David Herbert and Stefan Fisher-Høyrem (Eds.

)
Social Media and Social Order
David Herbert and Stefan Fisher-Høyrem (Eds.)

Social Media and

Social Order

Managing Editor: Katarzyna Inga Michalak

Associate Editor: Francesca Corazza

Language Editor: Michael Evans

ISBN 978-83-66675-60-5
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Copyright © 2021 David Herbert, Stefan Fisher-Høyrem and chapters' contributors

Published by De Gruyter Poland Ltd, Warsaw/Berlin

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The book is published with open access at www.degruyter.com.

Managing Editor: Katarzyna Inga Michalak

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Language Editor: Michael Evans

Preparation and publication of this book was financially supported by the Research Council of
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Contents
Acknowledgements — IX

David Herbert and Stefan Fisher-Høyrem

1
Introduction: How Do Social Media Change Social Order? The Deep
Datafication of Society from Global to Local Scales (and Back Again) — 1
References — 9

Nick Couldry
2 The Social Construction of Reality – Really! — 10
2.1 The Question of Social Order: Returning to Elias — 11
2.2 Managing Social Order Through Data — 13
2.3 Conclusion — 15
References — 16

John D. Boy and Justus Uitermark

3 The Dramaturgy of Social Media: Platform Ecology, Uneven Networks, and
the Myth of the Self — 17
3.1 Very Online — 18
3.1.1 The Insider: Yvette — 19
3.1.2 The Workaholic: Sammy — 20
3.2 Dramaturgy: The Self in Interaction — 21
3.2.1 Self — 22
3.2.1.1 Self as Strategic Project — 23
3.2.1.2 Self as Myth — 25
3.2.2 Interaction — 27
3.2.2.1 Interactive Affordances — 28
3.2.2.2 Network of Mediations — 29
3.3 Conclusion — 29
References — 30

Stefan Fisher-Høyrem and David Herbert

4 Clusters of Prestige: Social Media and Social Order in the Norwegian Bible
Belt — 33
4.1 Introduction — 33
4.2 Social Order in Kristiansand — 34
4.2.1 Evangelical Church Culture — 44
4.2.2 Family Friendly — 35
4.2.3 Physical Activity — 37
4.2.4 Characteristics of Kristiansand’s Social Order — 38
4.3 Social Media in Kristiansand — 38
4.3.1 Local Clusters — 40
4.3.2 Local Top Users: Navigating Hierarchies — 41
4.4 Reproducing the Social Order — 44
4.4.1 Prestigious Consumption — 45
4.4.2 City-Wide Symbols of Prestige — 47
4.5 Concluding Remarks  — 49
References — 50

Sagorika Singha
5 Meme Collectives and Preferred Truths in Assam — 52
5.1 Introduction — 52
5.2 Memes as Digital Objects — 52
5.2.1 Digital Objects and Generation of Social Knowledge — 53
5.2.2 Public Opinion Formation and the Meme-Machine — 56
5.3 Network Economy and the Meme — 57
5.3.1 Memes Experience and Existence: Offline Dynamics Acting on Memes — 58
5.4 Akhil Gogoi, or How a Peasant Leader Became a Meme  — 59
5.4.1 The Media Event and the Meme — 63
5.5 Conclusion — 64
References — 65

Liat Berdugo
6 Insurgent Ways of Looking: Gendering the Witness and the Land in the
Visuality of Israel-Palestine  — 67
6.1 A “One-Way Hierarchy of Vision” — 69
6.2 A Woman’s Camera — 72
6.3 Women’s Ethical Agency in Conflict — 74
6.4 Watching the Land — 75
6.5 An Ecofeminist Critique of the Feminized Witness — 81
6.6 Towards an Insurgent Way of Seeing  — 82
Acknowledgements — 84
References — 84

Sarah Sobieraj and Shaan Merchant

7 Gender and Race in the Digital Town Hall: Identity-Based Attacks Against US
Legislators on Twitter — 89
7.1 Introduction — 89
7.2 Literature — 90
7.3 Methods — 94
7.4 Analysis — 97
7.5 Findings — 97
7.6 Discussion and Conclusions — 105
References — 106
Appendix A: Thumbnail Descriptions of Key Variables — 109

Alicia Wanless and Michael Berk

8 Participatory Propaganda: The Engagement of Audiences in the Spread of
Persuasive Communications — 111
8.1 Modern Propaganda and the Evolution of its Participatory Model — 112
8.1.1 Hyper-Targeted Audience Analysis — 114
8.1.2 Provocative Content — 114
8.1.3 Echo Chambers — 115
8.1.4 Manipulating Feed and Search Algorithms — 116
8.1.5 Encouraging Followers to Action — 117
8.1.6 Using Traditional Media — 118
8.1.7 Assess, Modify and Repeat — 118
8.2 Modelling Participatory Propaganda — 118
8.2.1 Methodology and Data — 118
8.2.2 Facebook Page Like Networks — 120
8.2.3 Facebook Page Posts — 120
8.3 Findings — 120
8.3.1 Pro-Trump Pages Shared Different Kinds of Provocative Content, such as
Fake News, Memes, and Data Leaks — 120
8.3.2 Pro-Trump Pages Constitute an Echo Chamber – A Like-Minded
Community, which Shared Similar Content — 122
8.3.3 Pro-Trump Pages Posted Across Multiple Websites Affected Google
Search Returns — 122
8.3.4 Followers of Pro-Trump Pages Were Encouraged to Action — 123
8.3.5 Pro-Trump Pages Heavily Engage with Media Outlets  — 127
8.3.6 Pro-Trump Pages in a Participatory Propaganda Model — 131
8.4 Conclusion: Participatory Propaganda in Liberal Democracies — 131
References — 132
List of Figures — 138
List of Tables — 139
Acknowledgements
This volume has grown out of the conference Social Media and Social Order held in
Oslo in Nov-Dec 2017 as part of the research project Cultural Conflict 2.0: Religion,
Media and Locality (https://cc2.mediated.eu/; CC2). We are grateful to the Norwegian
Research Council (Grant no. 231344) for funding the project, to the University of Agder
for funding the open access electronic publication of the book, to Nick Couldry and
Kim Knott our project advisors, and to our editor at De Gruyter, Beata Socha, for her
patience, professionalism and help in bringing the project to fruition.
1 Introduction: How Do Social Media Change Social
Order? The Deep Datafication of Society from Global
to Local Scales (and Back Again)
Introduction: How Do Social Media Change Social Order? The Deep Datafication of Society ...

David Herbert and Stefan Fisher-Høyrem

Researching the social/media relation today must mean more than merely describing how the
latest platforms work, let alone celebrating their supposedly positive potential (democratic?
expressive? socializing?). It must mean at least researching how social media platforms … have
come to propose a certain version of “the social,” and how users go on to enact it. It must also
mean researching … and registering the fractured spaces from where alternative proposals of
“the social” might be built (Couldry & van Dijck 2015, p. 2; emphases in the original).

The concept of “social order” is not an academic detail, still less a theoretical extravagance, but
rather a highly practical term for registering how social worlds are, on the largest scale, being
transformed through the interlinking of all we do on social media … and the systems of social
governance, explicit and implicit, that are emerging to manage them (Couldry, this volume).

This book addresses the relationship between social media and social order at multiple
scales, providing insights into how diverse social worlds are being reshaped by social
media, as well as analysis and reflection on what this means and how critical publics
might respond.
From the invention of the internet, successive waves of digitally networked
technologies have been welcomed by social scientists and commentators as providing
the means both to widen participation in discussion of matters of common concern
(the public sphere model, following Habermas, 1989/1968) and for subordinate
groups to self-organise and resist forms of oppression based on media and political
elites’ symbolic domination of society through the mass media (the emancipatory
model, following Castells, 2012). Furthermore, social scientists have identified several
mechanisms through which these forms of participatory and emancipatory agency
might be exercised – including the propensity of networks to elude hierarchical
domination (Benkler, 2006), their capacity to enable “contraflow” from peripheral to
central media producers (Cottle, 2006), and the “virality” of user-generated content,
which can on occasion generate networked publics capable of challenging major
corporations and even governments (Castells, 2012).
However, it is our contention that, while networked technologies do indeed
sometimes enable such dialogical and emancipatory outcomes, normally they enable
rather different social processes – i.e. they tend to reinforce, elaborate and further
embed existing forms of social order, rather than challenge them (Boy & Uitermark,
2019, pp. 2–3; Herbert, 2020, p. 10). Social order in this context should not be conceived
as static, but rather as dynamic, constantly evolving and actively reproduced through
2   How Do Social Media Change Social Order?

continuous interaction. The tendency of networked technologies to re-enforce rather

than challenge existing social order occurs partly because the networks formed
through them are mostly composed on the basis of attraction, admiration and shared
interest; for example, with social media networks being woven from the expressions
of liking, following and retweeting etc., with those individuals who most exhibit
the admired quality (and most actively promote it and often themselves), as the
stars around which the network revolves, each forming a cluster with the network
of clusters comprising the constellation of the platform. Platforms explicitly formed
around the desire to engage with different others are comparatively rare, and often
require vigilant forms of moderation to keep the discourse civil (see Herbert & Black,
2012). Furthermore, the formation of clusters is algorithmically shaped, as algorithms
embedded in the platforms constantly suggest friends, content and products we might
like in iterative response to our choices. The emergent process of tailoring content to
users is thus one of continuous differentiation, which at an individual level ensures
we receive suggestions we are likely to like, at a collective level connects us more
intricately to those we already like and are likely to like (reinforcing our filter bubble,
and likely existing power relations), and is continually commercially harvested, and
may be used to enable differential (and hence potentially discriminatory) treatment
by businesses and government.
In Chapter 2 project advisor for CC2 and leading public intellectual on media-
society entanglements Nick Couldry casts doubt on optimistic assessments of the
impact of networked digital media for a related but different reason. Addressing the
largest geographic scale possible, he asks: how does the corporate harvesting of data
from networked digital devices impact on the ordering of social relations in general,
at a global scale? In other words, what are the general features of a “datafied” social
order? The question relates to the homophilic basis of social networks because the
choices of individuals to link to networks of similar others forms a small part of the
data on user activity collected by the corporations who run social media platforms
and other networked digital services. On social media platforms it is used to suggest
people we might know or like to connect with, and thus may shape our social
networks directly; similar algorithms which drive the recommendation process are
also deployed to recommend products and services based on our internet search and
retail activity. Couldry’s is therefore a large question, but an appropriate one within
which to frame a collection which focuses on analysing specific instances of the
development of how users enact social orders shaped by networked digital platforms
– social media – and hence datafied – at city/site (Chapters 3 through 6), and national
scales (Chapters 7 and 8).
But first, before considering Couldry’s answer, why “social order” at all? Couldry
argues that the concept is out of fashion, citing in support that the last major work
came out in 1994 and is out of print, and giving as a possible reason the challenge
to reified concepts of the social especially in the field of assessing the impacts
of new technologies by proponents of actor network theory (Latour, 2005). In
 How Do Social Media Change Social Order?   3

