From Chiapas to Tahrir: Networks and the Diffusion of Protest
By Sandra González-Bailón, on
A lot has changed in the world of technology since the indigenous Zapatista movement emerged in the mid-1990s in southern Mexico to become a symbol of the fight for global justice. To modern would-be revolutionaries, the communication technologies that allowed the Zapatistas to gain global visibility -- highlighted by the then-futuristic-looking pictures of Subcomandante Marcos, the movement’s leader, posing in the Chiapas jungle w
rapped in electronic gear -- now look obsolete and cumbersome. Communication technologies have since morphed into devices that, despite being smaller, are incomparably more powerful for broadcasting, not only because exponential growth in Internet penetration over the past two decades has made potential audiences larger, but also because the devices themselves are now ubiquitous, becoming a sort of invisible presence that shapes our daily routines and feeds us constantly with information.
As outdated as the imagery of the Zapatista movement might look to our retrained eyes, however, it was one of the first global manifestations of the tectonic shift caused by new communication technologies and the ever-extending capillarity of the Internet. The transformations unleashed then are still shaping the way protest movements arise: The Internet underpins much of the action in the recent global upsurge in political protests, as it surely will in future waves, albeit with a different interface.
The series of events leading from the insurgency in Chiapas in 1994 to the uprisings that followed the 2011 Egyptian revolution can be split into two phases. The first encompasses the emergence of transnational networks, or what some have called a “global civil society,” empowered by the increasing availability of Internet technologies. The Zapatista movement is one of the most prominent examples in this phase because it showed how local struggles could grab the attention of an international public through their digital presence. Organizations -- nongovernmental and advocacy groups, mostly -- were the crucial nodes in the transnational networks that echoed those local struggles, and websites and electronic mailing lists were the main tools for disseminating information.
In the second phase, the evolution of Internet technologies brought about the consolidation of these transnational networks and the shared consciousness of inhabiting a global public domain: The Web carried information that anybody could find directly. This phase also brought a more significant change: It made transnational networks reachable by individuals, who could now bypass organizations, dispense with membership and embrace the power of self-organization. Individuals could exploit the contagion effect of their connections without a central authority overseeing the flow of information. In this stage, common users became the crucial nodes in the network, as social media and mobile applications blurred the distinction between private and public connections -- a division that shaped the first generation of Web technologies.
The Web as Weapon
Organizations were instrumental in the dissemination of information during the first stage of Internet-mediated protest movements. Online networks, in the form of websites and hyperlinks, created virtual communities that delivered information, amplified the voices of minorities and disseminated calls for action. Research on the Web presence of the Zapatista movement attributes its online prominence to connections with the websites of hundreds of global NGOs that offered an international network of solidarity: All these organizations opened the routes through which the Zapatistas’ cause could attract attention and support, directing traffic either directly, with hyperlinks, or indirectly through search algorithms.
The Web thus acted as a sounding board for protest messages, and it encouraged linkages across causes that until then had been scattered in offline collaboration networks forged by NGOs and advocacy groups but intangible and often invisible to the public. Web presence was not a sufficient condition for immediate success; for every local struggle projected to global visibility, the Web sank many more into oblivion. But it offered an amplifying platform to which very few protest movements would have had access before.
In addition to the dissemination of information, the Web also provided the infrastructure to launch new actors to prominence, for instance independent media sites. Platform like Indymedia, a global network of journalists that emerged as an alternative to corporate media, were instrumental in this type of news coverage, but they also played a central role in the coordination of anti-globalization and global justice protests, which started in Seattle in 1999 during the World Trade Organization conference. Protesters could use these online resources to coordinate their actions as well as to build their own story of the events, on the margins of traditional media narratives and supported by their own graphic documentation, which was digital and easy to publish online.
These Web networks were very powerful in reaching audiences and creating awareness. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997, is often cited as an example of how the Internet increased the speed and efficiency of group mobilization, in this case to coordinate the efforts of six founding NGOs to build a global network in dozens of countries for the elimination of antipersonnel landmines. Five years after being launched, the campaign helped secure an international treaty banning landmines.
