Youth Activism and the Politics of ‘Mediapreneurship’: the Effects of Political Efficacy and Empowerment on Mediated Norm Conveyance in Tunisia and Morocco
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10 youth Activism and the Politics of ‘mediapreneurship’: The effects of Political efficacy and empowerment on mediated norm Conveyance in Tunisia and morocco Roxane Farmanfarmaian Since 2011, the role of social media in the politics of the southern bank of the Mediterranean has changed substantially. Until then, uprisings and sustained social movements – the Cypress Revolution in Lebanon, the Green Revolu- tion in Iran, the ‘We are all Khaled Said’ in Egypt – had utilised mobile phones, shared webpages and digital information exchange as means of political activ- ism, and new media use was undoubtedly gathering steam in popular abilities to mediate organisation, demonstration and change.1 But it was when Tunisia trig- gered the 2011 Arab uprisings, which then found expression in demonstrations from Morocco to Yemen, that protestors, particularly younger people who were already skilled in digital and mobile messaging, took to using social media as a tool of local mobility and international strategic communication, broadcasting in real time their demands for work, government transparency and political change.2 1 Suzi Mirgani, ‘The State of the Arab Media in the Wake of the Arab Uprisings’, Bullets and Bulletins: Media and Politics in the Wake of the Arab Uprisings, ed. Mohamed Zayani and Suzi Mirgani, London 2106, p. 5. 2 Jean-Pierre Filiu, The Arab Revolution: Ten Lessons from the Democratic Uprisings, London 2011. Unfinished Arab Spring.indd 216 05/02/2020 14:51 YOUTH ACTIVISM AND THE POLITICS OF ‘MEDIAPRENEURSHIP’ 217 These movements, composed of a variety of ages and sectors, used traditional forms of activism – demonstrations, placards, speeches – as well as social media and citizen journalism to organise, but also to bypass government narratives, report directly from the streets, share photographs and videos of events captured on their mobile phones, tweet, blog and podcast and develop new media celebri- ties, showing up the self-censorship of the establishment media, and transmitting their messages across their own countries, their region and to the world at large.3 As Creech noted, ‘by giving a technological form to the protests that could be captured by [international] media, mobile recording technologies, alongside the distribution networks of YouTube, LiveLeak, Facebook, and Twitter, helped val- orize the movement and articulate it’.4 The Arab uprisings were the training ground for young people, many new to the political sphere, whose use of social media on the streets blurred the lines between activism and journalism, and contributed to the compound terms ‘citizen journal- ist’, ‘citizen media’ and ‘media activist’, now in common use.5 Lilie Chouliaraki describes this evolution clearly, as a ‘democratisation of technology’ and, simul- taneously, as a ‘technologisation of democracy’.6 For those protesting in 2011 in Tunisia and Morocco and throughout the Arab world, their collective success in gaining the international media attention they set out to achieve contributed to a 3 Anita Breuer, Todd Landman and Dorothea Farquhar, ‘Social Media and Protest Mobilization: Evidence from the Tunisian Revolution’, Democratization 22.4, 2015, pp. 764–92; Johanne Kuebler, ‘Overcoming the Digital Divide: The Internet and Political Mobilization in Egypt and Tunisia’, CyberOrient 5.1, http://www.cyberorient.net/article. do?articleId=6212; Marcin Lewiński and Dima Mohammed, ‘Deliberate Design or Unintended Consequences? The Argumentative Uses of Facebook during the Arab Spring’, Journal of Public Deliberation 8.1, 2012, pp. 1–11; Marc Lynch, ‘After Egypt: The Limits and Promise of Online Challenges to the Authoritarian Arab State’, Perspectives on Politics 9.1, 2011, pp. 301–10; Nevzat Soguk, ‘Uprisings in “Arab Streets”, Revolutions in “Arab minds”! A Provocation’, Globalizations 8.5, 2011, pp. 595–99. 4 XXX Creech, ‘XXX’, XXX XX, 2015, p. 1014. 5 Sami Ben Gharbia, October 2013, and Samia Errazzouki, January 2016, interviews with the author; see also Breuer, Landman and Farquhar, ‘Social Media’. 6 Lilie Chouliaraki, XXX, XXX 2010, p. 228. Chouliaraki goes on to explain: ‘The ‘democratisation of technology’ addresses self-mediation from the perspective of the empowering potential of new media technologies to invent novel discourses of counter- institutional subversion and collective activism; … the ‘technologisation of democracy’, addresses self-mediation from the perspective of the regulative potential of new media technologies to control the discourses and genres of ordinary participation and, in so doing, to reproduce the institutional power relations that such participation seeks to challenge.’ Unfinished Arab Spring.indd 217 05/02/2020 14:51 218 THE UNFINISHED ARAB SPRING sense of empowerment, and a perception of their own ability to influence change in the social and political spheres.7 At the time, the movements were often described as ‘youth led’, with the young credited as bringing fresh dynamism to mass mobilisation through hori- zontal and leaderless linkages activated via social media. Subsequent academic assessment has offered a useful corrective, in highlighting the complex nature of the groups that contributed to the protests, and the pitfalls in homogenising even the ‘youth’ aspect of the demonstrators, which can erase class and income differences, both of which reflected significant variance in the demonstrators’ motivations for joining the uprisings.8 It is not the contention here that all young people utilising social media in Morocco and Tunisia benefited from the events of 2011, nor that ‘youth’, as a socially constructed category which at certain politi- cal junctures might be credited as an agent of change, describes the field under examination here. The focus of this study is on urban, educated youth and activists using new media.9 Many of these were side lined by the neo-liberal programmes that King Mohammed VI of Morocco and Tunisian ex-president Ben Ali set up despite their ostensible focus on the ‘educated unemployed’, who in turn became drivers in ‘mediating’ the uprisings through websites, blogs, Facebook postings and distributed Twitter feeds. Some, such as bloggers Dina Ben-Mhenni and Slim Amamou in Tunisia, burst on to the scene; others, often more seasoned journal- ists and media activists, developed or refashioned existing websites, including al- Nawat, Bawsala, Tunisia Live and I Watch in Tunisia, and Mamfakinch, Lakome, Ya Biladi and Le Mag in Morocco, to impact the uprisings and their aftermath.10 The merging of new media coverage and political activism was a feature of the interpretation, by younger, tech-savvy contributors, of the forces of change both technologically and politically in communicating protest, organisation and new ideas of identity and meaning. Produced under the umbrella of I Am Vigilant (and since 2017, a branch of Transparency International in Tunisia), I Watch sums up the confluence in this way: 7 Anita Breuer and Jacob Groshek, ‘Online Media and Offline Empowerment in Post- Rebellion Tunisia: An Analysis of Internet Use during Democratic Transition’, Journal of Information Technology & Politics 11.1, 2014, pp. 25–44. 8 Maria Paciello and Daniela Pioppi, ‘Youth as Actors of Change? The Cases of Morocco and Tunisia’, The International Spectator 53.2, 2018, pp. 38–39. 9 ‘Youth’ is itself a contested term in regards to its biological beginning and end, and is used widely here to refer people ranging from teenagers to those in their early thirties. 10 At different times, many of these websites have been supported by NGOs, with varying degrees of NGO influence over their workings. Unfinished Arab Spring.indd 218 05/02/2020 14:51 YOUTH ACTIVISM AND THE POLITICS OF ‘MEDIAPRENEURSHIP’ 219 The organization was founded after the Tunisian revolution on March 21, 2011. The organization includes a number of young men and women active in various parts of the Republic and all of them are working to preserve the gains of the revolution. I am vigilant in the youthful potential of Tunisia. The young people who made the revolution have credentials that make them trustworthy. The organization works to include young people in the decision-making system and rejects guardianship in any way because of lack of expertise.11 This chapter considers how today’s ‘mediapreneurs’ are exploring different ways to function as a responsible force of resistance within states still undergoing political transition. The term ‘mediapreneur’ engages with the multiple mean- ings ascribed to the interaction of media, journalism and activist communication that young people, as well as experienced activist journalists, have developed in challenging their existing political, social and communicative environments. I adopt John Downing’s definition of media activism as ‘collective communication practices that challenge the status quo, including established media’.12 Berman and Pickard offer a useful elaboration, in noting that ‘we conceive of the media both as a tool for political mobilization and as an object of political struggle as activists endeavour to reform, delegitimize, or build more-democratic alterna- tives to the commercial mass media system’.13 Citizen journalism is defined by John Hamilton as ‘non-professionals practicing journalism’, with ‘professional’ connoting those having undergone ‘a period of intensive training’.14 In states with limited media freedom, such as Ben Ali’s Tunisia and Mohamed VI’s Morocco, media training has often lacked professional credibility, while greater scope for professionalisation