing today
with the civil rights movement in the US - even the movements of 1989
- those were much more cohesive. Now the event itself is the message.
The question is whether that is enough."
She
suspects it is not, pointing to how present-day activism - from the
Iraq war demonstrations onwards - has often failed to deliver
concrete results with its impact often fizzling out. Because of this,
current forms of protest may be forced to change.
Another
key feature of the new protests, argues Saskia Sassen, a sociology
professor at Columbia University, New York, is the notion of
"occupation" - which has not been confined to the obvious
tactics of the Occupy movement. Occupations of different kinds have
occurred in Tahrir Square, Cairo, in Gezi Park, Istanbul, and during
social protests in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2011. "Occupying is not
the same as demonstrating. Many of the [recent] protests made legible
the fact that occupying makes novel territory, and thereby a bit of
history, using what was previously considered merely ground,"
Sassen wrote. "Whether in Egypt, the US, or elsewhere, it is
important that the aim of the occupiers is not to grab power. They
were and are, rather, engaged in the work of citizenship, exposing
deep flaws and wrongs in their polity and society."
She
argues that one distinguishing factor is that many of the new protest
movements have involved what she calls "the modest middle
class". She says: "Often what people are saying is that you
are the state. I'm a citizen. I've done my job. You're not
recognising that."
Hatuka
says: "The old pyramid way of organising protests does have its
limitations, but so too do the new ways of organising. Often it does
not feel very effective in the long run. People will often go for a
day or two and these protests are not necessarily offering an
ideological alternative."
-
Observer
Social
media 'wakes giant'
The
protests for better living conditions rocking Brazil's streets have
spilled over into social media, with a deluge of tweets, Facebook
comments and thousands of pictures posted on Instagram.
For
the past two weeks, hundreds of thousands of mainly young people have
been marching across the country, a placard in one hand and in the
other a smartphone to share their protests with the world.
As
with the 2011 Arab Spring protests and recent unrest in Turkey,
activists have used social media to mobilise supporters while
authorities have monitored it to try to stay one step ahead.
On
Twitter, a young woman exulted as more than 1.2 million people
flooded the streets in scores of cities on Thursday to rail against
the billions of dollars spent on the 2014 World Cup, as well as
corruption and inadequate transport.
"This
is what pride looks like. That was beautiful yesterday," she
tweeted, adding the trademark slogan keywords #ogiganteacordou (A
giant woke up) and #vemprarua (Come down to the streets).
Yesterday,
online networks were abuzz with comments on President Dilma
Rousseff's televised address on Saturday in which she pledged to
listen to the "voices of the streets" and offered a plan to
improve public services.
In
Sao Paulo the Free Pass Movement , which began the protests over
higher mass transit fares, said on Facebook that the demonstrations
would go on.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.