Online petitions are another important component of how the Web transformed political protests. Because increased connectivity lowered the costs of information diffusion, with no need for paper, printing or stamps, the number of supporters and signatories could be scaled up in shorter time frames: Posting the details of a petition on a Web site and encouraging subscription to electronic mailing lists facilitated the diffusion of such campaigns or, at the very least, the potential for large chain reactions. Research on the spreading dynamics of a petition to organize opposition to the war in Iraq in 2002-2003 shows that the petition was distributed in a narrow but very deep tree-like pattern, that is, it reached many people not in a few steps but through many successive steps connecting a few people at a time.
In other words, email lists allowed successful instances of large-scale diffusion by means of complex paths: The fact that the observed diffusion trees were so deep and narrow means that they were in fact fragile -- they could easily have been broken at any of the levels required for further distribution. When they didn’t break, and instead continued branching out for long enough to catch the attention of a large number of people, it was more because of a statistical anomaly -- an unlikely alignment of circumstances -- than because of the virtues of technology. Of course, rallies and massive mobilizations are so politically powerful because they are so rare.
In all these instances, the Web created global circuits of information and some shortcuts to reach potentially wide audiences. But the audience -- that is, individuals -- had to enter those circuits to be exposed to the information: The Web made it easier to access, and it helped bring together a critical mass of potential protesters, yet the information still had to be sought actively. As content producers, users also had to create their networks from scratch. Publishing a website did nothing to raise the profile of a cause if no other websites linked back to it, granting visibility in an otherwise uncharted sea of information. The ability to mobilize resources, in the form of solidarity networks, was still a problematic issue for most organizations wanting to raise awareness and the reason why successful instances of mobilization were more often than not an exception.
The Power of Personal Connections
The evolution of Web technologies and the growing number of Internet users changed some of the mechanisms by which online networks helped protest movements pick up steam. At some point the Web became less about creating new connections than capitalizing on existing social networks at the individual level. Social media and networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn make personal networks the backbone of their services and the main channels for information diffusion: Users no longer need to enter an online circuit to be exposed to specific types of information; their contacts and groups -- of colleagues, friends, relatives, acquaintances and public figures -- bring that information to them without any request or effort other than maintaining the connection.
Prior to the advent of online social networks, people had to search for global justice calls. Now, such calls come via friends, or friends of friends, in a constantly bubbling stream of information attached to recognizable faces and names. This change has had a significant impact on information diffusion, as we are more likely to pass on information if the source belongs to our social circles. And social media allow us to monitor those circles with a consistency and fidelity that are difficult to replicate offline, at least for the information that our contacts decide to make public.
Two other transformations took place in this change of phase, and they are equally relevant to understanding the operation of recent protest movements: mobile connectivity and the infiltration of mainstream media into personal networks. The first means that people are constantly exposed to streams of information, regardless of location, accelerating their reaction times to calls for action; the distribution of reaction times within a population is crucial to understanding the evolution of information and recruitment chains. Mobile technology is also more flexible for organizing and coordinating protests once they are in motion, especially if they involve the management of camps in public squares threatened by forceful evictions, as in 2011 in Cairo, Madrid and New York.
The second transformation, the integration of mainstream media and professional journalists into personal networks, especially through social media like Twitter, which is used more for broadcasting than for personal interactions, means that online networks are not as clear an alternative to corporate media as they used to be. Users now don’t write on the margins of mainstream media to provide alternative views as they once did with platforms like Indymedia. Instead they write on the walls or feeds of mainstream media outlets, an act that often creates two-way channels of communication and public discussions.
