Abstract
The book Networked Publics and Digital Contention is a welcome addition to a growing body of literature on the prodemocracy and antiausterity movements that unfolded in several areas across the world, beginning in late 2010 and further developing throughout 2011: from the massive uprisings that erupted in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region to the Indignados who took the streets in Southern Europe to the Occupy Wall Street mobilizations organized in North America and other Western countries. Several authors underlined that these movements share many traits: a strong critique of and opposition to the ruling political and financial elites, either in authoritarian regimes or in democratic systems; the occupation of the squares as the main form of protest that characterized their repertoire of contention; and the massive use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to organize protestors, spread mobilizations, and gain popular consensus. Mostly focused on similarities, the literature on such movements tended to overlook the differences that characterized single national cases, even within the same geo-political region. This is also because scholars who investigated these uprisings mostly focused on the moments in which activists and protesters came together in the squares and became visible to one another, to wider publics, and of course, to their protest targets. During the peak of such mobilizations, protest tactics and slogans resonated and diffused beyond national borders, thus contributing to foster the commonalities that much of the literature focused on. Shifting away the attention from the peak of protest to the stages of latency that preceded them, however, seems to allow a subtler understanding of the social, cultural, and political differences that lie behind such protests, including with regard to activists’ usages of ICTs.
This is exactly what Networked Publics and Digital Contention does in explaining the processes and mechanism that characterized digital activism in Tunisia from late in the 1990s to the early 2010s, when a youth-led movement overthrew the authoritarian regime of Ben Ali, who had ruled the country mostly unchallenged for more than two decades. The theoretical and empirical move that Mohamed Zayani makes in his book is simple and yet it has powerful consequences for our understanding of the Tunisian uprising. Zayani “[steps] back from the formal, the immediate, and the revolutionary and [puts] in perspective the relevance of the cultural, the ordinary and the everyday” (p. 20). In line with this, Chapter 1 argues for a contextual analysis of the uprisings that took place in the MENA region from late in 2010 and, in particular, for a situated understanding of the role that ICTs had in such mobilizations. Chapter 2 starts to sketch the broader context surrounding the Tunisian uprising through a historical reconstruction of Ben Ali’s rise to power and the consolidation of his authoritarian regime. Chapter 3 casts light on the fissures that Tunisian citizens were able to open so as to contrast the authoritarian regime: it discusses the different forms of oppositions that developed within the country—from the organized dissent of labor unions, professionals, and opposition media to the informal expression of discontent that sporadically shook Tunisia. Chapters 4 and 5 describe at length the development of a diverse range of ICTs applications, from Internet fora and newsletters created during the 1990s—including Takriz and TUNeZINE—to websites and blogs that emerged during the 2000s—like the radio-blog Radioun. With some relevant exceptions—among which Tunisnews and Nawaat—many of such Internet spaces were “socially oriented and politically averse” (p. 106). Taken together, however, these were important experiences also at the political level, especially for their creators and the networked publics they were able to involve. While they always remained small with regard to their readerships, the creation of such spaces to share information and foster discussions were incredibly important because they acted as “an incubator of a culture of contention” (p. 108).
Chapter 6 reflects on the struggle over Internet censorship. As Internet fora, newsletters, and blogs became a common space of expression not only for activists but also for the broader public, the Internet was more and more ingrained in the daily experience of lay Tunisian citizens. For this reason, the censorship that the Ben Ali authoritarian regime exerted over it ceased to be a niche concern and became a general problem. In other words, “censorship turned the Internet into an arena of political struggle and political contention for an increasingly broad segment of the population. It blurred the line between the political sphere and the nonpolitical sphere” (p. 166) in the years that preceded the Tunisian uprising. Chapter 7 discusses the relevant role that social media platforms, and Facebook in particular, had in nurturing and spreading the protests that erupted late in 2010 after Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation. Significantly, though, this chapter shows how social media platforms worked at their best because they combined with the wide diffusion of smartphones, on the one side, and the broad media coverage that Al Jazeera granted to protesters, on the other. It is the intersection of old and new media, traditional broadcasting and user-generated contents that let a strong political narrative emerge about the ongoing protest. Finally, Chapter 8 provides an overview of the revolutionary aftermath, underlining the challenges that Internet activists and citizen journalists had to face in the changed media ecology.
Overall, Networked Publics and Digital Contention is a book that enriches our understanding of how the Internet might nurture political mobilization within authoritarian regimes, providing a thick examination of digital activism dynamics in Tunisia. But the relevance of the book goes beyond the knowledge we might acquire on one specific case study. Although the author does not situate his work in the broad and rich field of social movements, scholars interested in analyzing ICTs usages in protest settings might bring home an essential lesson: the situated nature of digital activism and hence the relevance of the context in which activists interact with the Internet. First, Mohamed Zayani repeatedly argues throughout his book that the mundane use of ICTs, especially in authoritarian contexts, should be seen as a political act in itself able to politicize ordinary citizens. In line with this, he suggests that the broader societal usages of ICTs might help us interpreting their subsequent political use during moments of protest. The book then clearly illustrates that focusing on just one social media platform used in one specific moment in time does not make justice to the intricate dynamics that characterize media ecologies today: we cannot fully grasp the widely recognized role of Facebook without including its usage in the long history of digital activism in Tunisia and without considering its interactions with other digital technologies and media channels, such as smartphones and Al Jazeera.
Finally, Mohamed Zayani also considers the relational nature of ICTs usages before and during mobilizations. Activists are not the only ones who use the Internet: their opponents employ digital media too. With this respect, the book then also tells the long story of conflict between two opposite forces: an authoritarian regime fascinated by ICTs as a tool for modernization, but at the same time scared about the liberating capabilities of such technologies, and the citizens that that authoritarian regime wanted to control, who increasingly employed the Internet as a space of free communication, discovering its emancipatory potential, but also its fragile nature when facing the violence of regime censorship and repression.