response, Couldry argues that “at a time when, through datafication, it appears that
corporations and governments are intent on reconstructing social reality in ways that
align with their interests, it becomes vital to pay close attention to processes of social
construction” (Couldry, Ch. 2) – and that some concept of social order is essential in
developing a critical account of such processes.
Furthermore, other evidence suggests social order may not be such a neglected or
marginal topic in social sciences. In 2003 an American textbook on the topic appeared,
with a second edition in 2009 and a well-maintained supporting website, suggesting
at least modest currency of the term in US social science programs (Hechter & Horne,
2009; https://www.sup.org/socialorder/?ref=bookurl). This collection is useful for
showing the influence of the concept of social order across a range of social science
disciplines, for asserting its role as “a core theoretical issue in the social sciences” and
for indicating the range of ways in which the “problem of social order” – understood
by the authors as how people “coordinate their actions and … cooperate to attain
common goals” (ibid. 1) is addressed through several traditions of conceptualisation
and theorisation, including mobilising concepts of groups, hierarchies, markets and
networks (ibid., vii–viii).
Notably absent from this collection, however, is any sustained attention to how
media technologies might shape social order, which is the central question addressed
in this volume, focusing on social media. The perspective also differs markedly in
its Hobbesian framing – which constructs the “state of nature” as fundamentally
conflictual and therefore legitimises the need for ordering mechanisms to reconcile
the differing interests of individuals for the greater (individual and collective) good.
In this way, the perspective aligns with what Zygmunt Bauman describes as “the
gardening principle” of the modern state, as Schiel summarises the concept:
It refers to a state “managed” by its government like a garden. The gardener/
government applies rational methods based on scientific knowledge to create optimal
conditions of growth for the “plants”/people (2005, p. 81).
The framing of an absence of social order as a problem that needs “solving”
tends to legitimise the need for “solutions” of some kind; whether through markets
or networks as “horizontal” or decentralised co-ordinating mechanisms, or through
the state or some kind of hierarchy as “vertical” mechanisms of control. Bauman, in
contrast, is suspicious of such mechanisms of social control, an approach exemplified
by his characterisation of the modern state, which emphasises the disruptive and
novel features of modern state power:

With the backbone of communal self-reproduction disintegrating or crushed, the modern state
power was bound to engage in deliberate management of social processes on an unheard-of
scale … it did not concentrate the previously dispersed powers. It presided over the formation of
an entirely new kind of power, or unprecedented scope, depth of ambition, depth of penetration
and ambition (Bauman, 1990, p. 157).
4   How Do Social Media Change Social Order?

We think it is not exaggerating to say that Couldry sees the datafication of society as
a project of similar scope, involving a parallel deepening of penetration of state and
corporate mechanisms of social control. Couldry focuses on corporate data harvesting
as the most ubiquitous global form of datafication, but locates this in relation to and
stresses connections with state uses of digital data; for example, in China where there
is less separation of state and corporate sectors and less emphasis on personal privacy
to maintain that distinction than in the West. It is also where the most ambitious and
overt attempt to harness big data to rank the social “trustworthiness” of citizens and
distribute rewards and punishments accordingly – The Social Credit System – and
hence directly harvest digital date to shape social order – is already being rolled out
(Liang et al., 2018). Yet, Couldry also notes the interest of governments everywhere
in harnessing digital data to police populations and shape behaviour, stressing the
disproportionate impact of this on the lives of the poor and especially those relying
on state welfare.
Couldry argues that the genesis of the datafied order was largely unplanned (e.g.
Google’s accidental discovery that it could commercially exploit internet search data,
Zuboff, 2019), and that this remains partly true of its ongoing development. For while
“corporate intention becomes a major factor once the advantages of an emerging
datafied social order become clearer to corporations,” planned or coordinated
action by key players is not required for what we suggest might be termed the deep
datafication of society, a process through which “the principle of discrimination-
through-data (that is, automatically harvested data from online activities) has spread
right across the social terrain” (Couldry, this volume). Thus, while corporations and
governments have long sought, held and used data on citizens and consumers from
multiple sources, networked digital platforms enable its gathering, use and integration
on an unprecedented scale, reaching deep into the everyday lives of people across the
planet – hence deep datafication.
Like Herbert and Fisher-Høyrem (Chapter 4), Couldry draws on Elias to
conceptualise the emergence of a datafied social order. Elias understands a
“figuration” as “a structure of mutually orientated and dependent people … the
network of interdependencies formed by individuals” (Elias, 2000, p. 482). Elias
argues that social order emerges through such figurations, “through the continuous
interweaving of many interrelationships and connections, their progressive impact,
as social actors try, successfully or otherwise, to live their lives through the web of
interrelations in which they have largely no choice but to be entangled” (Couldry,
this volume). Thus, what Couldry and Mejías (2019) call “data relations,” referring
to “relations that configure social life on a basis designed to optimise the generation
and extraction of valuable data” become “a leading form of ‘figuration’ … for the era
of datafication.” (Couldry, this volume).
At the same time, Couldry argues that while “discrimination-through-data … has
spread right across the social terrain,” resistance is neither impossible nor futile;
rather “to the extent that this order is resisted by social actors, it will not unfold
 How Do Social Media Change Social Order?   5

exactly as I outline here. That is the point of analysing datafied societies from the
point of view of social order, to alert readers to what is under way and help them
imagine what resistance might feel like.” (Couldry, this volume).
Elias’ concept of figuration can be applied to many kinds of social relations,
especially where there is a lack of strong central social control, or social norms leave
space for negotiation. But the difference in a datafied social order is the way in which
virtual forms of social interaction are mediated by the properties of digital systems,
in particular by social media platforms. It is on this mediation, its effects on those
enmeshed, their agency and resistance, that the substantive chapters that follow
Couldry’s essay focus. Each examines how users enact – using Couldry and van
Dijck’s terms – the versions of the social proposed by social media platforms across
range of scales and sites.
Drawing on the dramaturgical perspective of Erving Goffman, in Chapter 3 Boy
and Uitermark investigate the self-presentation and status displays characterising the
online conduct and related careers of Instagram influencers. Instagram clusters tend
to centre on very few user accounts, whose style of display sets the tone for the entire
cluster, and whose influence enables them to access temporary job opportunities as
party hosts or event promoters. The interviews reveal a vast and stress-inducing gap
between their curated Instagram “frontstage” personas and the “backstage” precarity
of their offline lives and continuous intense effort required to maintain their social
media profiles. These interviewees are “central users” in their Instagram clusters and
the platform has become central for their livelihoods, but one that has become a hard
taskmaster, requiring constant updating to maintain the users’ precarious position at
the pinnacle of esteem.
Similarly, in Chapter 4 Fisher-Høyrem and Herbert draw on Elias’ model of
the early modern royal court, analysing how local top users of Instagram in a
Scandinavian town compete for the attention of users of higher status, and how this
quest for affirmation involves mutual (and self-) policing, shaming, and an anxious
interweaving of online and offline lives. Combining computational and qualitative
methods in their investigation of local online “clusters of prestige,” they argue
that what is celebrated in the local social order of the “Bible belt” town – specific
locations, leisure activities, family structures, religious identities – is also celebrated
as prestigious and worthy of esteem across local social media clusters, so that at this
site Instagram tends to reinforce the social norms and hierarchies of the pre-existing
social order.
In Chapter 5 Sagorika Singha also examines the interplay of small-town dynamics
with digital media – in this case the media product being not an Instagram profile
but the memes produced by local online “meme collectives” in the Indian region
of Assam. Memes have revived and fuelled old sentiments, providing a platform
from which users seek to influence regional and national politics through insider
jokes and shaming practices playing on pop-cultural references. Singha explores
the ambivalence of the effects of these meme collectives on the distribution of
6   How Do Social Media Change Social Order?

power in local social and political relations. On the one hand they demonstrate a
decentralisation of “agenda-setting” media power away from educated urban elites
in the major cities, empowering “small town” media users. As Singha comments “if
designed and received in the right way, a meme has immense potentialities to provide
required value to a cause.”
But on the other hand, those so empowered tend to be amongst the more
privileged within local communities. Furthermore, because “memes often appropriate
dominant discourses” their use can (and does, in the examples discussed) reproduce
and more widely disseminate gendered, stereotyping and populist discourses. The
dynamic here seems to be similar to that observed by Rajagopal (2001) of the national
televising religious epics on Indian politics two decades before: new publics are
created and new participants become politically engaged, but at the cost of increased
“confusion” of public discourse and polarisation of political life (ibid., p. 279; see also
Herbert, 2003, pp. 112–3). Social media thus reconfigures the social order in ways that
allow for the emergence of new political actors, but which tends to reinforce existing
social hierarchies, prejudices and divisions.
In Chapter 6 Liat Berdugo also investigates the interaction between networked
digital media and contested local spaces, in this case between Israeli security
services and Palestinian and Israeli activists in contested territories on the West
Bank, examining the liminal space that emerges between physical and mediatised
conflict. Specifically, she investigates what happens when camera recordings of civic
injustices in Palestine are met with camera recordings of the resistance – a “struggle
for spectral power,” and the implicit recognition from all involved parties of the force
carried by the online spectacle, as activists’ videos are posted on their website for a
potentially global audience.
Berdugo’s analysis highlights gendered aspects of the conflict, especially between
the “vision of and visual documentation produced by Palestinian women” and that
produced by “a special unit of exclusively female soldiers called Tatzpitaniot (‘The
Watchers’),” whose “sole job (is) to watch live video streams of the IDF’s network
of 1,700 security cameras mounted along key sites in the West Bank and Gaza.”
Berdugo argues that the framing of the activities of the Tatzpitaniot in the Israeli
Defence Forces’ promotional material as defenders of Israel’s borders draws on an
essentialised construction of Israeli women as defenders of “the land,” against which
Palestinian counter-surveillance is positioned as a threat. In response, Berdugo
invites readers to view the conflict through and “an ecofeminist lens, which demands
a consideration of how the land and women – as feminized witnesses – have both
been historically subjugated by a shared history of oppression” and for “a sightline
that celebrates disobedient, insurgent ways of looking: ways that visibilise the very
frame of an image as a means towards new kinds of resistance in conflict.” Here, the
use of networked digital technologies crystallizes around and, in some ways, amplifies
existing divisions, with the IDF mobilising tropes of the female guardians of the land
reaching back to pioneering days, and activists invoking the potential presence of
 How Do Social Media Change Social Order?   7

a global audience for their videos in an attempt to redress the power balance. Yet
Berdugo also points to the possibility of the invocation of a shared narrative and way
of viewing which moves beyond binary constructs of “us” and “them.”
Berdugo’s analysis of the gender dimensions of the “competitive videography”
may also be used to suggest another perspective on Amsterdam’s Instagram
influencers (Boy & Uitermark, Chapter 3). Both their leading interviewees are women,
reflecting a tendency for women in their 20s and 30s to predominate among the most
followed accounts on Instagram in Amsterdam (Boy & Uitermark, 2017, p. 617). It may
be that the Instagram platform, with its emphasis on the curation and projection
of stylish and glamorous self-images, is one that skilled female users are amongst
those most adept at exploiting to attract followers. However, as Boy and Uitermark’s
analysis clearly brings out, this attention comes at the price of constant effort to
maintain the image, articulating the precarity of a profile based on gendered criteria
of glamour and attractiveness, and in a context in which the women’s working lives
are precarious, dependent on their capacity to keep drawing “the right crowd” to the
venues they promote.
A different downside of gendered public attention to women on social media
is exposed by Soberaj and Merchant’s study of Twitter mentions of US legislators
(Chapter 7), and their analysis takes on an intersectional dimension as it focuses
particularly on the abuse directed at female legislators of colour in the US. Their
analysis reveals that different users inhabit different digital worlds, in that online
shaming and harassment affects female legislators and legislators of colour far more
than their white (and/or) male colleagues. In a world where social media are crucial to
the outcome of democratic elections, politicians are required to display themselves on
several platforms, yet exposure can have huge personal costs for female candidates,
especially women of colour. Here social media serves to amplify prejudices and power
imbalances within the wider social order.
Our second American case study is provided by Wanless and Berk (Chapter 8),
who show how social media users are “drawn into and participating in the creation
and spread of persuasive messaging,” something they call an “enhanced form of
propaganda” that is increasingly invasive in nature. Using data from the 2016 US
presidential campaign, they examine the “organised deployment” of techniques of
“participatory propaganda” to greatly amplify the impact of political messaging by
harnessing the trust people place in social networks, including giving credibility to
messages of questionable provenance and veracity – and indeed whose provenance
has been deliberately obscured. From the propogandists’ viewpoint the method
is particularly efficient, as rather than requiring the constant funding of political
advertisements via mass media, “participatory propaganda campaigns run as long
as the cause driving it matters to its members – or rather, those administrating such
groups are able to produce content that engages and provokes followers.” Social
media here present a threat to social order rooted in democratic debate, because the
social basis of trust in networks is used by participatory propagandists to mask the
8   How Do Social Media Change Social Order?

false basis of claims, resulting in systematically distorted public communication.