The consequence of all these shifts is that the boundaries between the private and public spheres have become fuzzy, with the channels of communication for private and public talk conflated into the same networks. Put differently, a significant portion of political information shared online goes through networks that are not necessarily political, but that can be activated for political purposes as circumstances arise. The activation of pre-existing networks for a political cause is more effective than constructing or reviving ad hoc communication structures. In this, online social networks replicate the logic for recruitment dynamics that operated prior to the emergence of the Internet. The key is that it is more effective to have a friend tell you about a petition, or of the date and venue of the next protest demonstration, than to be told by an organization you might not belong to or know much about.
So the composition and rhythm of online protest networks have changed, but many of the characteristics of early Web dynamics remain. Online protest networks are still decentralized structures that pull together local sources of information and create efficient channels for a potentially global diffusion. But in the past, support networks built with websites and hyperlinks responded to strategic planning by organizations and were dependent on the ability of rising movements to access and mobilize those resources. Now, personal networks in social media sites emerge spontaneously out of the trajectories and biographies of individuals. Some users are better connected than others, and some have geographically more diverse networks, creating the bridges that might lead to global diffusion dynamics.
The wave of protests that took place in 2011 -- from the Arab Spring, to the Spanish “Indignados,” to the Global Occupy Campaign -- seems to reflect this global interdependence of localized, personal networks. However, systematic research in this area to uncover the actual bridges and network mechanisms that facilitated diffusion across national borders is still lacking. This wave of protests also cannot be understood without reference to the pervasive role of mainstream media, which is not only part of many of those local networks, but also retains some grip on the spread and framing of news from the top down. Finally, there is the obvious but important fact that protest movements are not stirred by social media technology itself; social media is just one vehicle of many that can help a protest movement rise from the shadows of indifference and irrelevance, given the right social, economic and historical circumstances. But it is true that, among other vehicles, online networks offer avenues for mobilization that allow unprecedented reach and speed.
Nevertheless, decentralized personal networks are good at generating bursts of activity, or flash mobilizations, but not at maintaining momentum or steering protests to more stable shores. For this, traditional organizations are still relevant, but they struggle to maintain a critical mass. So while social media might temporarily motivate people to go to the streets, sign petitions and get involved beyond making information chains grow online, the difficulty is in encouraging sustained engagement or, at an even more basic level, reproducing the same success in mobilization numbers in later calls to action. If traditional organizations fail to harness the power of personal networks, it is because these networks create complex structures that make prediction, planning or engineering difficult.
The Complexity of Protest Networks
Mobilization paths in online networks are difficult to predict because they depend on the right alignment of conditions on different levels, from the local information contexts of individuals who initiate or help sustain diffusion chains to the global assembly of the diffusion branches, which might take root in the same place or in different parts of the network. Much in the same way chain letter trees exhibit a narrow and deep structure, requiring many nested layers of subsequent forwarding to reach a large number of people, so the chain reactions in protest networks that make people join the bandwagon follow intricate paths that are difficult to anticipate -- among other things, because they might end or split at any stage.
Diffusion chains stop when people put an end to them by not forwarding the information through their personal networks, with information ending up trapped in local clusters or social circles loosely connected to the rest of the network. The reasons people decide not to continue the chain vary. Some might not register enough activity in their local network to consider the protest relevant and are averse to the idea of becoming one of the chain leaders. Others might be against the protest and decide not to join, in spite of local pressure. They might also break the chain for a number of reasons that are external to the network and independent of the protests. After all, social media users live in a world that still constrains their online presence and puts a limit on their political engagement.
The sum of every individual decision is not enough to explain the emergence of large diffusion events: The cumulative effects of individual behavior are not linear in a network, which activates feedback mechanisms that can propel a sudden change in mobilization dynamics, like exponential growth in the number of protesters recruited. Nevertheless, while these mechanisms are at the heart of network complexity and the unpredictability of their dynamics, they can be dissected and reconstructed to uncover their logic.
