10 Music Videos as Protest Communication: The Gezi Park Protest on YouTube

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. AbstractThis chapter explores the relevance of the protest song as political communication in the Internet era. Focusing on the prolific and diverse YouTube music video output of the Gezi Park protest of 2013, we explore how digital technologies and social media offer new opportunities for protest music to be produced and reach new audiences. We argue that the affordances of digital media and Internet platforms such as YouTube play a crucial part in the production, distribution and consumption of protest music. In the music videos, collected from Twitter, activists use a range of aesthetic and rhetorical tools such as various mash-up techniques to challenge mainstream media reporting on the protest, communicate solidarity, and express resistance to dominant political discourse.

The symbol of social media in contemporary protest: Twitter and the Gezi Park movement

“…but rather encompasses a wide, and more democratic, use of visuality (Mirzoeff, 2015) that is 'aimed at catalyzing social, political, and economic change' (Demos, 2016: 87). Grassroots visual activism often strategically remediates images that typically don't 'belong' in the realm of politics, thus subverting them, or simply repurposing them, so that they take on new meanings (Jenzen et al, 2019), and as Olesen (2018: 657) has noted about the production of visual injustice symbols online, social media has transformed 'the way photographs are politicized'. Poell (2014: 728) links social media to the prominence of the visual in contemporary protest, arguing that social media 'greatly enhances [the] visual character' of protest communication.…”

“…As noted by Aytekin (2017: 191), 'the predominant form of protest in the [Gezi Park] movement was aesthetic political acts', and he goes on to argue that 'artistic practices and cultural symbols employed by protestors' served to bring diverse groups of people together politically. Reflecting this, an emerging body of work concerns itself with various aspects of creative outputs linked to the protest, including street art and graffiti (Seloni and Sarfati, 2017;Taş, 2017), music (Jenzen et al, 2019;Bianchi, 2018;Parkinson, 2018;Way, 2016) and photography (McGarry et al, 2019), and it is in this strand of Gezi Park research that we situate our work. Approaching social media imaginaries through visual methods, focusing on visual representations of social media that circulate online, offers an approach to understanding activists' engagement with media technologies that moves away from operative concerns (i.e.…”