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Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest Hardcover – May 16, 2017

by Zeynep Tufekci (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 305 ratings
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From New York Times opinion columnist Zeynep Tufekci, an firsthand account and incisive analysis of the role of social media in modern protest

“[Tufekci’s] personal experience in the squares and streets, melded with her scholarly insights on technology and communication platforms, makes [this] such an unusual and illuminating work.”—Carlos Lozada, Washington Post
 
“Twitter and Tear Gas is packed with evidence on how social media has changed social movements, based on rigorous research and placed in historical context.”—Hannah Kuchler, Financial Times
 
To understand a thwarted Turkish coup, an anti–Wall Street encampment, and a packed Tahrir Square, we must first comprehend the power and the weaknesses of using new technologies to mobilize large numbers of people. An incisive observer, writer, and participant in today’s social movements, Zeynep Tufekci explains in this accessible and compelling book the nuanced trajectories of modern protests—how they form, how they operate differently from past protests, and why they have difficulty persisting in their long-term quests for change.
 
Tufekci speaks from direct experience, combining on-the-ground interviews with insightful analysis. She describes how the internet helped the Zapatista uprisings in Mexico, the necessity of remote Twitter users to organize medical supplies during Arab Spring, the refusal to use bullhorns in the Occupy Movement that started in New York, and the empowering effect of tear gas in Istanbul’s Gezi Park. These details from life inside social movements complete a moving investigation of authority, technology, and culture—and offer essential insights into the future of governance.
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Previous page
  1. Print length
    360 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Yale University Press
  4. Publication date
    May 16, 2017
  5. Dimensions
    9.3 x 6.4 x 1 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0300215126
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0300215120
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Tufekci believes that digital-age protests are not simply faster, more responsive versions of their mid-century parents. They are fundamentally distinct.”—Nathan Heller, New Yorker

"This comprehensive, thought-provoking work makes a valuable contribution to understanding recent political developments and provides a clear path by which grassroots organizers can improve future efforts."—Publishers Weekly

"Twitter and Tear Gas is packed with evidence on how social media has changed social movements, based on rigorous research and placed in historical context."—Hannah Kuchler, Financial Times

“[Tufekci’s] personal experience in the squares and streets, melded with her scholarly insights on technology and communication platforms, makes [this] such an unusual and illuminating work. . . . Will be long cited, deservedly, by activists, technologists, and others grasping at the relationship between our causes and our screens.”—Carlos Lozada, Washington Post

"Insightful and entertaining. . . . Twitter and Tear Gas is infused with a richness of detail stemming from [Tufekci's] personal participation in the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Turkey. . . . Tufekci writes with a warmth and respect for the humans that are part of these powerful social movements, gently intertwining her own story with the stories of others, big data, and theory."—Bruce Schneier, Motherboard

“The book’s claims are relevant for those organizing protests or studying them, but not exclusively. . . . What’s more, repressive governments themselves could learn from the book what platforms are being used to undermine their attempts at censorship, and more importantly, how.”—Melissa Altman, Voluntas

"A striking and original conclusion: today’s low barrier for organizing a movement can also lead to its long-term frustrations. Tufekci’s superb book will define the debate on social protest for years to come."—Dani Rodrik, author of Economic Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science

"Tufekci is undoubtedly the most qualified person in the world to explain the meaning of political collective actions catalyzed and coordinated by social media. She knows the technology, the social science, and the politics—and she is the rare academic observer who was at the scene, from Istanbul to Cairo to New York."—Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

"Incisive and illuminating, Tufekci’s book arrives at the perfect moment, right when we desperately need our activism to become smarter and more effective than ever before, or else."— Astra Taylor, author of The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age and co-founder of the Debt Collective

"Many have asked why people rebel, but few describe how. Here, Tufekci uses firsthand observation to offer an intelligent and informed examination of the tools and nature of today’s political protests."—Vali Nasr, author of The Dispensable Nation and The Shia Revival

"For all the claims that new technologies afford grassroots movements new power, research on the topic is rare. Tufekci's book provides just that—and a cautionary conclusion."—Doug McAdam, author of Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America

About the Author

Zeynep Tufekci is a New York Times opinion columnist, a contributing opinion writer for The Atlantic, associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science, and a faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Yale University Press (May 16, 2017)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 360 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0300215126
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0300215120
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.5 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.3 x 6.4 x 1 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 305 ratings

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Zeynep Tufekci

Zeynep Tufekci

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Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
305 global ratings
Don't Miss this book Zeynep Tufekci!
5 Stars
Don't Miss this book Zeynep Tufekci!
Zeynep gives us many good reasons to think about why current social movements and new technologies are failing to affect authoritarianism worldwide? This is a stunning work and not to be missed!
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Top reviews from the United States