A survey of recent research on cascading behavior in online networks suggests that most chain reactions burn out quickly, that is, close to the roots of the tree-like structure, and that there is no agreed network position that has a clear advantage when initiating the chains. Large cascades tend to start at the core of the network, but network centrality is not a guarantee of success. Interdependence makes chain reactions more likely, but also more unpredictable and rare. What has changed with social media is that there are more attempts to trigger those reactions, sometimes without the large-scale vision or motivation. Chain reactions are only successful with the right alignment of factors, but this becomes more likely as more attempts are launched.
Conclusion
The study of complex networks is still in its infancy, and the implications for the study of protest mobilizations in the digital age are yet to be fully understood. But in addition to providing tools for protesters, social media have provided valuable data that are helping researchers gain insights into how people self-organize, and how bottom-up dynamics facilitate or hinder the emergence of large political mobilizations. Research to date has pointed to three relevant dimensions: the dynamics of message propagation and recruitment; the geographical spread of social networks; and the scales of human mobility. All three aspects are relevant to understanding why some attempts to organize protest mobilizations succeed, and most fail. Future work will have to shed more light on them, especially if protest organizations, governments and NGOs are to draw lessons to exploit the potential of online networks to mobilize people.
The protest movements that have emerged in the past two decades speak clearly to people’s ability to bypass traditional modes of mobilization using Internet technologies. But answering why and how online networks facilitate self-organization and information diffusion requires a careful approach to both the successes and the more abundant failures. The Internet and, recently, social media have altered the way in which people interact and come together, making formal organizations less necessary, and audiences potentially wider. But at the core of the process there are still motivations and chains of influence that transcend technology. The activation of diffusion still depends on people’s willingness to diffuse information, and free will is difficult to nudge, even with the help of online networks and the reinforcement instilled by social circles.
Collective action is more transient now, and spikes of attention and protest bursts do not easily crystallize into more-stable trends or outcomes. Protest movements seldom become stable and fixed organizational structures, and online networks are good at channelling that sort of fluid commitment and identity. As Internet and Web technologies continue to mutate, so will the strategies people use to irrupt the political scene with their fleeting actions, and some of them will lead to more substantive change.
But technology is only part of the story, and not a stable one itself: Soon, Twitter accounts will look as outdated as the electronic gadgets the Zapatistas used in the Chiapas jungle. An accurate picture of how digital technologies are changing protest movements has to focus less on the nature of the technologies and more on how they are used if it is to explain how online unity makes strength.
Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon is a sociologist whose work focuses on new media, social networks and political engagement. She is a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute
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| Abajo: Un smartphone como herramienta de protesta. |
As outdated as the imagery of the Zapatista movement might look to our retrained eyes, however, it was one of the first global manifestations of the tectonic shift caused by new communication technologies and the ever-extending capillarity of the Internet. The transformations unleashed then are still shaping the way protest movements arise: The Internet underpins much of the action in the recent global upsurge in political protests, as it surely will in future waves, albeit with a different interface.
The series of events leading from the insurgency in Chiapas in 1994 to the uprisings that followed the 2011 Egyptian revolution can be split into two phases. The first encompasses the emergence of transnational networks, or what some have called a “global civil society,” empowered by the increasing availability of Internet technologies. The Zapatista movement is one of the most prominent examples in this phase because it showed how local struggles could grab the attention of an international public through their digital presence. Organizations -- nongovernmental and advocacy groups, mostly -- were the crucial nodes in the transnational networks that echoed those local struggles, and websites and electronic mailing lists were the main tools for disseminating information.
In the second phase, the evolution of Internet technologies brought about the consolidation of these transnational networks and the shared consciousness of inhabiting a global public domain: The Web carried information that anybody could find directly. This phase also brought a more significant change: It made transnational networks reachable by individuals, who could now bypass organizations, dispense with membership and embrace the power of self-organization. Individuals could exploit the contagion effect of their connections without a central authority overseeing the flow of information. In this stage, common users became the crucial nodes in the network, as social media and mobile applications blurred the distinction between private and public connections -- a division that shaped the first generation of Web technologies.
