Framing Bouazizi: ‘White lies’, hybrid network, and collective/connective action in the 2010–11 Tunisian uprising

Lim, Merlyna

doi:10.1177/1464884913478359

Cited by 91 publications

(72 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Participatory cultures of self-expression and distributed organisation such as those witnessed in the protest wave unfolding since 2011 (Biekart and Fowler, 2013) The Tunisian uprising is a case in point. It is an illustration of the imbrication of discrete media-from an individual's mobile phone camera to social media and satellite television-used tactically and subversively to turn the footage of Mohamed Bouazizi's selfimmolation into a symbolic spark for the popular insurrection that overthrew the country's authoritarian regime (Lim, 2013). The same case testifies to the 'integrated environments of affordances' (Madianou, 2014:667) encased in smart phones and the wider spectrum of autonomy for activists to frame protest (Gitlin, 2003) and to begin to claw back the democratic power to shape their political context (Hay, 1997:50).…”

Section: Protest Communication and Democracymentioning

confidence: 99%

Protest communication ecologies

Mercea

Iannelli

Loader

2015

Information, Communication & Society

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This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link: The flurry of protests since the turn of the decade has sustained a growth area in the social sciences. The diversity of approaches to the various facets and concerns raised by the collective action of aggrieved groups the world over impresses through multidisciplinarity and the wealth of insights it has generated. This introduction to a special issue of the international journal Information, Communication and Society is an invitation to recover conceptual instruments-such as the ecological trope-that have fallen out of fashion in media and communication studies. We account for their fall from grace and explicate the rationale for seeking to reinsert them into the empirical terrain of interlocking media, communication practices and protest which we aim to both capture with theory and adopt as a starting point for further analytical innovation.Key words: protest, communication, media, ecology, social media, social movement Protest communication ecologies is an attempt to pin down a conceptual meeting point for areas of social enquiry addressing increasingly interconnected phenomena. Ecology is a longstanding trope denoting variability. It encapsulates multiple and layered interconnections among component parts and of the latter with their surrounding environment. In information sciences, ecology has been defined as a 'system of people, technologies, practices and values in a local setting ' (O'Day, 2000:36). The term 'system' signifies complexity of organisation where technologies imprint on human action which in turn adjusts technologies to local circumstances. Protest, on the other hand, has become a 1 Corresponding author. Email: dan.mercea.1@city.ac.uk 2 staple albeit non-institutional form of political participation (van Deth, 2014), which is coextensive with a heightened mediation of socio-political intercourse (Keane, 2013).In this special issue, we contemplate the local variability of protest, its expression, appeal, and ramifications. All the while, we keep sight of the participatory cultures that bridge or separate disparate instances of protest. This opening article provides an outline of these conceptual considerations and relates them to methodological conundrums and apposite reflections instigated by the keynote speakers at the international iCS Symposium Media ecologiesThe chief merit of the concept of 'ecology' is that it underscores the need to emplace interconnectedness as its origins, forms, implications and valorisations are pondered. Put differently, an ecology is by definition bounded. Therefore, it is coextensive with many other systems, which stand apart from it in one or more respects. It is this insight that has prompted Olsson (2010) to distinguish between three contemporary media ecologies: the broadcasting, the interactive and the participatory ecology. Retracing his classification back to McLuhan (1964) and the proposition that broadcasti...

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Section: Protest Communication and Democracymentioning

confidence: 99%

Protest communication ecologies

Mercea

Iannelli

Loader

2015

Information, Communication & Society

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“…Tunisia's cyber avant-garde, however, was dominated by affluent, well educated, and polyglot individuals with a high degree of cultural capital (Lim 2013) -a social profile characteristic for early ICT adopters throughout the developing world (Norris 2001). Yet it would be inaccurate to dismiss their network as a socially exclusive club.…”

Section: Cyber-activism 1998 -2010mentioning

confidence: 99%

Social media and protest mobilization: evidence from the Tunisian revolution

Breuer

Landman

Farquhar³

2014

Democratization

187

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“…Researchers have explored how social network sites are instrumental to the rapid formation of a geographically interconnected, networked counter public that we investigated in this study, particularly in movements such as the Indignados in Spain (Vallina-Rodriguez, et al, 2012), the Occupy in the U.S. (Penney and Dadas, 2014), the Kony 2012 campaign (Harsin, 2013), and the political unrest in the countries of the so-called Arab Spring (Lim, 2013).…”

Section: Previous Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Taking tweets to the streets: A spatial analysis of the Vinegar Protests in Brazil

Bastos

Recuero

Zago

2014

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In this paper we investigate the relationship between the geographic location of protestors attending demonstrations in the 2013 Vinegar protests in Brazil and the geographic location of users that tweeted the protests. We explored the overlap between different sources of geographic information from Twitter -namely geocode, hashtag, and user profileprovided by multiple samples drawn from a population of three million tweets related to the events and compared the data to the location of protestors attending the street demonstrations. We adjusted the data for the uneven distribution of the population and performed geospatial and spatial clustering analysis over sets of spatial locations. We found evidence for the hypotheses that users tweeting the protests are geographically distant from the street protests and that users from geographically isolated areas rely on Twitter hashtags to remotely engage in the demonstrations.

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Framing Bouazizi: ‘White lies’, hybrid network, and collective/connective action in the 2010–11 Tunisian uprising

Cited by 91 publications

References 12 publications

Protest communication ecologies

Protest communication ecologies

Social media and protest mobilization: evidence from the Tunisian revolution

Taking tweets to the streets: A spatial analysis of the Vinegar Protests in Brazil

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