the world today: social networks & social movements by ...€¦ · social movements: student...

The World Today: Social Networks & Social MovementsBy Facundo Ramos & Arthi Radhakrishnan

Social Networks & Social Movements

When we began embarking on our quest to understand the topic, we had planned to focus our research to a specific facet of Social Networks & Movements. We soon discovered that the topic was not easy to narrow down, given the many intersections of the two fields. We decided that instead of narrowing down the scope of our project, we would broaden our search, to facilitate a more meaningful discussion concerning networks, graphs, and technical Computer Science knowledge. The intersection between these two realms is undeniable, and in order to fully understand it, we realized we must broaden the scope of our project.

Furthermore, cursory google searches of the material yielded results pertinent to the latest Middle Eastern and African revolutions, rallies, protests, and means of organizing. While these results contained information concerning Social Networks and Social Movements, these were all sources and articles that were highly publicized in American and global media. But, as we began to hone in the search to academia, we began to discover that the analysis of these most recent occurrences was only scratching the surface of a far greater phenomena.

Before Facebook, Twitter and the recent situations in the Middle East and Africa, the Internet was an invaluable resource for revolutionaries advocating causes and certain social movements as well. The analysis of these past situations are more academic in nature (rather than more recent situations, which tend to be detailed in popular culture references and publications). Furthermore, the more broad analysis and understanding of past circumstances is also necessary to understand, because these movements and networks served as a fundamental foundation for both recent events that have transpired, as well as all those movements and networks following the ones we will cover.

As computer scientists, we are not often presented with the opportunity to understand the importance of what we do and analyze the intersectionality between computer science and other fields. That said, this was an amazing opportunity to explore, investigate and research the aforementioned topics. Not only was it thoroughly educational, but inspirational as well.

To begin the discussion, we are going to at first thoroughly analyze the definition of Social Networks and Social Movements independently and then proceed to analyze more in depth interconnected questions regarding the intersection of the two fields. We will also take a look at specific case studies.

Before proceeding with the analysis of the various topics mentioned thus far, we would like to expound upon the reasoning for why it is crucial and relevant to understand this topic now, and in coming times.

Why do Social Networks & Social Movements matter?

Facundo Ramos & Arthi Radhakrishnan - CSE 190 - Winter 2011

After reading articles, finding books, searching in the library and fully learning more about Social Networks & Social Movements, it struck us that Social Networks and Movements not only work with each other, but require one another in order to function well. We began to notice these patterns and it is evident that applying the terminology of social network theory to describe social movements allows us to see how one is necessary for the other so sustain itself and constantly evolve. It is both necessary and sufficient for the two to exist and play off one another’s progress and growth in order for the other to grow as well. In fact, there truly is an uncanny correlation between the growth of a Social Network or Movement and its eventual success. We will articulate how this is done through using the terminology of Social Network theory to describe Social Movements, and also provide numerous case studies and academic references to support this point. In today’s world, we see this correlation very blatantly, in the form of a continued growth and continued interdependence. We suspect this terminology will continue to become more and more relevant in a globalized world as we see technology and social networks become more embedded into our lives.

What is a Social Movement?

According to Wikipedia a social movement is, “[a] large informal grouping...of individuals and/or organizations focused on specific political or social issues.” We use the Wikipedia definition here, because it allows us to understand on a basic level, the most base line representation of a Social Movement, as it is interpreted by a widely accepted authority within many internet communities. There obviously exist many other definitions as well. In Social Networks and Individual Perceptions: Explaining Differential Participation in Social Movements Florence Passy and Marco Giugni, define individual roles and participation within a Social Movement.

“Individuals who have been recruited - that is, structurally connected the opportunity to participate - through strong ties are more likely to display a high level of participation than those who have been recruited through weak ties.”

Here, we can see the influence of certain Computer Science and more technical terminologies to Social movements, with regards to ties and their respective strength. Clearly, there is a great impact provided by the context of a network.

Another aspect that influences people’s involvement within a movement can be the setting described through an application of game theory. In Ecologies of Social Movements: Student Mobilization during the 1989 Prodemocracy Movement in Beijing, Digxin Zhao describes how the dense living situations of students during the 1989 prodemocracy movement in Beijing affected the student’s participation within a movement.

“With six to eight students living in the same dormitory room for a period of four years, it is as if every student was forced to play an Axelrodian game in which cooperation is the only optimum long-term solution. … For example, when the government asked [the students] to resume class, only one student went to class. As a result, that student was accused of being a renegade”


In this sense, it is evident not only that there are applications we’ve studied towards Social Movements, but there is also a sense that various theories can be applied to these notions for the sake of understanding and practice.