The Web as Weapon
Organizations were instrumental in the dissemination of information during the first stage of Internet-mediated protest movements. Online networks, in the form of websites and hyperlinks, created virtual communities that delivered information, amplified the voices of minorities and disseminated calls for action. Research on the Web presence of the Zapatista movement attributes its online prominence to connections with the websites of hundreds of global NGOs that offered an international network of solidarity: All these organizations opened the routes through which the Zapatistas’ cause could attract attention and support, directing traffic either directly, with hyperlinks, or indirectly through search algorithms.
The Web thus acted as a sounding board for protest messages, and it encouraged linkages across causes that until then had been scattered in offline collaboration networks forged by NGOs and advocacy groups but intangible and often invisible to the public. Web presence was not a sufficient condition for immediate success; for every local struggle projected to global visibility, the Web sank many more into oblivion. But it offered an amplifying platform to which very few protest movements would have had access before.
In addition to the dissemination of information, the Web also provided the infrastructure to launch new actors to prominence, for instance independent media sites. Platform like Indymedia, a global network of journalists that emerged as an alternative to corporate media, were instrumental in this type of news coverage, but they also played a central role in the coordination of anti-globalization and global justice protests, which started in Seattle in 1999 during the World Trade Organization conference. Protesters could use these online resources to coordinate their actions as well as to build their own story of the events, on the margins of traditional media narratives and supported by their own graphic documentation, which was digital and easy to publish online.
These Web networks were very powerful in reaching audiences and creating awareness. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997, is often cited as an example of how the Internet increased the speed and efficiency of group mobilization, in this case to coordinate the efforts of six founding NGOs to build a global network in dozens of countries for the elimination of antipersonnel landmines. Five years after being launched, the campaign helped secure an international treaty banning landmines.
Online petitions are another important component of how the Web transformed political protests. Because increased connectivity lowered the costs of information diffusion, with no need for paper, printing or stamps, the number of supporters and signatories could be scaled up in shorter time frames: Posting the details of a petition on a Web site and encouraging subscription to electronic mailing lists facilitated the diffusion of such campaigns or, at the very least, the potential for large chain reactions. Research on the spreading dynamics of a petition to organize opposition to the war in Iraq in 2002-2003 shows that the petition was distributed in a narrow but very deep tree-like pattern, that is, it reached many people not in a few steps but through many successive steps connecting a few people at a time.
In other words, email lists allowed successful instances of large-scale diffusion by means of complex paths: The fact that the observed diffusion trees were so deep and narrow means that they were in fact fragile -- they could easily have been broken at any of the levels required for further distribution. When they didn’t break, and instead continued branching out for long enough to catch the attention of a large number of people, it was more because of a statistical anomaly -- an unlikely alignment of circumstances -- than because of the virtues of technology. Of course, rallies and massive mobilizations are so politically powerful because they are so rare.
In all these instances, the Web created global circuits of information and some shortcuts to reach potentially wide audiences. But the audience -- that is, individuals -- had to enter those circuits to be exposed to the information: The Web made it easier to access, and it helped bring together a critical mass of potential protesters, yet the information still had to be sought actively. As content producers, users also had to create their networks from scratch. Publishing a website did nothing to raise the profile of a cause if no other websites linked back to it, granting visibility in an otherwise uncharted sea of information. The ability to mobilize resources, in the form of solidarity networks, was still a problematic issue for most organizations wanting to raise awareness and the reason why successful instances of mobilization were more often than not an exception.
The Power of Personal Connections
The evolution of Web technologies and the growing number of Internet users changed some of the mechanisms by which online networks helped protest movements pick up steam. At some point the Web became less about creating new connections than capitalizing on existing social networks at the individual level. Social media and networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn make personal networks the backbone of their services and the main channels for information diffusion: Users no longer need to enter an online circuit to be exposed to specific types of information; their contacts and groups -- of colleagues, friends, relatives, acquaintances and public figures -- bring that information to them without any request or effort other than maintaining the connection.