How then to resist self-fuelling participatory propaganda? Wanless and Berk argue
that “finding ways to identify and measure engagement within these networks to
understand the driving rationale, as oppose to blocking them, should be a priority for
those studying liberal democracies.”
The overall construction of the collection thus follows an arc from outlining the
general properties of a datafied social order through a series of actor-focused
perspectives which examine how roles structured by social media are performed
at various sites located in European cities, entangled in contested Middle Eastern
borders, and embedded in provincial Indian small-town networks, then back to
an increasing focus on the general properties of social media networks revealed
through our American cases, while not forgetting the human costs for the recipients
of abuse (legislators of colour) or the political costs of participatory propaganda for a
deliberative understanding of democracy.
Our accounts will emphasise how the principle of differential treatment
embedded in a datafied social order is becoming increasingly widespread across
social fields (Chapter 2), and examine a series of cases in which social media is clearly
implicated in the reshaping social order in ways which align with the principle:
where social media creates new precarious hierarchies of esteem maintained at high
cost by those at their pinnacle (Chapter 3), reinforces existing hierarchies (Chapter
4), includes a broader range of participants in political discourse but at the expense
of reinforcing local hierarchies and dominant discourses (Chapter 5), reinforces
gendered constructions of national identity (Chapter 6), amplifies the abuse received
by women and people of colour in leadership positions (Chapter 7) and enmeshes
users in the circulation of propaganda which resonates with their preconceptions,
deepening societal polarization (Chapter 8).
This arc then, as Couldry writes, will alert readers “to what is under way,” but
what of the potential for resistance by social actors, to help readers “imagine what
resistance might feel like”? Writing this introduction in late 2020, it is hard to miss
the powerful global examples of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter as cases of digitally
networked global movements which have been able to provide sustained foci of
resistance to abuses of power, particularly to the gendered and racialised forms of
abuse identified by Soberaj and Merchant (Chapter 7). The volume lacks case studies
on this scale, but rather identifies scattered sites from which such resistance could be
mounted, in the spirit of Zygmunt Bauman’s contention that the purpose of sociology
is to imagine alternative futures (Bordoni, 2016, p. 283).
These “fractured spaces” range from the personal awareness shown by the
key witnesses in Boy and Uitermark’s account of Amsterdam Instagrammers, to
Berdugo’s eco-feminist standpoint and Wanless and Berk’s appeal for more research
to understand the “driving rationale” for engagement with participatory propaganda
networks. The first group articulate a discontent with their lifestyle and a desire
to move to more secure employment, suggesting that even those most personally
References   9

invested in the platform maintain a critical and external perspective which allows
them to imagine how things might be otherwise. The second constructs a vantage
point from which deeply divided Israeli and Palestinian women can be seen to share
a common history of oppression, while the third articulates the desire to understand
in order to empower people to choose to change; a good vantage point from which to
launch into the collection.

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Bordoni, C. (2016). Introduction to Zygmunt Bauman. Revue internationale de philosophie, 277(3),
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Boy, J. D. & Uitermark, J. (2017). Reassembling the city through Instagram. Transactions – Institute of
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Monitoring, and the Genesis of New Sensibilities. SocArXiv. July 11. doi:10.31235/osf.io/phm5x.
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Society, 1(2), 1–7.
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Trans. Revised ed). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
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2 The Social Construction of Reality – Really!

Nick Couldry

Today, in countless diverse places, a new project is under way: the project of
transforming the social fabric so it becomes amenable to a new kind of rule at a
distance, rule through data. A new vision of social governance is emerging in many
varied forms but based around a convergent principle; that the stuff of social life, its
every element, will, indeed must, be reconfigured in ways that enable the extraction
of data and so new regimes of governance and value extraction. Under these
circumstances, we cannot think about media’s role in society (let alone social media’s
role) without drawing on social theory. But which social theory exactly?
The societies we inhabit today are not societies in the same way as the societies
of fifteen, perhaps even ten, years ago. They are different types of configuration that
operate on different scales and through different flows from the societies of earlier
eras. Indeed, because every point in space and time now, in principle, embeds a
two-way computer connection (for influence and surveillance), the non-linear patterns
of social relations operate in many more dimensions than our old models of social
interaction can account for. The result is new forms of technological, institutional and
social power that we have barely begun to characterise, although we already know
one thing for sure: that they will depend on the continuous multi-scalar tracking of
human life by technologies. We can also predict with confidence that those forms,
taken together, will make possible a new type of social order, massively more aligned
to corporate goals and economic ends than previous social forms.
We need to understand this emerging social order; indeed, it makes no sense to
analyse social media without theorising the underlying “social order” of which their
“socialness” is part. This affects the theorists we choose as allies.
The book that follows contains many finely detailed analyses of the uneven and
often strange surfaces and conflicts that characterise this new social order: conflicts
over identity and status, battles for political capital, personal attacks and strategies
of self-defence, the shifting patterns of contention and self-advancement in urban
space. They give the reader a vivid sense of the unsettling uncertainty of the datafied
social world in locations as varied as Assam and Israel, Holland and the US.
In this opening essay, I want to strike a bass note that, I hope, will resonate
through what follows. I would like to capture a few more general features of the type
of social order that is emerging through “datafication” (Van Dijck, 2014), when every
aspect of life is under pressure to reconfigure itself in ways that allow the extraction
of data. It goes without saying that this is the core rationale behind the emergence
of social media platforms, even if this is never their stated mission. But – and this
is important to note – datafication as a process goes much wider than social media
platforms. It is transforming other areas of business such as logistics, education and
 The Question of Social Order: Returning to Elias   11

health, and it is changing business models of all sorts. That said, social media is a
good place to focus analysis.
I will stop short of offering a specific theory of the new social order. There are,
to be sure, rival theorisations here, and I have a stake in that debate (see Couldry &
Mejías, 2019; Srnicek, 2017; Zuboff, 2019). But, whatever specific theory one prefers,
what matters more here is to get a broader sense of key lines of change; lines that will
help, I hope, bring into focus the details of the following chapters as you read them.

2.1 The Question of Social Order: Returning to Elias

The concept of “social order” has gone out of fashion. The last major book on the
topic was written a quarter of a century ago and it is now out of print (Wrong, 1994):
even that book complained of the topic’s neglect. Meanwhile, and less directly, much
has been said about technology’s role in engineering the social world, in the wake
particularly of Actor Network Theory. Indeed, a whole way of thinking about the
social order through technology has developed that involves, in a sense, not thinking
about it (Latour, 2005), and rejecting the whole tradition from Durkheim onwards of
analysing the emergence of social facts from human beings’ efforts to construct social
reality.
There are, for sure, serious problems with versions of “social construction”
that paid little attention to media technologies (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). But, as
I have argued elsewhere (Couldry & Hepp, 2016), these can be addressed without
abandoning entirely the question of what social world emerges from processes
of social construction. Indeed, at a time when, through datafication, it appears
corporations and governments are intent on reconstructing social reality in ways that
align with their interests, it becomes vital to pay close attention to processes of social
construction. What if those processes are not metaphorical – as the term “social
construction” often seems to be – but literal: actual processes of building a different
material basis on which humans’ lives together can be configured?
Some remarkable intuitions of the future expansion of corporate power and
rule emerged three decades ago in the wake of Foucault’s extraordinary insights
into neoliberalism. I am thinking of Deleuze’s short essay on “the control society”
(Deleuze, 1997), on which much has been written. That essay, however, remains
vague about how its predictions will be actualized, and it cannot possibly have been
based on a prediction of social media platforms, which were not predicted even by
the engineers closest to the developments from which the internet developed and the
world wide web was invented. So, we must look elsewhere for a theory of how today’s
social world is being transformed.
The place to look is not commentary predicting the emergence of social media
themselves, for the issue is not about technology or software as such, but instead an
earlier tradition of thinking about social order itself that remains extremely insightful
12   The Social Construction of Reality – Really!

to this day. I mean the work from the 1970s and 1980s and even before of the German
sociologist Norbert Elias. Particularly useful is Elias’s idea that complexity in social
life emerges from interconnections between human beings, from the patterns of
interaction that he calls “figurations” (see Couldry & Hepp, 2016).
Figurations for Elias are “processes of social interweaving” that have a “special
kind of order” that “starts … from the connections, the relationships, and works …
out from there to the elements involved in them” (Elias, 1978, p. 116). His most simple
example is a game of cards or football or a dance in which everyone plays their part by
being in relations with each other person playing. As he says, “the behaviour of many
separate people intermeshes to form interwoven structures” (1978, p. 132). In Elias’s
approach to social order, by contrast with Durkheim’s, two things are very important.
First, he grasps the role that material infrastructures play: today, that means
software, computer code, servers for storing data, the cloud. But second, Elias insists
on thinking about the consequences of that material infrastructure, of technology,
from the point of view of the human beings entangled within them and their human
goals. This was a point Elias made eloquently towards the end of his life: “People
often seem deliberately to forget that social developments have to do with changes in
human interdependence […]. If no consideration is given to what happens to people in
the course of social change – changes in figurations composed of people – then any
scientific effort might as well be spared” (Elias, 1978, p. 172, added emphasis).
There are many worries today about the role of social media platforms in politics,
in government, in family life, in the lives of children, concerns that run through this
volume. Those worries are important, but they do not get to the most important issues
that datafication raises for social space and power: the problem of how social order is
being put together. Right now, that debate is emerging in multiple places.
Think of the intense debate today in the US about the consequences of automatic
data collection on the lives of the poor, which in the US disproportionately means the
lives of black people. As the legal theorist Patricia Williams (2019) recently commented,
“many of us imprison ourselves with ... technology by choice – the smart watches
we wear on our wrists, the GPS tracking on our cell phones or car-location apps, the
... reassurances of Siri. They aren’t perceived as disciplinary tools; instead they are
marketed as ways to connect.” Yet that, she suggests, is what they are: disciplinary
tools of social order operating through processes of datafication. The most dramatic
example of this new vision of social order through connection, through datafication,
comes from China. In China there are the most socially integrated digital platforms:
in effect “super-platforms” like Alibaba or Tencent which combine social media
(something like Facebook and Twitter and WhatsApp), with sites for e-commerce
(like Amazon) and with sites for personal finance. Unlike in the West, none of these
platforms are securely encrypted and the government has a close relation with
the owners of those platforms (it helped finance their building). Think of China’s
emerging “social credit system,” whose general framework and key mechanisms were
 Managing Social Order Through Data   13

