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A review by lilacashes
Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci
5.0
Zeynep Tufekci is one of my absolute favorite people on Twitter for her ability to concisely but in a deep and nuanced way explain political dynamics, especially those having to do with technology, social media and AI. I had big expectations for this book and I was not disappointed. It can and should be used as the standard textbook on protests and digitalization for... the next few months?
Honestly, things are moving so fast now that parts of the book seem to be be, sadly, missing. Zeynep refers to that in the text, when she mentions she had to rewrite the last chapter due to being stuck in the Turkish coup of 2016, an event fueled to a large degree by social media dynamics. She mentions the 2016 US election just in passing, an event whose interplay with social media and protest culture could fill an entire book by itself. I suppose at some point she just had to finish the book and stop adding to its material. After all, while writing about her personal experiences energizes the book and makes it more palatable, her goal as a sociologist is to identify the larger patterns in the power struggle between ruling elites and countermovements.
There are many, many things to learn from this book. If I have to identify the one I found most important it would be this: it is not enough, as a movement, to mobilize people for your goals. You also have to organize them, to be able to make decisions, and there is no shortcut to that.
Other than that, of course there were many things I learned about protest movements from somebody who has not only had decades of experience as a dissident, but also deep structural insight into both social (as a sociologist) and technological (as a programmer) dynamics. Even if a year after its publication I already wish the latest developments had been included, I 100% recommend reading this book, and also following @zeynep on Twitter.
Honestly, things are moving so fast now that parts of the book seem to be be, sadly, missing. Zeynep refers to that in the text, when she mentions she had to rewrite the last chapter due to being stuck in the Turkish coup of 2016, an event fueled to a large degree by social media dynamics. She mentions the 2016 US election just in passing, an event whose interplay with social media and protest culture could fill an entire book by itself. I suppose at some point she just had to finish the book and stop adding to its material. After all, while writing about her personal experiences energizes the book and makes it more palatable, her goal as a sociologist is to identify the larger patterns in the power struggle between ruling elites and countermovements.
There are many, many things to learn from this book. If I have to identify the one I found most important it would be this: it is not enough, as a movement, to mobilize people for your goals. You also have to organize them, to be able to make decisions, and there is no shortcut to that.
Other than that, of course there were many things I learned about protest movements from somebody who has not only had decades of experience as a dissident, but also deep structural insight into both social (as a sociologist) and technological (as a programmer) dynamics. Even if a year after its publication I already wish the latest developments had been included, I 100% recommend reading this book, and also following @zeynep on Twitter.