Prior to the advent of online social networks, people had to search for global justice calls. Now, such calls come via friends, or friends of friends, in a constantly bubbling stream of information attached to recognizable faces and names. This change has had a significant impact on information diffusion, as we are more likely to pass on information if the source belongs to our social circles. And social media allow us to monitor those circles with a consistency and fidelity that are difficult to replicate offline, at least for the information that our contacts decide to make public.
Two other transformations took place in this change of phase, and they are equally relevant to understanding the operation of recent protest movements: mobile connectivity and the infiltration of mainstream media into personal networks. The first means that people are constantly exposed to streams of information, regardless of location, accelerating their reaction times to calls for action; the distribution of reaction times within a population is crucial to understanding the evolution of information and recruitment chains. Mobile technology is also more flexible for organizing and coordinating protests once they are in motion, especially if they involve the management of camps in public squares threatened by forceful evictions, as in 2011 in Cairo, Madrid and New York.
The second transformation, the integration of mainstream media and professional journalists into personal networks, especially through social media like Twitter, which is used more for broadcasting than for personal interactions, means that online networks are not as clear an alternative to corporate media as they used to be. Users now don’t write on the margins of mainstream media to provide alternative views as they once did with platforms like Indymedia. Instead they write on the walls or feeds of mainstream media outlets, an act that often creates two-way channels of communication and public discussions.
The consequence of all these shifts is that the boundaries between the private and public spheres have become fuzzy, with the channels of communication for private and public talk conflated into the same networks. Put differently, a significant portion of political information shared online goes through networks that are not necessarily political, but that can be activated for political purposes as circumstances arise. The activation of pre-existing networks for a political cause is more effective than constructing or reviving ad hoc communication structures. In this, online social networks replicate the logic for recruitment dynamics that operated prior to the emergence of the Internet. The key is that it is more effective to have a friend tell you about a petition, or of the date and venue of the next protest demonstration, than to be told by an organization you might not belong to or know much about.
So the composition and rhythm of online protest networks have changed, but many of the characteristics of early Web dynamics remain. Online protest networks are still decentralized structures that pull together local sources of information and create efficient channels for a potentially global diffusion. But in the past, support networks built with websites and hyperlinks responded to strategic planning by organizations and were dependent on the ability of rising movements to access and mobilize those resources. Now, personal networks in social media sites emerge spontaneously out of the trajectories and biographies of individuals. Some users are better connected than others, and some have geographically more diverse networks, creating the bridges that might lead to global diffusion dynamics.
The wave of protests that took place in 2011 -- from the Arab Spring, to the Spanish “Indignados,” to the Global Occupy Campaign -- seems to reflect this global interdependence of localized, personal networks. However, systematic research in this area to uncover the actual bridges and network mechanisms that facilitated diffusion across national borders is still lacking. This wave of protests also cannot be understood without reference to the pervasive role of mainstream media, which is not only part of many of those local networks, but also retains some grip on the spread and framing of news from the top down. Finally, there is the obvious but important fact that protest movements are not stirred by social media technology itself; social media is just one vehicle of many that can help a protest movement rise from the shadows of indifference and irrelevance, given the right social, economic and historical circumstances. But it is true that, among other vehicles, online networks offer avenues for mobilization that allow unprecedented reach and speed.
Nevertheless, decentralized personal networks are good at generating bursts of activity, or flash mobilizations, but not at maintaining momentum or steering protests to more stable shores. For this, traditional organizations are still relevant, but they struggle to maintain a critical mass. So while social media might temporarily motivate people to go to the streets, sign petitions and get involved beyond making information chains grow online, the difficulty is in encouraging sustained engagement or, at an even more basic level, reproducing the same success in mobilization numbers in later calls to action. If traditional organizations fail to harness the power of personal networks, it is because these networks create complex structures that make prediction, planning or engineering difficult.