established by 2020 and which gives a score to every citizen depending on the data
gathered about them online –their score for social responsibility.
In an important policy document outlining this new system, the Chinese
government used an interesting phrase to describe its significance: “a market
improvement of the social and economic order” (China Copyright and Media, 2014).
So, we are brought back here to the question of social order, but this time not as a
theoretical concept, but as vision of government, a practical plan for the management
of society. A vision that, for the US, Patricia Collins (2019) goes so far as to call “the
civic practice of nothing less than totalitarianism.”
What these two rather dramatic perspectives on the forms of social order
emerging in datafied societies – the US and China – bring out is that the concept of
social order is not an academic detail, still less a theoretical extravagance, but rather a
highly practical term for registering how social worlds are, on the largest scale, being
transformed through the interlinking of all we do on social media (Elias’s insight),
and the systems of social governance, explicit and implicit, that are emerging to
manage them.
We cannot, in other words, do without a concept of social order. In the next
section, I want to address the question of what is distinctive about a datafied social
order.

2.2 Managing Social Order Through Data

It might, initially, seem implausible to argue that a new type of social order is being
made through the processing of data. This is, indeed, an extraordinary and epochal
development. In explaining this a little further, let’s remember Elias’s key insight that
new norms and what he called “social pressure” (Elias, 1987, p. 145) emerge without
anyone exactly intending them, as a complex and, if you like, higher-dimensional
side-effect of countless individual, group and institutional actors doing what they
intend to do. The “special kind of order” Elias was interested in emerges through
the continuous interweaving of many interrelationships and connections, their
progressive impact, as social actors try, successfully or otherwise, to live their lives
through the web of interrelations in which they have largely no choice but to be
entangled.
In Elias’s view, there is absolutely no need to imagine a vast corporate conspiracy
to build something like a social order. It would indeed be deeply implausible to claim
that what is emerging today through data processes was all, from the outset, planned
to occur in particular boardrooms (so, for example, Zuboff’s (2019) account of the
emergence of surveillance capitalism allows for plenty of contingency along the way,
as for example when Google discovered its ability to predict human activities in great
detail from crunching the vast datasets about people’s online activities that it had,
indeed, intended to amass to fuel its search algorithm). Acknowledging that, however,
14   The Social Construction of Reality – Really!

is very different from denying that corporate intention becomes a major factor once
the advantages of an emerging datafied social order become clearer to corporations.
We are now more than a decade into the era of social media and taken-for-granted
fast internet connection in many parts of the world, and we are now in a very different
phase in the evolution of datafied social orders.
Why in particular, you might ask, should new ways of collecting data generate a
new type of social order? Data, of course, has always been collected by governments,
though on a massively smaller scale and intensity than today’s everyday forms of
corporate data collection. The link between data and social order derives not so much
from the collection of data as from its use. As Oscar Gandy (1993, p. 15), a pioneer of
research into corporate data collection back in the 1980s, noted, the point of gathering
data is to make discriminations, to treat this entity or person differently from that
entity or person. In the early states of datafication, it was discriminations between
the customers of credit card companies and airline companies, to offer differential
pricing for linked purchases. But now the principle of discrimination-through-data
(that is, automatically harvested data from online activities) has spread right across
the social terrain, including the actions of government.
Also spreading fast is the principle that institutional rationality now depends on
the continuous gathering of data on human subjects so more discriminations can be
made about them. Although this will vary depending on employee status (with higher
status jobs being likely to be exposed less to continuous surveillance), many jobs today
involve not just regular monitoring of key outputs, but continuous tracking of every
dimension of an employment’s activities and the generation from this of data-driven
interventions to modulate and regulate the employee’s behaviour. Similar principles
apply to governments’ regulation of those citizens who are dependent on state
benefits or are in other ways subject to close management (for a useful recent survey,
see Sánchez-Monedero & Dencik, 2019). Once again, the point of data gathering is not
just to gather data, but to continuously manage behaviour through data uses.
While there might seem to be a huge distance between the explicit regulatory intent
of state authorities and the business models of social media platforms that track their
consumers, what is emerging across many different social and economic domains is a
shared rationality of changing behaviour through data, based on continuous tracking
and the constant modulation of signals and incentives.
The language of marketers is an instructive entry-point to this emerging rationale
for the social order of datafied societies. Listen, for example, to Price Waterhouse
Coopers (2014) speculating about a future where consumers will wear embedded
chips that monitor their bodily and psychic mood continuously: “brands could
even tap body cues to tailor messages ... sensor revealing that you’re thirsty? Here’s
a coupon for smart water.” Or listen to AT Kearney (2014), leading consultants in
the insurance industry, commenting on the advantages of the so-called Internet
of Things not for consumers, but for insurers: insurers, they say, could “use IoT-
enriched relationships to connect more holistically to customers and influence their
Conclusion   15

behaviors.” These are not random remarks, but early signs of a shift in business
rationalities summed up recently in a report by Wharton Business school professors
in the authoritative Harvard Business Review, which recommended the adoption of
“four effective connected strategies, each of which moves beyond traditional modes
of customer interaction and represents a fundamentally new business model. We call
them respond to desire, curated offering, coach behavior, and automatic execution”
(Siggelkow & Terwiesch, 2019).
Once again, we are looking less here at a conspiracy to dominate and influence
and more at a rationality for ordering the world. Which leaves a final question: how
do those tracked participate in this order? The short answer is that they are induced
in countless different ways to enter into what Ulises Mejías and I call “data relations,”
relations that configure social life on a basis designed to optimise the generation and
extraction of valuable data (Couldry & Mejías, 2019, Chapter 1). Data relations can be
seen as a leading form of “figuration” in Elias’s term for the era of datafication.
Such data relations can, however, have many different gradations: from the
definitely voluntary choice of someone who wants to track their fitness or health and
so uses a tracking app which sends data to a third party; the less voluntary “choice”
of an employee encouraged by her employer to use a health app as a condition of
obtaining work-related health insurance; the definitely not voluntary decision of
welfare claimants or borrowers whose activities online are comprehensively tracked
by state agencies or finance companies to generate a stream of information on their
reliability and creditworthiness. And then there is the barely voluntary submission
to tracking of users of social media platforms who may calculate that the seeming
necessity of being on the platform such as Facebook – so as to connect with everyone
else who is there for various practical purposes – makes it worth paying the price of
being tracked by the platform. What is much less clear is how platform users calculate
the bargain in relation to all the other uses of data relating to them gathered by and
through Facebook and used by multiple parties unknown to them.
In these various ways, data relations work and the forms of power established
through them come to stick. As we enter into ever more intermeshing data relations,
something like a social order emerges.

2.3 Conclusion

In this short essay, I have only been able to give a bare outline of how a social order is
being built through data processing, an order that is gathering a depth and intensity
unrivalled by previous forms of governance and social power.
It is worth emphasising, however, that this order remains under construction; it
is certainly not complete. Its eventual shape cannot at this stage be fully predicted.
Indeed, to the extent that this order is resisted by social actors, it will not unfold
exactly as I outline here. That is the point of analysing datafied societies from the
16   The Social Construction of Reality – Really!

point of view of social order; to alert readers to what is under way and help them
imagine what resistance might feel like. This demonstrates again that the concept of
social order is not a trivial addition to social theory, but a practical tool for analysing
the world that corporations and governments are building for us.
In this essay, however, I have chosen to focus on general features of the emerging
datafied social order, abstracting from the local complexities and tensions that are
the subject of the essays which follow. A more complete picture can, of course, only
be formed by reading them all together.

References
A.T. Kearney. (2014). The Internet of Things: Opportunity for Insurers. Retrieved from https://www.
atkearney.com/documents/10192/5320720/Internet+of+Things+-+Opportunity+for+Insurers.
pdf/4654e400-958a-40d5-bb65-1cc7ae64bc72
Berger, P. & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
China Copyright and Media (2014). Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System
(2014-2020). As last modified April 25, 2015. https://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.
com/2014/06/14/planning-outline-for-the-construction-of-a-social-credit-system-2014-2020/
Couldry, N. & Hepp, A. (2016). The Mediated Construction of Reality. Cambridge: Polity.
Couldry, N. & Mejías, U. A. (2019). The Costs of Connection. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1997). Postscript on Control Societies. In Negotiations (pp. 177–182). New York:
Columbia University Press.
Elias, N. (1978). What is Sociology? London: Hutchinson.
Elias, N. (1987). The Society of Individuals. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gandy, O. (1993). The Panoptic Sort. Boulder: Westview Press.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Price Waterhouse Coopers (2014). The Wearable Future. Retrieved from https://www.pwc.com/us/
en/industries/technology/library/wearable-technology.html
Sánchez-Monedero, J. & Dencik, L. (2019). The Datafication of the Workplace, working paper, Data
Justice Lab, Cardiff university, 9 May. Retrieved from https://datajusticeproject.net/wp-content/
uploads/sites/30/2019/05/Report-The-datafication-of-the-workplace.pdf
Siggelkow, N. & Terwiesch, C. (2019) The Age of Continuous Connection. Harvard Business Review,
May-June, 2019. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2019/05/the-age-of-continuous-connection
Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity.
Van Dijck, J. (2014). Datafication, Dataism and Dataveillance: Big Data Between Scientific Paradigm
and Ideology. Surveillance & Society, 12(2), 197–208.
Williams, P. (2019). Why Everyone Should Care About Mass E-Carceration. The Nation 29 April.
https://www.thenation.com/article/surveillance-prison-race-technology/
Wrong, D. (1994). The Problem of Social Order. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. London: Profile Books.
3 The Dramaturgy of Social Media: Platform Ecology,
Uneven Networks, and the Myth of the Self