Saul Albert
5.0 out of 5 stars A user's guide to social movements, political power and their technological infrastructures
Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2017
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This is a fantastic book with some extremely useful insights on how power is being exercised and transformed through networked communication infrastructures. Tufekci begins by showing how the political power of informal social groups can expand through highly leveraged forms of networked organization. Then she shows how this leverage can be one of their vulnerabilities if they grow too fast to be able to strategize or to make crucial decisions without formal structures, established norms and strong social ties. She explains how governments and powerful institutions have learned to exploit these weaknesses to retain power by delaying, distracting and deflecting social movements with widespread disinformation campaigns. The book explores these major themes through detailed and compelling case studies written in clear and accessible prose. The book functions as a missing manual for all responsible social media users, and should be required reading for activists, journalists, politicians and academics. The academic contribution of the book is significant, and (unusually) isn't hidden away behind obscure terminology. Tufekci uses and adapts thinking from political, social and economic theory, and conceptual frameworks from studies of communication, human development and psychology to explain concrete examples with elegance and clarity - and provides her readers with their own tools for thinking about how power, politics and technology are significant in their own lives. Despite the grim subject matter, and the deeply worrying implications of the political and historical trajectories traced so well in Tufekci's book, this is one of the most hope-inducing reads of 2017. I read this book while the ink was still wet, and it provided a startlingly clear perspective on some major political, social and technological changes of the last 20 years. I'm sure that when people read this book in 20 years time, that perspective will retain its vivid clarity, its depth of experience and its essence of grim, critical optimism.
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Ben Shneiderman
5.0 out of 5 stars vital book, filled with insights and compelling stories
Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2017
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I’m very impressed! It’s an amazing book, interweaving your personal life with some of the great dramas of the past decade, all told from the perspective of how social media enables, amplifies, and challenges protest movements. Your journalistic skills bring great satisfactions as you tell the compelling stories of the protesters and your own engagement from Chiapas to Gezi Park to Tahrir Square and beyond. The most dramatic moment was at Antalya Airport when you saw the video of tanks on the Bosporus, and realized that a coup was in progress, so you needed to get your checked bag back and find a safer place.
Equally your sociology skills bring vital insights about how social media have become part of the world-wide political story, especially for protest movements. You document and catalog how protests can be formed quickly, without the long process of capacity development that was manifest in the civil rights movement. At the same time you make it painfully clear that many of these rapidly assembled protest movements just can’t sustain their efforts, adapt their tactics, or accept the idea of leadership structures, and therefore often fail to achieve their goals. Your nifty theorizing comes across clearly, e.g. signaling and the way that movements need to build their narrative, disruptive, and electoral/political capabilities. This was a helpful guide to understanding what happened, including how governments are able to crack down on leaders.
Your technology skills also brought insights in your descriptions of the differing affordances for each social media platform, making it clear why Twitter became the platform of choice for protest movements – suitable balance of anonymity/reputation, easy access, and appropriate openness. Your stories of abuses on Reddit and other platforms provide valuable lessons about what needs to be fixed.
The opening chapter was more difficult reading, with too many long complex sentences and fewer of the colorful stories.
I was pleased to see the warm appreciation for Dean Gary Marchionini – I’m pleased he was so supportive to you.
Overall, an important and vital book, filled with insights and compelling stories that stick in my mind.
3 people found this helpful
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Ian R Slutz
4.0 out of 5 stars but I am glad I read it and feel more informed as a ...
Reviewed in the United States on July 19, 2017
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I initially encountered Zeynep Tufekci’s writing in The New York Times where her writing on technology’s impact on society seemed sharp and insightful. Twitter and Tear Gas is a clear and to the point analysis of the state of social media and its role in protest movements. Everything is described in clear terms. The book is written with academic rigour yet describes everything in plain language.

What most impressed me the most is how balanced her tone is. She is able to describe the strengths and weaknesses of social media as a protest platform while avoiding casting the big picture as either utopian or paranoid. This is most impressive when she documents how repressive regimes have mastered social media in recent years, creating a new kind of censorship. As I am more suspicious of social media as a social force I respected her sober tone.

