1. From Seattle To Tehran: The Role of
Social Media in Protests and
Grassroots Movements
Cameron Jones
Michael Turner
2. Guiding Questions
• Protest Paradigm and Liberal Ideology Theory
mutually serve to reinforce the hegemonic status
quo
– How did this idea change with the introduction of
democratic structures of Web 2.0 technologies?
– How did the hegemon adapt to the challenges of Web 2.0
radical democracy?
– How have social movements learned to use features of the
internet to organize and disseminate information?
– How have features of the web changed in the ten years
between the Battle of Seattle and the Iranian Twitter
Election Riots?
3. Thesis
• A comparison of uses of social media and mobile
technology between the Battle of Seattle in 1999
and the Iranian Election Riots in 2009 tell us that
despite the harnessing of the internet for global
social movement organization and despite the
promise of radical democracy with the
proliferation of Web 2.0 technologies, western
liberal hegemony nonetheless works to impel
reconciliation of the resulting dissonance
between the protest paradigm and liberal
ideology.
5. Pickard (2006)
• Indymedia internet-based activism
actualization of radical democracy.
– Email lists
– Easily uploaded news stories to collective online
documents or shared website architecture
6. Pickard, con’t.
• Radical Democracy - a broad version of
participatory democracy that seeks to equalize
power hierarchies, correct structural
inequities in all institutions, and counter
proprietary logic. The internet amplifies
Indymedia activists’ potential for radical
democracy by democratizing media
production, increasing non-hierarchical
communications, and redistributing power to
facilitate coordinated, co-operative action.
7. Pickard, con’t.
“Important questions remain regarding the
often passive nature of this consensus;
we should interrogate whether silence on
an email list can constitute participatory
democracy” (36).
Basically, Pickard is asking a question that
addresses needs that will soon be in part
met by the features of Web 2.0.
8. Protest Paradigm
(McLeod and Detenber, 1999)
– Framing characteristics:
• Narrative Structure – violent crime story narrative casts
event as a battle between protesters and police, rather than
as an intellectual debate between the protesters and their
chosen target
• Reliance on official sources – perspective of the power
holders reinforces the status quo
• Public Opinion – mainstream media coverage of social
protest often communicate the deviance of protesters by
depicting them as an isolated minority, often by bystanders
• Combined effect is to delegitimize, marginalize, and
demonize protesters.
9. Ideology and Hegemony
• Ideology - a process in which different kinds of
meanings are produced and reproduced
through the establishment of a mental
attitude toward the world. That outlook
privileges certain sign systems as necessary,
natural, or inevitable ways of recognizing
meaning and suppresses or ignores other sign
systems (Lears, 1985).
10. Ideology and Hegemony
• Hegemony – The process by which a social
order remains stable by generating consent to
its parameters through the production and
distribution of ideological texts that define
social reality for the majority of the people
(Cloud, 117).
• Liberal Ideology as Hegemon
11. Battle in Seattle
• Complex series of events protesting WTO Ministerial
Conference, week of Nov. 29, 1999
• “The protests against the World Trade Organization
that rocked Seattle, Washington in late 1999 were an
incredibly significant moment in the history of popular
protests. Not only did the protestors succeed in
disrupting the meetings of the world's most influential
trade-governing bodies, but the event drew together
incredibly diverse constituencies that represented a
wide range of interests, many of which would seem to
be incompatible at first light.” (Source: wtohistory.org)
• Cited as early major example of successful harnessing
of internet for global organization of a social
movement action
12. “The birth of a global citizen’s
movement”
• This is What Democracy Looks Like
– A 2000 documentary film directed by Jill Friedberg
and Rick Rowley for Big Noise Films
– Made from footage compiled from over 100
independent journalists.
• News Hour and local news coverage
• Protest Paradigm
• Indymedia
– Photo, video, email, news, etc.
13.
14. How might this historical event have
been different with access to the
features of Web 2.0 technology?
15. Iran Protest
• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government vs.
supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi
• Contested election, vote-counting fraud
• Iranian people feared that Ahmadinejad
would succeed in undermining the values of a
republic.
16. Reporting on Iran’s Protest
• Journalists restricted
• Twitter one of few sources of information
• Rapid spread of Youtube video depicting
protester Neda Agha Soltan’s death
• Web 2.0 technologies lauded in press as
essential tools for democracy
21. Criticisms of Coverage
• Golnaz Esfandiari:
– “no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate
protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than
Farsi”
– “Twitter wasn’t one perspective in Iran, it was the only
perspective that outsiders had” (Foreign Policy Online)
• Evgeny Morozov:
– “we have to blame a bevy of English-speaking Iranian bloggers
who had shaped his opinion (many of them from the Iranian
diaspora, with strong pro-Western feelings—why else blog in
English?), as well as Farsi-speaking bloggers in Tehran who had
shaped the opinion of the English-speaking Iranians, and so
forth” (Dissent)
22. Results of Web 2.0 Technology In Iran
• Disputed role of Twitter overshadowed
protest issues
• Drew global attention to protest
• Overlooked effects on news: Criticism of CNN’s
weekend coverage by Twitter users led to
more coverage
• Effects on political actors
– Criticism of Obama, Clinton
– State Department and Twitter
23. Conclusions
• Implications of technological differences between
Iran and Seattle
• Radical Democracy: Seattle lacked technology,
Iran lacked democratic accountability
• Reconciliation of Protest Paradigm and Liberal
Ideology in service of the hegemon at the cost of
web-based radical democracy
– Mutation of narrative structure in protest paradigm
– Ahmadenijad still “won”, so citizens/democracy didn’t
prevail, but news organizations framed the story as
the success of American/Western technology
