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A review by seclement
Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci
4.0
This is certainly an essential reader for the modern activist. Everyone seems to have a theory about the effects of social media on society, spawning terms like slacktivism and prompting scathing critiques from just about everyone. This book puts those armchair theories to the test in a way, taking a balanced look at the good, the bad, and the uncertain impacts of the Internet and social networking sites on social movements. It combines narrative with academic discourse and theory to create a book that is broadly accessible as well as thought-provoking and fairly robust. This is a difficult balancing act that most academics can't achieve, but Tufekci does it quite well, with a few exceptions (e.g. using academic terminology that doesn't really add to the argument but creates a clunky narrative or overusing the word 'networked' to the point that it loses meaning). Though the book has some holes in it from a research perspective, to my mind it's one of those books that highlights how much more you can achieve with a book than with academic articles. Dipping into narrative and out into the literature and back again is one of the great things about this book, with the author combining her own personal tales with stories from other social movements she has studied as well as the literature to explore the many sides of this issue.
I learned a lot from this book as well, particularly about how the policies of various social networking sites advantage certain groups and disadvantage others. I found her discussion about the tendency to measure success via protest numbers and the need to use additional metrics quite important and relevant, especially in the context of her discussion of how social media can bring out big numbers of protestors but faces challenges in building long term capacity and effective social movements that change policy. What we get from protests, the social caché of posting pictures of ourselves at protests, and the change that can be achieved via protest don't always align. Yet at the same time Tufekci critiques these challenges of creating sustainable and effective social movements, this is not a book that is anti-social media by any stretch. She emphasises the good, including the radically different types of people that can find common ground, and emboldening people in countries where they previously would have suffered in isolation.
I 'read' this book via Audible, and I wouldn't actually recommend that medium. It's one of those books that you will want to underline in and remember quotes, so I think it's better to pick up the ebook or a hard copy.
I learned a lot from this book as well, particularly about how the policies of various social networking sites advantage certain groups and disadvantage others. I found her discussion about the tendency to measure success via protest numbers and the need to use additional metrics quite important and relevant, especially in the context of her discussion of how social media can bring out big numbers of protestors but faces challenges in building long term capacity and effective social movements that change policy. What we get from protests, the social caché of posting pictures of ourselves at protests, and the change that can be achieved via protest don't always align. Yet at the same time Tufekci critiques these challenges of creating sustainable and effective social movements, this is not a book that is anti-social media by any stretch. She emphasises the good, including the radically different types of people that can find common ground, and emboldening people in countries where they previously would have suffered in isolation.
I 'read' this book via Audible, and I wouldn't actually recommend that medium. It's one of those books that you will want to underline in and remember quotes, so I think it's better to pick up the ebook or a hard copy.