It took me some time to make my way through the book because I wouldn’t call it riveting, but I am glad I read it and feel more informed as a result.
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Top reviews from other countries

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Terenzio Facchinetti
5.0 out of 5 stars Social media and their impact
Reviewed in Germany on May 21, 2023
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A book to read to understand the role social edia had, why so and what could we further expect. Good basis to understand also what AI (Artificial Intellingence) might bring with it and we all must take care of for our future and the one of our future generations: freedom, respect, peace, cooperation, education and understand that there is only this world that we have and that WE, as all what in this world, are one variable, an element, subject to the law of the nature. There is no plan(et) B to this, just as there is no alternative to war but peace, no alternative to manipulation and oppression but freedom.
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Francesca
5.0 out of 5 stars Libro innovativo e interessante
Reviewed in Italy on June 8, 2021
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Questo libro offre degli spunti davvero interessanti e coinvolgenti sul tema dell’influenza dei social network nelle proteste moderne. Ben scritto e innovativo, da leggere.
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F. VALDES Perezgasga
5.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking in an age of social media
Reviewed in Mexico on February 24, 2018
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This books explains a lot about networked protest. It highlights its strengths and its shortcomings. A lot of ideas worth pondering.
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Kevin D'Abramo
5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling read
Reviewed in Canada on December 28, 2017
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I liked this book for it’s extensive coverage of the topic. The author is a professor who specializes in the field and this shows in how the book is written. The book provides a broad perspective on how social media can help social movements achieve their goals, and also pinpoints some of the drawbacks for activists.

All in all, I find the book an enlightening read.
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Athan
5.0 out of 5 stars History, manual and memoir
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 5, 2017
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I have fewer than 100 followers on Twitter and know zero about activism, so you should probably not take my views too seriously.

Views I do have, however, and they are rather dark: I think there’s a reason the emergence of a bourgeoisie in China has not had the effect it had on the US in the 1880’s and it’s that the government can monitor electronically all communication that in the 1880’s would have stayed unobserved long enough for a revolutionary movement to emerge. Something not too different happened when the “green movement” was quashed in Iran almost a decade ago, and Siemens was singled out in the press as a purveyor of the necessary surveillance technology to the theocratic state.

So I bought “Twitter and Teargas” to see how it squared with my sundry biases. Much as I ordered the book on the strength of the author’s writing in the NYT, I had not made up my mind on whether I’d actually read it, until I saw her picture / statement on the inside sleeve of the book. At that point I knew I had to.

I was not disappointed.

Zeynep Tufekci has written the manual and the history of online activism, all rolled into one. She’s been at it since its birth (maybe even before that, in its very conception amongst the Zapatistas), she knows the main actors personally and she recounts their story merely by telling hers. For this is not only a manual and a history, but also a pretty complete memoir. It’s amazingly impressive, without once becoming tedious. Quite to the contrary, it’s totally gripping.

It’s also very profound. Between Tahrir Square, Gezi Park and Zuccotti Park, this young author has been busy “doing,” but she’s also been busy thinking, questioning and analyzing. A (very incomplete) list of her findings would be as follows:

• The new online tools have made it easier to reach the “mass protest” phase than ever before. The main reason is that today’s digital technology is both a quantum leap in the public’s ability to discover the truth (the first necessary ingredient in wanting to protest), but also in terms of providing a platform to organize an event involving multiple participants. Similarly, technology has made it orders of magnitude easier to organize procurement once a movement has graduated to its “mass protest” phase.

• Consequently, the significance of mass mobilization has changed too. In particular, whereas in the past a movement that was able to organize a massive demonstration had by definition reached some type of maturity, cohesion, familiarity and common background of suffering together between its members, the fostering of such “network internalities” is no longer typically the case. The author draws upon encyclopaedic knowledge of the US civil rights movement to illustrate this point.

• By dint of the fact that they can be organized in hours using a single account, mass movements can today be a lot more “horizontal” than ever before. Apart from the strong bonds and feelings of brotherhood that unite participants in a horizontal structure, this “spirit of Tahrir” type of environment comes with some small practical benefits too; for example, it is impossible to “decapitate” a horizontal organization. Chiefly, however, it comes with a series of large drawbacks: lack of flexibility, no authority to negotiate with the state, and often a “deer in headlights” approach to changes in the environment, that the author politely calls a “tactical freeze.” The best case scenario is that an “adhocracy” arises, and that’s not particularly great either.

• Moreover, the oppressors around the world may have had to concede that things will never be the same again when it comes to censorship, but they have taken on board the “affordances” of the new tools and they have by now come up with the appropriate response that strikes at the Achilles’ heel of the activists’ approach: crowding out of the message via the organized spreading of their view, via targeted misinformation campaigns against whoever dares speak truth to power and, more generally, by dividing and diverting the attention of the public.

I could go on, but I’d like to encourage you to buy and read the book, instead. With all that said, the author does not arrive at a conclusion: Will the state harness the new technology and, China-style, take advantage of it better and more systematically than the diffuse and disparate dissidents and protesters?

That would be a very dark message, indeed, but it’s the message my friend Kentaro Toyama arrived at in at least a couple of articles he once published in the Atlantic. I’d love to see him on a panel with Zeynep Tufekci one day!
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