Protestors in France in 2006 – young people resisted plans to deregulate labour. Gonzale/Flickr. Some rights reserved.Two thoughts came consistently to mind while reading Zeynep Tufekçi’s new book “Twitter & Tear Gas: The power and fragility of networked protest” – no doubt soon to be considered a key text for anyone wishing to understand protest in the twenty-first century.
Perhaps unusually, the first concerned Gustave Flaubert. Tufekçi develops a point that has always fascinated me, relating to Flaubert’s masterpiece Madame Bovary: published in 1857, Flaubert set his story marginally before the time of its writing, because those crucial few years saw the construction of the regional Paris-Rouen railway – and meant that journeys which had taken a few days by horse could be completed in a few hours by steam locomotive. Flaubert believed that Emma Bovary’s forbidden love in Rouen required those days of distance, and that in the contracted space and time heralded by the steam engine, there died the necessary conditions for human attachment, suspense, wonder.
The question of human connections is implicit in protest and important in this book. Tufekçi uses the term “network internalities” to describe relations operating in two ways: the ties between people in a movement, and the relation of those people to their movement. Can a viral Twitter hashtag – no matter the millions it reaches – create the same bond with a cause as a crumpled piece of paper, printed by mimeograph, kept in a pocket and bearing instructions for where its holder must go for the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama? Did the very hours spent with that mimeograph create an engagement that contributed to a stronger strain of resistance?