What is a Social Network?

A fundamental understanding of the terms separately is important so that we can define the terms and context of the discussion. Furthermore, this understanding will allow us to understand the role that Social Networks play in Social Movements and vice versa. According to David Easley and Jon Kleinberg in their text, Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World,

“The social networks we inhabit — the collections of social ties among friends — have grown steadily in complexity over the course of human history, due to technological advances facilitating distant travel, global communication, and digital interaction. The past half-century has seen these social networks depart even more radically from their geographic underpinnings, an effect that has weakened the traditionally local nature of such structures but enriched them in other dimensions.”

Although conceptions of Social Networks have existed for as long as humanity and civilization have existed, the particular Social Networks that we aspire to analyze are those which will are particularly relevant to the topics we will be analyzing. Considering this, there are two facets of social networks that we will consider: firstly, we will consider the technological aspects, with regards to both specific technologies (i.e. Twitter) but also more broad technologies with an undeniable influence (i.e. the internet, on a more holistic level). Secondly, we will also take a closer look at the idea of networks themselves and the manner which they will ultimately play a role in Social Movements.

According to Christian Fuchs in his article The Self-Organization of Cyberprotest, he explains that the internet is a self-organizing system,

“The Internet is a self-organizing socio-technological system [23], it is not a global technological network of networked computer networks based on the TCP/IP protocol, but a social system. As a pure technological storage of knowledge the Internet would be useless, it gains its “life“ only by human activity and social relationships that interpret data and produce meaningful knowledge. In order to conceive the Internet as a on-mechanistic, non-linear,complex system it is necessary to consider it not as a purely technological system, but as a socio-technological system in which human actors and groups(virtual communities) are of central importance. The Internet consists of a technological subsystem, i.e. a global decentralized network of computer-networks that store objectified human knowledge, and a social subsystem, i.e.human actors and virtual communities that interpret, communicate, and produce knowledge within the Internet.”

Clearly, the internet is an invaluable and infinite resource of information. Fuchs is able to prove that these virtual communities which exist are of the utmost crucial


significance to the Internet; without these systems in place, and the sheer number of networks, the internet would not be what we know it as today.

The Role of the Internet in Social Networks

In fact, it would possess neither the mass that it does posses, nor would it have the significance in terms of information withdrawal and input that it does in contemporary society. Fushc continues further about the self-organization mechanism of the internet, and the role that human action and interaction plays,

“In the self-organization of the Internet objective knowledge that is stored technologically emerges dynamically by processes of human production,communication, and co-operation. Subjective and intersubjective knowledge is objectified in these processes. The already existing objective knowledge that is stored e.g. in the World Wide Web, is permanently reproduced, i.e. it is interpreted and meaning is attached to it by human actors. The technological storage of knowledge, i.e. digital knowledge, enables human action-,communication-, and co-operation-processes, it constitutes social systems and virtual communities in which objective digital knowledge is subjectively appropriated and used. This adoption allows the production and reproduction of further objective knowledge in the Internet. An endless self-referential production cycle emerges in which objective and subjective knowledge, technological structures and human actions, produce each other mutually.”

The key point of contention that Fushc clarifies here is that the internet requires the aforementioned processes and mechanisms by the human actors, in order to continue its own cycle of existence.

Fushc continues to talk more about the interaction between actors within the graph that is the Internet. He talks about the Internet as a system for sharing knowledge on a many-to-many level, which is between communities, but also spreading information from within a community, to outside a community. While it is not explicitly mentioned here, it is obvious that the communities would basically be hubs in a graph that we might consider as strongly connected components. In any case, Fushc continues the analysis to explicate the more tangible role that the Internet ultimately plays for the cause around which a movement or community is centered.

“The character of the Internet as a system for the co-operative production of knowledge, the global sharing of knowledge, real-time- and many-to-many-communication allows the emergence and permanent reproduction of social systems of global protest that have collective values, practices, goals, and identities. By Internet communication protesters produce shared meanings that constitute collective identities and practices. The logic of the Internet and of new global protest movements is characterized by decentralization, networking,dynamics, and globality. Both systems are based on global self-organization processes. Hence the Internet is suited as a medium of co-ordination,communication, and co-operation in global protest.”


He furthers that the Internet is changing the way we conceive of and experience these world wide protests. Clearly, the notion of Social Networking has had a significant and profoundly deep impact on Social Movement based communities worldwide.

Besides these aforementioned theoretical projections of the Internet and Social networks, the first and foremost thing to understand how this is true, is to take a look at a timeline concerning the Internet and Social Networks, which will shed light on a time line. This will be important for a later analysis of how, when, and which networks mattered and which specific times throughout the histories that we will focus on.