John D. Boy and Justus Uitermark

For good reason, critical observers of the contemporary digital media landscape have
grown tired of Mark Zuckerberg’s contention that there is something inherently good
about “connection.” Even when faced with overwhelming criticism, the Facebook
founder and CEO has stuck to his claim, which seemingly counterbalances all evils
the company might be accused of, that Facebook facilitates building “community.”
This is not surprising, since more connection means more users, means more revenue,
means more profit for the company and its shareholders. But if we take Zuckerberg
at his word, he sees connection as valuable because it shores up social ties, which
have been shown to be beneficial to individuals in many ways; from lowering blood
pressure to making it easier to find a job. In other words, Facebook and other platforms
like it simply add more of a good thing to people’s lives.
One reason this simple formula fails to convince is the growing recognition
that social media are not simply added to what is already there: the institutions,
interactions, and effects of everyday life. They have gradually come to permeate
everyday life, and this interweaving has left the fabric itself changed. In other words,
social media have become ecological (Postman, 1998).
For their part, sociologists have long asked whether online social ties develop at
the expense of offline social ties. When it was found that this wasn’t the case, they
were reassured. Now we view the correlation between online and offline social ties
somewhat differently. We no longer think of them as additive or interchangeable, but
as mutually transformative. This changes the verdict. It means the difference they make
is no longer linear. Instead, they effect a broad qualitative shift that isn’t confined to
any particular area but has reverberations throughout the social environment. This
has consequences for how we study them. Although platforms have specific cultures,
which is the stuff of media studies, there’s also much to be said for understanding
platforms as sites within a larger ecology.
Hoping to develop an understanding of how such ecological processes “scale
down” (Breiger, 2015) to the level of daily life, we turn to the stories of two informants
we met in the course of our research whose social position as “very online” women
means that the platform ecology is particularly relevant to how their daily lives
unfold. Their experiences give us some points of reference to evaluate how well
the tools of the sociology of everyday life, particularly dramaturgical analysis, are
suited to our task. Dramaturgical concepts, which study the self in interaction,
are pervasive in the extant literature on digital media. It almost seems like Erving
Goffman, the founding figure of dramaturgical analysis, has experienced a rebirth
as an analyst of online life. Even so, our assessment of the dramaturgical approach
18   The Dramaturgy of Social Media

is mixed. While on the one hand it helps us bring some of the cross-pressures
that shape experiences within the platform ecology into view, it can also lead to
an overly narrow perspective. That is especially the case when the self is merely
taken as a strategic project subject to deception and manipulation by individuals.
In such cases, the dramaturgical perspective obscures the “colonization of everyday
life” (a term coined by Guy Debord) by platforms circumscribing what constitutes
idiomatic identity displays and establishing a hierarchy among them. Insofar as
dramaturgical perspectives account not just for individual strategies but also for
normative pressures and systematic interdependencies, they provide a useful tool
for making sense of platform ecologies.

3.1 Very Online

Throughout our discussion, we draw on some findings from five years of studying
Instagram in Amsterdam using both computational and qualitative methods. Early
on in our research on social media in urban life, we identified uneven networks as
one of the defining features (Boy & Uitermark, 2017). For an impression, consider
that among the roughly 80,000 Amsterdam Instagram users we included in a
computational analysis, the top 50 users (0.06%) received more likes and comments
between them than the bottom 30,000 (38.4%). The Gini coefficient, commonly used
as a measure of income inequality, when applied to the distribution of attention
comes to a stunning 0.76 – considerably higher than the Gini coefficient for South
Africa’s income distribution, the world’s most unequal. We found this kind of
unequal distribution fractally repeated at every level, from the city as a whole to
individual neighborhoods and subgroups of users. Since we wanted to understand
how personal appeal and self-exposure through platforms are experienced in
everyday life, we figured that the most central users, those getting the most attention,
offered a privileged window onto this world – kind of like how social scientists of
another era studied the experiences of white-collar workers to understand the social
alienation they saw as society’s characteristic mentality. Or, to quote cyberpunk
legend William Gibson, “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed”
(quoted in Ratcliffe, 2016b).
Using a network metric, PageRank, that initially developed rank search results
for the Google search engine, we could identify the hubs of the Instagram network.
Not surprisingly given what we know about the “very online,” a high number of these
individuals were young women in their twenties and thirties. Many of them work
in fashion, marketing, or entertainment – professions that give them facility in the
visual idioms of micro-celebrity. The experiences of two women in particular shaped
our thinking about the presence of Instagram in the practice of everyday life: Yvette
 Very Online   19

and Sammy.1 We briefly introduce them here before returning to their experiences
below in our discussion of dramaturgical perspectives on social media.

3.1.1 The Insider: Yvette

During the day, Loggerhead’s is the kind of hamburger joint where you can get a burger
with a truffle-glazed patty, but even the basic burger – Angus beef, lettuce, tomato,
onions, slice of pickle – costs over ten euros. The restaurant, located on a busy market
street, is small and unassuming and features the same unfinished wood paneling
found in bars in gentrified neighborhoods the world over. At night, the back of the
establishment is rumored to transform into a nightclub serving exquisite cocktails
where you can dance till the early hours of the morning. Rumor also has it that access
to the secret back room is only granted to those who know the password. Standing at
the passageway between the burger joint and the extravagant speakeasy-style club
is a door hostess. She’s who you have to convince if you want to be part of what is
happening in the back room. “Most people coming are wasted, that’s why I call myself
a ‘door bitch.’ I try to be polite,” Yvette Legrand tells us, laughing.
In her early thirties, tall, with long blonde hair and wearing an elegant outfit,
sometimes with a hint of butch, she cuts an imposing figure in the role of gatekeeper.
But that’s not her only role –not by far. On her Instagram profile, she calls herself
an “Amsterdam insider,” and her insider status derives not only from being able to
decide who’s in and who’s out in the backroom at Loggerhead’s. Yvette became an
insider by entering the city’s party scene and getting to know a lot of people not long
after her thirtieth birthday. In a matter of just two years, she became highly connected
among the movers and shakers of the city’s nightlife. In her various other roles – as
party organizer, event producer, and photographer – she has put them on a guest list,
partied with them, and, of course, taken their picture. There’s no question that she
belongs.
What ties together these various activities in Yvette’s life is the crowd of people in
which she moves. In her understanding, this crowd, or “scene,” is defined by a shared
style above all else. “My photography is a bit more fabulous,” she explains. “Either
you like it or you don’t.” Those who like her photography are those she encounters
in other parts of her life as well. Because she lives in De Pijp, walking distance from
Loggerhead’s and most other central venues where the city’s party scene congregates,
she moves in a relatively small radius and mostly interacts with likeminded people. “I
have a certain kind of people that I see in my life wherever I go. They’re all in the same
crowd. So it’s pretty easy for me, because I know a lot of them. When I go somewhere
with a camera, they jump in front of my camera. I don’t have to ask them, ‘Can you

1  We use pseudonyms for both people and places to hide our research participants’ identities.
20   The Dramaturgy of Social Media

please…?’” Similarly, when she’s the one hosting a party, she doesn’t have to work
particularly hard to get people to turn out. They come, because Yvette’s involvement
all but guarantees the party will have the right vibe. Yvette is connected, and she is
also recognized as somebody who knows the right kind of people. Her recognition in
the scene revolves around her persona – Yvette Legrand is her nom de guerre, and she
projects a seductive and glamorous image through her appearances in the city’s party
venues and online, chiefly Instagram.
Other events she participates in, such as art openings, are a way for her to extend
her social circles and to investigate what appeals to people in other scenes. Rather
than just draw in the people she already knows, she tries to mix up the composition
of her crowd by assembling members of different groups. “That’s the most important
thing to keep on going,” she explains. “To be interesting in the scene, it has to be
surprising.” Filling a venue is no challenge when you’re as connected as Yvette is; the
challenge is to put the right people together. If four out of five attendants are gay men,
the women and straight men will be alienated and won’t want to come back. Instead,
you have to engage in an activity that Yvette likens to scouting: searching for the right
kind of people that will fit in. Another smaller event with an attendance of 80 to 100
that Yvette started serves as her scouting grounds. Each person she personally invites
is able to bring two to three other people. “It’s the best cocktail you could imagine,”
she says enthusiastically. The event brings together gay men, well-dressed women,
and straight men who say to themselves, “It’s a bit gay, but I actually like this!” Mixing
this cocktail is a matter of mobilizing the right social connections, but also of having
the right communications strategy.

3.1.2 The Workaholic: Sammy

In the course of our research we also spoke to Sammy, another young woman thriving
on social media. Sammy has a lot going on in her life. She runs a program to match
brands and social media influencers, organizes talent scouts, is responsible for the
creative management for several well-known artists, designs marketing campaigns
for various big brands, hosts evenings at one of Amsterdam’s best-known clubs,
and manages a co-working space for creative entrepreneurs. She’s a self-diagnosed
workaholic: “I never stop. I work 24/7. Go! Go! Go! There is no such thing as a holiday,
and we don’t do breaks.”
Not that she minds. She knows no greater pleasure than creating content
for marketing campaigns. She loves working with her best friend and long-time
collaborator, Cori. Unlike Sammy, who is more into marketing, Cori is a “real fashion
girl.” She is also wilder, younger, and taller, so she appeals to a different subset of
people in the scene. When they’re at events, the two of them stand out. With her height
and looks, Cori is naturally the center of attention. Sammy all too modestly states that
she can also attract looks if she dresses up. As a self-professed workaholic, Sammy
 Dramaturgy: The Self in Interaction   21

abhors the distraction of exhibitions or social events, but she found out that she and
Cori are at their best when they’re going out. She checks out how other entrepreneurs
organize events or promote brands (and invariably comes to the conclusion that
they can do better) and gets into contact with business partners or recruits for her
influencers program. As long as she attracts attention, she knows opportunities, and
new people, will present themselves.
Take her recent foray into deejaying. She had been messing around with a turntable
for a couple of weeks when she got her first booking. At the time of the interview,
her deejay career was accelerating. That was before she had actually purchased any
deejay equipment. When she explains why she is so successful, she mentions looks
and connections. Social media are important for both. Sammy consciously crafts a
stream of images to maintain visibility, so she’s on people’s minds, allowing her to
outcompete aspiring deejays who have spent years honing their skills. Having an
Instagram profile helps her maintain connections and make new ones.

3.2 Dramaturgy: The Self in Interaction

The Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman famously conceived of social life

as a kind of theater that binds people together as spectators and performers. Starting
from face-to-face interactions between two people, he analyzed social interaction
through the lens of dramaturgy –the performances and displays we put on in our
daily lives. His best known statement of this perspective, The Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life (1959), proposes to think of people in social situations as forming a team
engaged in a performance together as performers and audience, the aim of which is to
put on a show that accords with prevailing norms concerning conduct and decorum.
Branaman (1997) points out that, over the course of his career, Goffman used
different metaphors to develop his dramaturgical perspective. Aside from drama, he
frequently spoke both in terms of games and in terms of rituals. In general, the game
metaphor directs our attention to the individual as a strategic actor, while the ritual
metaphor directs our attention to the social order and actors’ displays of fealty to it.
Drama encompasses aspects of both games and rituals. This can be seen in his concept
of “face”: we have no choice but to preserve our “face” through ritual practices, but
it also is subject to strategic manipulation, giving face-work a game-like character.
Goffman didn’t mean for any of these metaphors to be hypostatized. Instead, he
regarded them as “scaffolding” to aid understanding through defamiliarization. All
concepts in Goffman are thus provisional. They are not intended to reinscribe the
definition of the situation, but to allow interpreters of social life to get a conceptual
grip. Goffman never hesitated to tear down his scaffolding to construct a new
framework, and neither should we today.
In this section, we review some of the applications of Goffmanian dramaturgy in
the extant literature on social media. References to Goffman in the literature on social
22   The Dramaturgy of Social Media

media are common. Since the 1990s, social psychologists, communications scholars,
and scholars of human-computer interaction (HCI) have adopted his work to analyze
what people do online, and publications discussing social media citing Goffman and
using his central concepts now number in the hundreds. While these appropriations
of Goffman indicate some of the ways in which dramaturgy helps us understand the
social media–social order nexus, they are not in themselves without shortcomings.
Our review seeks to assess the existing literature and clarify how the perspective we
develop here relates to existing perspectives.

