I’m late to Zeynep Tufekci’s excellent Twitter and Teargas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. It analyses the impact of social media on political events such as the Arab Spring – remember that? – and Occupy. Her thesis is that online organization is a powerful political tool when combined with offline organization, but cannot substitute for it; and the evidence presented here from a range of mass protests certainly convinces me. The problem mass socially-networked protests have lies in their norms of decision making, which are slow and non-hierarchical. This makes them unable to change tactics quickly when hostile authorities respond to the protest, and so the moment passes. If, however, there is a parallel offline organisation with more conventional decision-making structures, the political protest can adapt and continue.

The book is informed by the author’s experiences visiting protests since long before Twitter and Facebook (and this makes it an engaging read). There is a lot of intriguing detail. Why, she asks, do longer-lived protests like Occupy Wall Street or Gezi Park set up libraries? Even clinics and clothing exchanges are probably unnecessary. She argues that the spirit of protest involves expressiveness – taking part is a meaningful or even joyful activity, often with a sense of ritual or transcendence..

A later interesting section of the book concerns the way authoritarian governments are fighting back against protests using social media themselves – not so much by cutting off the internet (which happened more in the early, Arab Spring, days than it does now) as by flooding social media with confusion and false information. I think the book was written before we all became familiar with the phrase Fake News, but here it is presented as a tactic of repression. Even in tightly controlled China, online comment is rarely shut down unless it looks like becoming organised offline action.

All in all, a highly recommended book, albeit not a particularly cheering one. The Arab Spring feels a long time ago, those days when democracy looked like it was still spreading rather than retreating. Tufekci herself ends on a slightly positive note, reporting a conversation with a young activist (one of Sain’s Indignados) about where things might go. The young woman replies with a phrase echoing one the Zapatistas used much earlier: “We will keep walking and keep asking questions.” As long as pepole have the energy to keep on, there’s hope.

[amazon_link asins=’0300215126′ template=’ProductAd’ store=’enlighteconom-21′ marketplace=’UK’ link_id=’2ce80de2-f88a-11e7-88a1-9ba99454fed4′]

I read the book on my trip to the ASSA meetings, also reading Darren McGarvey’s Poverty Safari, a second book by the wonderful new discovery Mick Herron, and Svetlana Alexievich’s Boys in Zinc. All highly recommended.

[amazon_link asins=’1912147033′ template=’ProductAd’ store=’enlighteconom-21′ marketplace=’UK’ link_id=’bf9de2be-f88a-11e7-9766-5dc6dfa6a09a’] [amazon_link asins=’1473674204′ template=’ProductAd’ store=’enlighteconom-21′ marketplace=’UK’ link_id=’c8f8248d-f88a-11e7-ae31-2f6e46bdb0f3′] [amazon_link asins=’0241264111′ template=’ProductAd’ store=’enlighteconom-21′ marketplace=’UK’ link_id=’d07763b0-f88a-11e7-8dcc-6b3f662b0a98′]