(Fig 0: “An Incomplete Timeline of Social Networks”)

According to Williams and Gulati, there are also numerous other facets to consider about a Social Network which is readily accessible on the internet. They themselves cite and have scoured numerous sources for various theories. The conclusion that they arrive at is essentially that there are both certain pros and cons to the notion of a Social Network.

“A social network is a set of people, organizations, or other social entities


connected by a set of socially meaningful relationships. When a computer network connects people, it is a social network. These virtual communities ―emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.... [T]he Internet facilitates bonding without being in close proximity either spatially or temporally, across national borders and time zones. It can include and accommodate all types of individuals, in large numbers, who may not have known one another previously.”

Furthermore, an interesting analysis of a social network is described, in that it is an entity containing only those sets of “meaningful relationships,” though of course, that will vary based on any given contexts and any given set of users or nodes. Here, they in addition foster a great positive impact due to the nature of increased accessibility gained by using the internet as a medium for communcation, collaboration and cooperation. These things are all really only legitimate due to the fact that the Social Network and movements are online.

Graph Structure of the Internet

Besides expounding about the cycle upon which the internet relies to sustain itself and grow, Fusch also has something to say about what he called a “hypertext” matrix or system, in which there exist text connected by links to other text. This is a graph, where the nodes are text, and the links are paths between the differing nodes.

“The WWW is a self-referential medium in the sense that when a new link is created the system refers to itself by actualizing its content. Each web-page refers to a number of other web-pages that again refer to other web-pages,etc. Self-reference is the essential nature of a hypertext, by creating links a text is connected to another text, the hypertext system of the WWW is referring to itself. Virtual self-reference is based on human activities, i.e. on the creation of new hypertexts that are embedded into the existing system. The interlinked structure of the WWW defines possible paths that are discovered by active human beings that browse the Web and create their own personal path. A hypertext is a matrix of potential texts, only some of which will be realized. A hypertext system reproduces itself by the permanent self-reference of the category text.”

Fusch claims here that this virtual self-reference, that is, the existence of this matrix-system-graph exists, because of continued human activity, whereby each individual is able to create his or her own personal path, which serves an addition with this personal graph. This is a graph in which individuals create their own personal paths as they search and browse around the internet, in a manner whereby their personal graph will contain their history with regards to the internet). Furthermore, he claims that the internet is constantly in flux because human activity is constantly altering and creating these personal paths and as a result altering links between texts. While it might be painfully obvious, it is important to note here that the internet is essentially an infinite graph which is continuously growing larger and larger.

The other important thing to consider is the previous quote concerning the “logic


of the internet” where he explains how there are communities within the Internet, and obviously these communities are strongly connected components within graph theory. This would be a highly concentrated group of connected nodes.

The Abstract Role of Social Networks in Social Movements

Fusch’s conception of Social Movements are nuanced and specific. He denotes them by a term called “cyberprotest,” defined as, “self-organization processes of the Internet [interacting with] self-organization processes of the protest system of society.” He extrapolates on the necessary mechanism by which both processes run, in a manner that is mutually beneficial for the network (expanding) as well as the movement (progressing).

In cyberprotest the self-organization of the Internet system and the self-organization of the protest system produce each other mutually in a self-organization process, hence cyber protest is self-organization of self-organization processes, a form of second-order self-organization. [These processes are] characterized such [that] self-organization processes produce each other mutually in cyclical causality as hypercycles. Cyberprotest is a global hypercycle of the socio-technological Internet system and the protest system.

In Social Networks and Individual Perceptions: Explaining Differential Participation in Social Movements Florence Passy and Marco Giugni, discuss how the sense of embeddedness affects a person’s degree of participation within a movement,

“Social networks [serve] as a ‘socialization device’ concur[rent] to the formation of a mobilization potential [to] provide or reinforce the political awareness toward a given protest issue.”

What about specific cases?

Specific cases are relevant and important to understand. Analysing and understanding specific cases which do, and in some cases might not, support our theory will strengthen our argument. Now we will analyze empirical data concerning the interconnectedness of Social Networks and Social Movements.

In our analysis of the two, it became evident to us that over time, the interconnectedness has grown, and will continue to grow further. Naturally, in the past, before the pervasiveness of the Internet, the scene regarding the interplay between Social Networks & Social Movements (with regards to a technological perspective) was not blatant, as it is today.

Below are just some of the many many notable cases we read about. Rather than write about every case we read about, and every relevant case in all of history, we will just talk about specific, but unique cases as much as possible. Each case represented below is a unique one, and though there may be numerous others, below are the ones which we have selected based on personal interest or general uniqueness.