3.2.1 Self

Posts and profiles on social media are meaningful because they are the expressive
products of users who put their selves on display. This was already true of personal
websites, blogs and other pre-Web 2.0 formats, but social media heightened the
emphasis on the self as the locus of significance because of the insistence, in the
words of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, that “[y]ou have one identity … Having
two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” (quoted in Ratcliffe,
2016a). Foremost among the Goffmanian concepts to enter the literature is, therefore,
the “self”: its production, presentation, and evaluation.
The literature on social media using dramaturgical frameworks has two main
emphases in its discussion of the self: the self as strategic project, and the self as
myth.2

2  There is also a third emphasis in research by behavioralist scholars, particularly (cyber-)

psychologists, who frequently emphasize obsessive or pathological preoccupations with the self.
Self-presentation on social media is of interest to these scholars to the extent that it appears to be
associated with the so-called Dark Triad of personality traits: machiavellism, narcissism, and
psychopathy. Other psychological phenomena connected to social media self-presentation include
perfectionism, social comparison, self-esteem and social anxiety. In this literature, Goffman is
selectively appropriated for emphasizing the presentation of self qua impression management, but
this appropriation is suspect for a least two reasons. First, while Goffman himself took an interest in
questions of mental health, he famously spoke out against pathologizing behaviors (Goffman, 1961a).
What psychiatry classified as symptomatic behavior, he labeled “situational improprieties.” Second,
though it is easy to take Goffman’s description of social actors continually occupied with the work of
managing impressions and saving face to be an indictment of the superficiality and alienation bred
in capitalist societies (see Gouldner, 1971 for a famous example), Goffman’s dramaturgy does not, in
fact, describe a character type. To reduce self-presentation to a form of obsessive or neurotic conduct
is to misrecognize Goffman’s entire intellectual project. Thus, while there are superficial similarities
between this literature and other scholarship on the social life of social media, it is worth bearing in
mind that this strand of work asks fundamentally different kinds of questions. As we argue elsewhere
(Boy & Uitermark, 2019), narcissism and related labels seem ill-suited to making sense of the draws of
self-display. We are better suited following Goffman’s (Goffman, 1959) lead. As he said, we should not
take the whole world to be a stage, but we shouldn’t assume where the line can be drawn either. We
 Dramaturgy: The Self in Interaction   23

3.2.1.1 Self as Strategic Project

A significant strand of literature is concerned with the “balancing act” or “double
bind” of projecting an ideal self-image in online spaces while remaining authentic
(Davis, 2014). The “ideal” or “edited” self that is put on display has to strike the
right balance between aspirational and acceptable (Ellison, Heino, & Gibbs 2006;
Marwick, 2014). Overreach, and you get shot down; don’t reach high enough, and
you settle in place. Such balancing acts become especially acute in cases where
self-presentation becomes bound up with self-branding and the incessant economic
demand to enhance one’s human capital (Hearn, 2008; Duffy, 2017). Livelihoods
depend on successful self-presentation. Scholarship has especially focused on how
cultural producers such as fashion bloggers, models and live-streamers are drawn
into this balancing act.
A related recurring theme is the difficulty of distinguishing between frontstage and
backstage regions in mediated communication. Social contexts are easily blurred and
frequently collapse (Marwick & boyd, 2010; boyd, 2014). This happens, for instance,
when parents friend their children on Facebook, only to discover a whole side of
them that wasn’t meant for them to see. Writing about Instagram influencers, Leaver,
Highfield, and Abidin (2020) note that performers purposefully play with audience
expectations of greater authenticity in backstage areas. Another example is when
patrons supporting cultural producers financially through Patreon3 are promised
access to unedited footage as a reward for their sponsorship. Users of social media
are driven to be extra vigilant and strategic in crafting self-images in accordance with
various imagined audiences (Dijck, 2013). This intensifies the game-like character of
the online social drama.
These appropriations of Goffman are in line with his reliance on the game
metaphor. Goffman had a lot to say about what he called “expression games” – social
gambles to enhance one’s status. Examples of these kind of strategic interaction
abound in his work, though some of the most memorable ones deal with espionage
and political intrigue (Goffman, 1969). Spies have to play an extreme version of the
expression game as they strategically craft an identity allowing them to carry out
their intelligence-gathering work. This requires them to practice a great amount of
restraint, such as concealing or controlling emotions, even as they engage in fateful
action.4 Overwhelmingly, dramaturgical perspectives on social media emphasize

especially should not assume it can be drawn around inherently pathological behaviors or traits (see
also Warfield, Cambre, & Abidin, 2016).
3  Patreon is a digital platform through which subscribers can access content produced by artists and
performers.
4  In Goffman’s work, “fatefulness” implies that something may “spill over into the rest of life”
(Goffman, 1967, p. 162). A gambler wants the situation at the gambling table to transform their life
into one of affluence. Similarly, aspirational social media users may want their online personae to be
a pathway to a better livelihood. An excellent literary depiction of such a fateful transformation can
24   The Dramaturgy of Social Media

the game-like, strategic nature of online sociability. Having and building an online
presence is a gamble taken in hope of sprucing up one’s social status.
The game-like cast of online interaction is a reflection of the competitive
environment bred by social media which brings strategic considerations to the fore.
Social media feature publicly visible personae, tools for reward and appraisal, and
multiple clear indicators to gauge the impression made on others. Combined, these
features amount to a perfect storm. They conspire to make impression management
and self-presentation salient and ongoing concerns for those who maintain a public
presence on social media.
Metrics can be an immaterial mark of distinction, and they can also translate
into economic opportunities. But in absence of metrics, there are other ways of
waging competition on social media. On Instagram (which has stopped displaying
the number of likes on posts), appearing alongside celebrity users and being tagged
by them is a coveted trophy (Abidin, 2018). On Twitter, the practice of “one-upping”
or “dunking on” other users, of concocting “owns” and “burns” in response to
others’ status updates, is an almost unescapable part of the experience. All of this
competitiveness is no doubt intensified by the reigning neoliberal meritocracy which
“places a strong need to strive, perform, and achieve at the center of modern life”
(quoted in Day, 2018).
Yvette and Sammy’s experiences both speak to the importance of expression
games. Looking through their carefully curated feeds, it was undeniable that they
gave a lot of strategic thought to their appearance. Yvette likened this to being an
artist on a stage, and she insisted that aside from that, she is a “normal person” who
attends small-town family gatherings as well. She finds it important to not come over
as too icy and unapproachable, so she tries to smile and not take herself too seriously.
In discussing this with us, Yvette revealed that she was aware of a tension between
her desire, on the one hand, not to get too sucked into the frequently competitive
game of self-presentation on social media and, on the other hand, managing the
impression others have of her. Resolving this tension is a matter of careful reflection,
which means her social media presence becomes a larger preoccupation than she’d
like it to be. The game never ends.
Sammy saw this, too, and in fact she thrived on the excitement of always being on
and always having to remain vigilant. Moving through different scenes at a dizzying
pace, Sammy emphasizes she has to act fast, very fast, to keep up with developments
and seize new opportunities. But you couldn’t tell just from looking at her posts.
There she seems to be kicking it. She is having a drink, doing a dance. She’s acutely
aware that the images are contrived. “Everything I put up there is tongue in cheek.

be found in Stagg (2016). Almost overnight, the protagonist Colleen rises to influencer status, and the
resulting transformation of her life is whiplash-inducing.
 Dramaturgy: The Self in Interaction   25

You know exactly how you present yourself. You’re constantly feeding. There’s a sort
of marketing narrative. It’s ridiculous, but it’s there.”

3.2.1.2 Self as Myth

Strategic considerations are a big theme both in Goffman’s oeuvre and the lives of
the “very online,” but they are not the end of the story. For his part, Goffman sharply
rejected Georg Simmel’s “embarrassing effort to treat sociability as a type of ‘mere’
play, sharply cut off from the entanglements of serious life” (Goffman, 1961b, p. 21).
Understanding social life requires more than a study of individual, strategic action.
It calls for understanding something that Goffman elsewhere called “interpersonal
ritual” that revolves around the self as the last remaining sacred myth.
Scholars interested in gender display and other parts of Goffman’s oeuvre
concerned with the ritual dimension of social life understand that strategic action
isn’t everything. Baker and Walsh (2018) are recent examples, drawing on Goffman’s
Gender Advertisements (1979) to unpack the “ritual idiom” that underlies gender
expression in “clean eating” (a sort of minimalist, healthy cuisine) posts on Instagram.
They note that proper adherence to the ritual idiom requires observance of a gendered
social hierarchy. In his study of advertising, Goffman observed that, almost without
fail, women appear physically smaller in visual displays, and their lower positions
accentuate the subordinate roles they play. Posed pictures are thus an indicator of
the ritual idiom within a society. In their case study of “clean eating” posts, Baker
and Walsh (2018) find that it is the idiom of hegemonic masculinity rather than
“emphasized femininity” that structures the top displays. Muscle presentation and
other displays of virility and strength serve to affirm membership in a community of
lifestyle icons. Displays that fall back on a ritual idiom merely draw from a stock of
existing display conventions. They are rituals that seek to make behavior legible as
ritual; they are hyper-ritualized (see also Hancock & Garner, 2014).
This aspect of Goffman’s work highlights that self-presentation is not merely
strategic, but also a vehicle for establishing social bonds. These bonds revolve
around “sacred” objects, namely selves, which participants in the interaction have no
choice but to perform. As sacred objects, our selves are the myth we are collectively
invested in, turning images of “epidermally bounded containers” (Goffman quoted in
Wissinger, 2015) into meaningful social encounters. To the extent that social media are
a vehicle of social integration (see Boy & Uitermark, 2020), the integration depends
on the myth of the self.
To Goffman, the self is not a utility function, but a sacred object. The reasons we
show it consideration are not simply “strategic” in the narrow sense of manipulative.
Through our performances, we express deference to the social order through
demeanor, propriety, and the display of our connections.” Through these expressions,
we accord proper levels of veneration to selves – our own and others’ – with regard to
their position in hierarchies of status. Importantly, showing proper veneration often
26   The Dramaturgy of Social Media