The Complexity of Protest Networks
Mobilization paths in online networks are difficult to predict because they depend on the right alignment of conditions on different levels, from the local information contexts of individuals who initiate or help sustain diffusion chains to the global assembly of the diffusion branches, which might take root in the same place or in different parts of the network. Much in the same way chain letter trees exhibit a narrow and deep structure, requiring many nested layers of subsequent forwarding to reach a large number of people, so the chain reactions in protest networks that make people join the bandwagon follow intricate paths that are difficult to anticipate -- among other things, because they might end or split at any stage.
Diffusion chains stop when people put an end to them by not forwarding the information through their personal networks, with information ending up trapped in local clusters or social circles loosely connected to the rest of the network. The reasons people decide not to continue the chain vary. Some might not register enough activity in their local network to consider the protest relevant and are averse to the idea of becoming one of the chain leaders. Others might be against the protest and decide not to join, in spite of local pressure. They might also break the chain for a number of reasons that are external to the network and independent of the protests. After all, social media users live in a world that still constrains their online presence and puts a limit on their political engagement.
The sum of every individual decision is not enough to explain the emergence of large diffusion events: The cumulative effects of individual behavior are not linear in a network, which activates feedback mechanisms that can propel a sudden change in mobilization dynamics, like exponential growth in the number of protesters recruited. Nevertheless, while these mechanisms are at the heart of network complexity and the unpredictability of their dynamics, they can be dissected and reconstructed to uncover their logic.
A survey of recent research on cascading behavior in online networks suggests that most chain reactions burn out quickly, that is, close to the roots of the tree-like structure, and that there is no agreed network position that has a clear advantage when initiating the chains. Large cascades tend to start at the core of the network, but network centrality is not a guarantee of success. Interdependence makes chain reactions more likely, but also more unpredictable and rare. What has changed with social media is that there are more attempts to trigger those reactions, sometimes without the large-scale vision or motivation. Chain reactions are only successful with the right alignment of factors, but this becomes more likely as more attempts are launched.
Conclusion
The study of complex networks is still in its infancy, and the implications for the study of protest mobilizations in the digital age are yet to be fully understood. But in addition to providing tools for protesters, social media have provided valuable data that are helping researchers gain insights into how people self-organize, and how bottom-up dynamics facilitate or hinder the emergence of large political mobilizations. Research to date has pointed to three relevant dimensions: the dynamics of message propagation and recruitment; the geographical spread of social networks; and the scales of human mobility. All three aspects are relevant to understanding why some attempts to organize protest mobilizations succeed, and most fail. Future work will have to shed more light on them, especially if protest organizations, governments and NGOs are to draw lessons to exploit the potential of online networks to mobilize people.
The protest movements that have emerged in the past two decades speak clearly to people’s ability to bypass traditional modes of mobilization using Internet technologies. But answering why and how online networks facilitate self-organization and information diffusion requires a careful approach to both the successes and the more abundant failures. The Internet and, recently, social media have altered the way in which people interact and come together, making formal organizations less necessary, and audiences potentially wider. But at the core of the process there are still motivations and chains of influence that transcend technology. The activation of diffusion still depends on people’s willingness to diffuse information, and free will is difficult to nudge, even with the help of online networks and the reinforcement instilled by social circles.
Collective action is more transient now, and spikes of attention and protest bursts do not easily crystallize into more-stable trends or outcomes. Protest movements seldom become stable and fixed organizational structures, and online networks are good at channelling that sort of fluid commitment and identity. As Internet and Web technologies continue to mutate, so will the strategies people use to irrupt the political scene with their fleeting actions, and some of them will lead to more substantive change.
But technology is only part of the story, and not a stable one itself: Soon, Twitter accounts will look as outdated as the electronic gadgets the Zapatistas used in the Chiapas jungle. An accurate picture of how digital technologies are changing protest movements has to focus less on the nature of the technologies and more on how they are used if it is to explain how online unity makes strength.
Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon is a sociologist whose work focuses on new media, social networks and political engagement. She is a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute
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