Zapatistas


In Cyberactism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice we were able to analyze a set of case studies relating to activism and how it has grown to take advantage of recent technological advances through the internet and social media tools. One of the case studies studied the network relating to the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico on 1994. Maria Garrido and Alexander Halavais talk in Mapping Networks of Support for the Zapatista Movement about their endeavor to map and create a visual representation of the network of websites closely related with the Zapatista Movement. Two days after the uprising of indigenous peasants in Chiapas, Subcomandante Marcos took to the internet to educate the world on the events that had occurred and was able to then create a worldwide network of support for the Zapatista Movement.

In mapping what the support network actually looks like Garrido and Halavais were able to identify three main subgroups of websites which were central to the network of support. The first one was that of the direct information about the Zapatista movements. The second was that of Zapatista Global Support which were found in countries outside of Latin America. The third one was that of overall Human Rights organizations which most of their work revolves around many different issues regarding human rights violations throughout the world.

(Fig. 1: The above diagram is a representation of the network surrounding the Zapatista movement)

One of the most prominent findings of this mapping was that the Zapatista global support subgroup had stronger connections with the Human Rights subgroup and all the other smaller subgroups than the connections made between the Zapatista information group and the other subgroups. This allows us to see that it is not necessarily the Zapatista organization that is the one connecting and raising awareness to other organizations worldwide but rather those direct organizations whose purpose is to support the Zapatista movement from a global perspective.

This is a reasonable result given that the sole purpose of Global support websites are to raise awareness and promote the Zapatista movement. Whereas the Zapatista Information sites were ran by those actively engaging in the organizing of the movement.


Iran’s Green Revolution

In 2009, following the presidential elections in Iran a series of protests occurred which were eventually referred to as Iran’s Green Revolution. One of the greatest aspects of the protests that made headlines in the mainstream media was that many of the day to day events and actions were publicized through Twitter. This was rather unique in that Twitter had not yet been used for large scale organizing of protests of this magnitude.

It all might not have been as organized through twitter as the media was reporting it. In a with Doctor Manuel Cebrian, our guest lecturer for two of our classes, he was able to inform us of some of the research he had been allowed to do about the Iranian protests. He stated that even though approximately only ten percent of the population of Iran speaks English, approximately ninety-five percent of tweets from Iran regarding the protests were in English. This leads us to believe that the great involvement of Twitter was most likely not to organize Iranians to go to the protests. This raises a couple of theories of the true intent of the tweets.

Our first theory, and the one that is most far-fetched, is that the tweets were distributed greatly by English speaking governments which might have gained power at the fall of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from the position as president of Iran.

The second one is that the situation relating to Twitter in Iran closely resembles that of the Zapatista movement and it’s global support network. The English tweets were actually used to build support at a global scale for the movement undergoing in Iran at that moment. These twitter account were possibly more connected to other organizations at a global scope than the people leading the 2009 protests.

Middle East and North African Protests

Since December 2010 until the present there have been large mobilization efforts in Middle eastern and North African countries against corruption and unemployment among many other social issues facing those countries. Through large marches and continued protests Tunisia and Egypt were able to achieve historic events by forcing the removal of its leaders of 24 and 30 years respectively.

While these events are the most recent, and have perhaps recieved the greatest media coverage, in our research we realized that there were fewer readily accessible academic resources concerning the topic.

Furthermore, while this was in great part our initial motivation for pursuing the topic we have selected, after having done the actual research and analysis, it became evident that there were other, more unique and interesting (for us) cases to consider. Since mainstream media is adequately covering these situations, there was little to report with regards to academia, besides the obvious influence of Facebook and Twitter.

We decided to focus on some of the other cases rather than focus on the most obvious (and admittedly dull, due to its obviousness) case.


USA (2006 elections)

A curious circumstance about our paper and analysis thus far is that we are approaching the entirety of a situation from an “us vs. them” mentality, where we are objectively looking in upon another community or country to determine something specific about a specific case. Interestingly, we need not look that far! In the United States, social networking played a particularly large role in perhaps the largest social movement that Americans parake in: the elections.

In an article entitled, Social Networks in Political Campaigns: Facebook and the 2006 Midterm Elections, Christine B. Williams and Girish J. Jeff‖ Gulati discuss the impact that social networks had on the election, from a high level,

“Social networks have significantly different objectives than web sites. Candidates control both the content of the web site as well as how users interact with it. Social networking sites, on the other hand, allow users to contribute or even control content and to initiate contact with other users. Sometimes the struggle for control over the message or access to supporters forces campaigns to respond. For example, MySpace acceded to the Obama campaign‘s request to turn over access to the profile created independently by a volunteer for the Senator. YouTube pulled down a controversial video shot of Senator McCain at a campaign stop, then admitted it had been “mistakenly removed” when liberal activists protested. Given their reach of millions of potential voters, social networks pose a dilemma for campaigns over when they should react and when they should not.”