means avoiding expression rather than engaging in strategic expression games. It’s
about what we hold back, not just what we put out there.
Despite the evident joy both derive from expression games, the strains of paying
homage to the myth of the self are apparent in Yvette and Sammy’s experiences. When
we met Yvette, she was dressed down in yoga pants and looking forward to getting a
good night’s rest. For the next four days, she was booked, either as the “door bitch” at
Loggerhead’s, or photographing events. This meant multiple late nights coming up,
and yoga and resting were Yvette’s way of anticipating this exhausting stretch and
maintaining a degree of balance in her life. Yvette expressed ambivalence about her
ability to maintain balance. “I can do a lot,” she told us. “But when it’s my own party
and I need to be there till five o’clock in the morning, sometimes I really don’t feel like
it.” She has to be the last one standing, not just because she bears responsibility as
the organizer, but also because she has to keep everyone’s spirits up till the end.
Yvette is feeling the strains of playing her role. “I’m always watching and they’re
always watching me. … You can see me in social media, being in front of everything.
I want to be more in the background. It’s pretty exhausting.” Her way out is not an
exit, but a pivot. She aspires to become an entrepreneur whose involvement in urban
scenes is not in the foreground, as an artist, but more behind the scenes. She hopes to
achieve this by building a web-based guide to gay Amsterdam, advertising events and
locations and providing booking and ticketing services, all from her unique insider
perspective. She’s built a prototype, but it hasn’t really gotten beyond the stage of a
passion project. Even so, Yvette hopes this venture will become a “second step” in her
career as an insider, allowing her to capitalize on her connections and her persona
without having to perform all the frontstage work the scene currently demands of her.
Her planned pivot holds the promise of an eventual reprieve from all this
exhaustion. She thinks perhaps she’ll even be able to hire somebody to share the load
with her. Meanwhile, she has to achieve her hoped-for balance in other ways. Reading
about spirituality and practicing yoga are part of her practice of self-care and have
been since before she became a scenester. “I’m really into growth. Once in a while I
really need to go inside myself for real, like working, healing,” she explains when we
ask about her interest in spirituality. “That’s something I missed in the last two years,
when I got really into this world, which is a lot of, of course, like, fake and tough and
competition and whatever.”
The sense that her world is permeated by fakeness and competition is another
source of exhaustion, if not anxiety. Yvette feels a desire to steer against it, to be a
beacon of authenticity in the fake world in which she moves. That’s the reason she
doesn’t really like social media, and why she tries to restrict her use of it to building a
portfolio of her various activities. Aside from Instagram, where she feels the need to
be active, she also maintains a site on Tumblr, a Vimeo profile, and a Facebook Page
promoting her work as a photographer. At the same time, because she is aware that
everything on social media tends to “look so much more beautiful than it really is” –
in fact, that’s the whole point of social media as she understands it – she also wants
 Dramaturgy: The Self in Interaction   27

to show another side of herself. She mentioned making an effort to share things from
other parts of her life, such as taking an elderly acquaintance out for a walk or visiting
her family in a small town in the south of the Netherlands.
Sammy also told us that she’d recently been looking to make a change. She was
hunting for a job. “Not a nine-to-five job,” she emphasized, but still something more
“corporate.” Her attempts so far had been unsuccessful. For one position, she spent
an inordinate amount of time on the application. She put together a video clip with
help from some friends. She took four days to write an application letter to get it
absolutely right. And still, in the end, she didn’t get the job. It’s not that she can’t
do the work, because she’s already doing it, and at a high level. It’s just that, in
this industry, short-term or one-time contracts are the norm. While it is exceedingly
difficult to get a steady job, it is – at least for Sammy –  remarkably easy to move
from one gig to the next. Under these structural conditions of intense competition and
short-term engagements, people like Sammy are successful as long as they maintain
their reputations and keep up with their excruciating work schedules.
Sammy’s carefully curated Instagram profile only captures the glamorous aspects
of her brutal life-work regime. “I was working five days full-time on a day job. But you
can’t tell someone what they need to do and then not show up at night to see how
they do it. It’s not officially part of your job but you have to do it.” At 32, she feels
she’s getting old. She works out in the gym and has a policy of not drinking alcohol
or using drugs. “I look to London and New York for examples. Those people get up
at six in the morning and get home around one. Sure, they’re paid different kinds of
amounts, but you have to persist if you want to get somewhere.” Working from a canal
house in Amsterdam’s historic central district and shaping the image of big clubs and
large corporations, she has achieved much more than most people in her industry can
hope for, but she remains in a precarious position. Her devotion to her career is taking
a toll. She suffers from spells of exhaustion. She shares much of the glamour and the
suffering with her friends but she can’t really relate to her family anymore. When we
asked her whether it was difficult to explain what she’s doing, she replied that they
have stopped asking. In turn, she stopped going to family celebrations.
Bound up as it is with myriad strains and anxieties, self-presentation is not
merely strategic, but also ritualized. That means that, while they can tailor their
performances to different audiences and use all manner of strategies to improve their
status, neither Yvette nor Sammy can avoid self-presentation or turn it off when the
costs outrun the payoff.

3.2.2 Interaction

Dramaturgy is an interactionist theory. Following his Chicago School forebears

in the symbolic-interactionist tradition, Goffman (1959) states that performances
create a shared “definition of the situation” between performers and audiences. In
28   The Dramaturgy of Social Media

other words, we inhabit a shared social world in which our roles and behaviors are
meaningful to each other because of the displays we put on for one another. Every
moment of our social existence is an accomplishment rather than a natural outgrowth
of our human nature or the functional product of the social order. Both performers
and audiences constantly have to affirm, confirm, or correct the impressions fostered
in their shared drama. Understanding social life requires close attention to these
ceaseless maneuvers. As a “sociology of occasions” (Goffman, 1967, p. 2), Goffman’s
dramaturgical approach is interested in the syntax of momentary relations rather
than their specific content or longer-term structures. It’s all about process.
Goffman thought that face-to-face interaction was the site par excellence to study
this process. This wasn’t because he deemed other interactions less meaningful; he
mainly wanted to redeem the most basic forms of interaction from the condescension
of mainstream social scientists dismissing them as trivial. Given this emphasis, it is
no surprise that the literature takes differences between face-to-face and mediated
interaction as occasion to go beyond Goffman (Cetina, 2009). The context of
interaction becomes more complicated. “The presentation of self in everyday internet
still corresponds to Goffman’s playacting metaphor,” writes Jia Tolentino (2019,
p.14). “But the internet adds a host of other, nightmarish metaphorical structures:
the mirror, the echo, the panopticon.” While there is broad-based consensus in the
literature that we need to study more than the face-to-face, there is no consensus on
what that should look like.

3.2.2.1 Interactive Affordances

Overwhelmingly, the literature tries to grasp the other structures Tolentino (2019)
refers to with the concept of affordances. These are the “possibilities for action” offered
by the platform ecology (Norman, 1988). The study of affordances directs attention to
features of social media as socio-technical systems shaping how they are used by
both the producers and the consumers of these systems. While the work of building
an online profile –  profile-work –  bears some comparison to the embodied rituals
associated with face-work (Silfverberg, Liikkanen, & Lampinen, 2011), it is distinct in
that it affords different levels of control over one’s public image and requires different
kinds of work.
boyd (2010) discusses four key affordances of social media: persistence,
replicability, scalability, and searchability. These affordances crucially allow mediated
performances to extend through time and space because they can be saved, spread,
queried, and replayed. While users can and have shaped the affordances of social
platforms – the hashtag being a well-known case in point –the literature stresses that
product design is typically dictated by the twin demands for profitability and growth.
Because business models are invariably advertisement-based, and because venture
capitalists backing major tech ventures demand steep growth curves, social media
affordances are optimized for interactions that bind user attention to screens for as
Conclusion   29

long as possible, and that scale up indefinitely. They also try to squeeze as much
data out of users as possible to target advertisements or strengthen their positions
as data brokers. For that reason, Facebook users are encouraged to share their likes
and dislikes in ever more detailed online profiles. These profiles are thus no longer
(primarily) symbolic representations of selves, but inputs into larger algorithmic
systems.
Despite this strong emphasis in the literature, our conversations with Yvette,
Sammy and other participants do not suggest that varying affordances play a big
role in their daily lives. Even though they navigate multiple platforms with different
affordances and have seen platforms change their affordances, their practices and
anxieties had little relation to the shifting socio-technical landscape.

3.2.2.2 Network of Mediations

Another way to broaden our perspective on the context of interaction is to regard it
as a level within a larger social whole. Henri Lefebvre ([1961] 2002), an influential
sociologist studying everyday life from a critical perspective, observes that there is
no such thing as “immediate” interaction, because even face-to-face interaction is
mediated by language. Thus, to understand the context of interaction, we must have a
model of the larger “network of mediations” (Lefebvre [1961] 2002, 2:141) within which
interaction plays out. These mediations, broadly understood as interdependencies
linking the “micro” and the “macro,” shape the strategies of self-presentation and
shape the normative order that makes self-display compulsory.
Our research with Yvette, Sammy and other participants suggests that the endemic
insecurity induced by flexible work conditions and precarious livelihoods plays an
important mediating role. Neither the imperative to engage in expression games nor
the normative demand to remain visible to others would be as acute if they had the
option of “dropping out” for a while. This dependency thrusts the weight of the world
on individuals, giving them no choice but to maintain the myth of the self through
its ongoing reproduction in commodity form. This demand is contradictory because
it gives the semblance of unfettered self-expression, which further dissimulates the
normative demands of the situation. The result is that individuals accuse each other
of being “fake” or engaging in insincere signaling behaviors rather than seeing the
larger demands and interdependencies that are at play.

3.3 Conclusion

Our review of dramaturgical perspectives in the literature on social media leaves

us with a mixed assessment. Particularly when Goffman’s work is filtered through
social psychology (a common reference is Leary & Kowalski, 1990), we find a version
of dramaturgy that focuses chiefly on individuals and their strategic action. This
30   The Dramaturgy of Social Media

is often associated with Goffman’s game metaphor. Undoubtedly, the competitive

environment of social media brings strategic considerations to the fore. Our research
supports that view, which is widely shared by commentators. But our research also
suggests that such an individualistic and rationalistic version of dramaturgy is ill-
suited to our task of making sense of the social media–social order nexus, since it
works with a very thin conception of the social. The social only enters the picture to
the extent that it requires individuals to engage in balancing acts. It does not account
for the normative demands impinging on users.
Yvette and Sammy maintain a presence on social media as a way of claiming and
maintaining membership in their respective worlds. Each has an idiom of displays that
members must enact to be eligible as members. Yvette has to be seen partying, with a
smile on her face, till the party is officially over. Sammy knows about the “marketing
narrative” she has to adhere to in her scene. Though she finds it ridiculous, she knows
better than to not follow along. Both have learned the pervasive idiom of micro-
celebrity, though both desire a slower, more muted life.
While we could see their presentations of self as expression games helping them
to succeed, their stories make it clear that this doesn’t do justice to what they are
doing. In each case, the price paid seems out of proportion to the benefits reaped.
Sammy in particular remains precarious. Both engage in coping strategies like yoga
to mitigate the stress induced by the requirement to maintain decorum. They also
envision more structural solutions that would allow them to rely less on ephemeral
collaborations and shallow images. Yvette wants to do more backstage work; Sammy
is looking for a corporate job. As they seek an out, they run into formidable obstacles.
In their line of business, short-term engagements are the norm, which means they
have to ceaselessly pay homage to the prevailing norms of decorum to remain in view
of potential clients or collaborators.
Studying social media as a site of order requires more than an account of
individual strategic action. Crucially, we need to see social media as a source of
obligation, which requires us to study contradictions, emotions, and strains. We
also need to scale up the analysis from face-to-face encounters. This necessitates not
just accounting for the affordances of social media as socio-technical systems, as is
common in the extant literature, but understanding the “network of mediations” that
shapes the economy of display individuals are drawn into.