Besides the analysis of American politics, it is interesting here that Williams and Gulati go in depth to discuss the differences with respect to Social Networks and just regular websites. This is interesting because there are specific cases which are cited where this was evident.

Williams and Gulati continue that in the 2006 election, while the media did not broadcast this fact, the most influential and most used social networking tool was Facebook. Williams and Gulati assert, “In 2006, Facebook created entries for all U.S. congressional and gubernatorial candidates, which they could personalize, and which were available for members who wished to view them, register votes supporting specific candidates, and notify friends.”

Switzerland

Florence Passy and Marco Giugni talk in greater detail concerning a circumstance they encountered while studying the Swiss solidarity movement,

“We test a number of hypotheses drawn from the social networks and the rationalist perspectives on individual engagement by means of survey data on members of a major organization of the Swiss solidarity movement. Both perspectives find empirical support: the intensity of participation depends both on the embeddedness in social networks and on the individual perceptions of


participation, that is, the evaluation of a number of cognitive parameters related to engagement. In particular, to be recruited by an activist and the perceived effectiveness of one's own potential contribution are the best predictors of differential participation. We specify the role of networks for social movements by looking at the nature and content of networks and by distinguishing between three basic functions of networks: structurally connecting prospective participants to an opportunity to participate, socializing them to a protest issue, and shaping their decision to become involved. The latter function implies that the embeddedness in social networks significantly affects the individual perceptions of participation.”

This case study is important for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it proves that terms such as embededness are important in a word of social movements, and further proves that we must begin to embrace and adopt the use of this terminology to proceed in an analysis of social movements. The influence of this rhetoric is very evident in this case. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the participation of an individual is gauged by perceived effectiveness, which in turn leads to a mechanism of embededness. Thus, embededness clearly impacts a social movement.

Conclusion

Ultimately, we have found that it is perhaps more interesting to understand the more unique and lesser known cases which we found in our research. These cases shed light on numerous different ideas that may not have come to mind otherwise. We can through all these vastly varying social networks and associated movements, that clearly there is a distinctive and incredible overlap between the multifaceted worlds of Social Networks and Social Movements.

Above all else, one of the most surprising realizations in the research and analysis of research was the application of social network terminology to describe social movements. While it is obvious that this application is necessary to get a better understanding of social movements, we were surprised that social scientists as well utilized this terminology.

While the rhetoric used to describe a movement is important in proving its interconnectedness, it is insufficient. But, it is both a necessary and sufficient component of the interconnectedness that the two arenas are incredibly interdependent. One can essentially not exist without the other. In the above examples, we cover in depth the means by which the terminology can be applied, as well as look at some of the various mechanisms and means by which the social network was dependent on the Internet, and the growing graph of the Internet was also dependent on a social movement.

Clearly, the interconnectedness between these two very multifaceted notions of Social Networks and Social Movements is undeniable. These terms do indeed share more than just a common first word: Social! The two provide a complex means of being


the foundation for one another in a manner that provides extensive structural support for the future successes and growth of these structures.

Although these correlations never truly existed in the past, we see today, in a world more globalized than ever before, there exists a continued growth of both structures as well. Surely, it will be necessary for all those involved within a global economy and world to truly understand the mechanisms whereby these monolithic structures of a Social Network and a Social Movement exist and support one another. This is the future, and its time to embrace it in the present.


Works Cited

"Ecologies of Social Movements: Student Mobilization during the 1989 Prodemocracy Movement in Beijing." ERIC – World’s Largest Digital Library of Education Literature. Web. 11 Mar. 2011. <http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/recordDetail?accno=EJ576361>.

McCaughey, Martha, and Michael D. Ayers. Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory

and Practice. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print. "Networks, Crowds, and Markets: A Book by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg."

Department of Computer Science, Cornell University. Web. 11 Mar. 2011. <http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/>.

"Social Theory." The Self-Organization of Cyberprotest. Christian Fuchs. Web. 11 Mar.

2011. <http://fuchs.uti.at/papers/social-theory/>. Christine B. Williams and Girish J. Jeff‖ Gulati. "Social Networks as Viral

Campaigns: Facebook and the 2006 Midterm Elections." American Political Science Association. Web. <http://www.bentley.edu/news-events/pdf/Facebook_APSA_2007_final.pdf>.


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