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4 Clusters of Prestige: Social Media and Social Order
in the Norwegian Bible Belt

Stefan Fisher-Høyrem and David Herbert

4.1 Introduction

This chapter uses data from the southern Norwegian city of Kristiansand (population
90,000), asking whether social media constitute a vector for challenging the local
social order, or rather reproduce and reinforce existing established-outsider relations.
We combine computational and qualitative methods, while drawing on analytical
concepts from Norbert Elias’ figurational sociology, whose primary concern is
how social figurations are created and maintained through notions of prestige and
shame, as well as models of behavior (Elias, 1978). Specifically, we utilise Elias’
conceptualization of “established-outsider relations,” which he proposed as “a
universal human theme” of creating and maintaining social distinctions within the
same community (Elias, 1994, p. xv).
For Elias, the fundamental characteristic of social figurations is the distinction
between a dominant “established” group and other “outsider” groups; indeed,
categories such as gender, race, or class he sees as secondary to this most fundamental
social figuration (Elias, 1994, p. xviii).5 The superiority of the established group stems
not primarily from numerical size or use of force –  the group is often a numerical
minority – but from a comparatively high degree of internal cohesion and extent of
communal control (Elias, 1994, p. 86). Internal cohesion is created and maintained
by certain collective norms “which are apt to induce the gratifying euphoria that
goes with the consciousness of belonging to a group of higher value and with the
complementary contempt for other groups” (Elias, 1994, p. xviii). Put another way,
the two key elements in established-outsider figurations are power and morality, or
rather, power reinforced by a sense of moral superiority (Elias, 1994, p. xv).
Elias’s framework lends itself particularly well to analyses of social media, since
they are constructed precisely to facilitate mutual recognition (or ignoring) between
users competing for signs of prestige and seeking to reinforce their social status within
particular networks and groups.

5  For a discussion of Elias’ theory of established-outsider relations and race, see e.g. (Stanley, 2016).
34   Clusters of Prestige: Social Media and Social Order in the Norwegian Bible Belt

4.2 Social Order in Kristiansand

In the following, we propose that Kristiansand’s social order includes a powerful

’established’ network of businesses, politicians, and other influencers explicitly or
implicitly affirming hetero-normativity, nuclear family values, sports and outdoor life,
and a loose mix of ‘conservative’ Evangelical Christianity and mercantile interests.
While this group might be numerically inferior, its norms are reproduced and made
manifest across a range of social fields, such as the promotion of the city as a whole
as well as new neighborhoods, the field of cultural production, and public rituals.

4.2.1 Evangelical Church Culture

Named the buckle of the Norwegian bible belt, Kristiansand is the administrative and
economic center of the country’s southernmost region – a region which for the past
century has been known as a stronghold of conservative Evangelical Christianity.
The close association between regional Christian mission ministries, free churches,
and the mercantile middle and upper classes has molded the political, religious, and
cultural landscape of the region and its coastal ‘capital’ for at least the past 120 years,
and is well-known and accounted for by historians. (Abrahamsen, 2014; Seland, 2012,
2014). Even today, the region – but in particular Kristiansand – remains something
of a national political anomaly in its comparatively strong support for the relatively
conservative Christian Democratic Party (KrF), together with weaker support for the
Labour Party (AP)(Røed, 2010). Many of the Christian families who, with the help of
willing and generous brothers in the Christian associations, became wealthy during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, still remain so today.6
Through the 1990s and onwards, the region and its municipal center has
maintained a high level of religious activity according to almost all common
indicators (Botvar et al., 2010; Botvar & Aagedal, 2002; Magnussen et al., 2013). 24%
are religiously active at least once a month, compared to 7% nationwide. The region
has a high proportion (15% in 2008) of people who feel some association with one
of its many free  Evangelical churches, compared to the rest of the country (3% in
2008) (Magnussen et al., 2013). The region has high levels of part-time work among
women, and studies suggest an ideal of “the good mother” – working less in order
to “spend time with her children” – remains a strong norm, to the point where non-
working mothers might sanction other mothers who “work too much,” which again
leads to full-time-working mothers reporting feeling like outsiders (Magnussen et al.,

6  As Elias also points out, it is not uncommon to find a certain allusion to family bonds in studies
of high- and upper middle-class communities, where networks of families often may operate as a
powerful factor in the social stratification and structure of the local community (Elias, 1994, p. 3).
 Social Order in Kristiansand   35

2005).There are more married couples with children than in other regions, and more
married couples with many children (Ryen, 2002).
Other research has shown how in this particular region the most important
factor explaining the lingering skepticism towards gender equality – even more than
social background, age, education, or income levels – is the conservative Christianity
found in the free churches and associations (Magnussen et al., 2005, 2013). So-called
‘traditional men’ in this region are more conservative than their peers in other parts
of Norway: they believe in God; they tend to see religion as relevant and important on
a daily basis; they support religious organizations, and they are particularly oriented
around so-called ‘traditional family values’. While on a national scale this group
tends to score low on experience of contentment/happiness, in this region it scores
the highest, enjoying higher social status, higher education, and a stronger financial
situation (Ellingsen & Lilleaas, 2010).
Even religious people  in the region  who are  “sporadically active” are more
conservative than the same group nationwide, which some researchers have suggested
“supports the hypothesis of a Christian conservative hegemony” (Halvorsen, 2004).
Some have suggested that the effects of conservative Christianity extend beyond the
“core congregation,” so that conservative values (with regard to family structures,
sexual norms, and so on) somehow spill out of the specific church contexts. While
one might contest this by saying it ascribes too much power to what is arguably still
a numerical minority, Elias’ theory of established-outsider relations explains how
the fact that key members of the “established” group might hold key positions in the
community means that their norms come to influence people beyond their relatively
close-knit circle, and despite their lacking numbers. Indeed, it has been shown that
the moral ideals associated with this group remain strong even for people who have
to some extent left the former religious faith; that is, the ideals continue to influence
their perspective on what it might mean to be a “good person” and lead a “good life”
(Henriksen & Repstad, 2005).

4.2.2 Family Friendly

From the 1930s, tourism gradually became one of the region’s primary economic
engines, with Kristiansand as a natural center point. During the first decades of the
twentieth century, as artists began to explore the variations in the southern landscape,
these traits gradually turned into “positive” stereotypes in the increasing promotion
of Sørlandet (the South land) and Kristiansand as a tourist attraction associated
with summer, seaside, and hospitable locals (Johnsen, 2010). The accusations that
had been levelled at southerners during the decades of decline in the sail shipping
industries –  that they were slow, lacked initiative, and were generally politically
incompetent – transformed into characteristics with more positive connotations: the
36   Clusters of Prestige: Social Media and Social Order in the Norwegian Bible Belt

stereotypical southerner (and Kristiansander) was now portrayed as relaxed, calm,

and unassuming (Hundstad, 2008).
From the early 2000s, an image of positive homeliness took a particularly
strong hold of the promotion of the city as an object of tourist consumption, mainly
following the lead of the regional tourism and business cluster USUS’s project The
Children’s City. Tourist brochures began showcasing sunny archipelagos, children
laughing and swimming, and happy families visiting the local zoo and amusement
park Dyreparken. In an interview, one former project leader at USUS described how
this project gradually incentivized businesses not usually catering to families with
children to find ways of doing so. She recounted the story of a local bar and bistro
owner who, when hearing of the project, exclaimed “Oh God, if we don’t accept
children in here, we’ll lose all of our summer business!”
Kristiansand’s self-promotion can also be understood in relation to urban policy
development in the field of cultural production, in particular the foundation Cultiva
and its surrounding debates. In 2002, the municipality sold portions of its share in the
local water power plant Agder Energi to a state-owned company, and set up the public
foundation Cultiva with a NOK1.4 billion trust fund of which the returns are to be used
to support the city’s cultural economy. As the first and only of its kind in Norway,
Cultiva emerged as “the principal cultural entrepreneur in the city of Kristiansand,
seeking to play a pro-active role also in the financial and industrial sector[s]” (Lysgård
& Tveiten, 2005, p. 498). As such, it became subject to extensive public debate, in
particular regarding its stated purpose and underpinning ideology (Bille, 2013;
Lysgård, 2013). In 2005, researchers Lysgård and Tveiten put it thus:

Kristiansand is a small town with a traditional bourgeoisie citizenship marked by a Nordic

brand of Christian-democratic political values. Experimental art, avant-gardism and political
critique have not been in the forefront of this culture. The moral-based and traditionalist concept
of culture accepted as legitimate in the bourgeois and religious parts of the city’s cultural life
is, therefore, challenged by Cultiva, and has led to a discussion about how the money should
be spent and by whom. This is actually a question about who should control the power of the
cultural discourse in the city, the discourse about what is acceptable according to ethical and
moral values. The broad, liberal and innovation-oriented concept of culture adapted by Cultiva
where culture is meant to ‘put economy to work’ is challenging the more or less hegemonic
traditionalist discourse of culture in the city of Kristiansand (Lysgård & Tveiten, 2005, p. 496).

At the time of writing, one long-time member of the Cultiva steering board is
Kristiansand’s vice mayor from the conservative Christian Democratic party. In 2009,
another well-known conservative Christian politician from the Conservative Party
became new chair of the board. Soon after, in April 2011 Cultiva surprisingly changed
their official strategy to the following: “Kristiansand will become the leading city of
culture for children in the Nordic countries. With this the city will become the best
place for growing up and a city that children and their families alike must visit”
(About Cultiva, 2017). Instead of having artists apply for funding (a process that had
 Social Order in Kristiansand   37

been criticized for being overly complex and oriented towards questions of economic
profitability), the board would seek to initiate projects themselves, and then look
for potential partners. The abrupt change spurred strong negative reactions from
the cultural milieus in the city – like when more than 50 artists, critics, actors, and
directors issued a joint statement protesting the change and demanding the board
members’ resignation – but at the time, these protests had little effect.

4.2.3 Physical Activity

Kristiansand’s self-promotion and image-building is equally evident in the

marketing of new neighborhoods. Perhaps the largest and most widely advertised
new development since 2015 is the area of Lauvåsen. Primary targets are families
with parents aged 35–45 with an average of 1.7 children. According to the project
leader, a competing project run by another developer had already taken the slogan
“The Children’s Neighborhood,” so they decided to make theirs “the Sportiest
Neighborhood in Norway.” Houses include extra storage space for sports equipment,
and a new 5 km running track (parts of which will be fitted for parents walking
with prams) is being prepared in the surrounding woods. Everyone moving to the
neighborhood will receive free membership at the local gym.
In general, the population in Kristiansand appears to value physical activity and
exercise. The city has seen impressive growth since the 1970s in the area of sports
and outdoor life. While this has been a general development on a national level,
historians have pointed out that in the southern region one important factor was the
free churches’ change in attitude, from viewing sports as “worldly” and potentially
damaging to the faith, to supporting physical exercise and the importance of visible
Christian ‘role models’ in various social fields. In the following decade many sports
clubs saw such a dramatic increase in Christian members that some of them – like
the main football club IK Start – even came to be seen as “Christian clubs” (Justvik,
2012).7
At the time of writing, Kristiansand boasts over 110 local sports clubs, and near
60,000 memberships (many are members of two or more clubs) after a 28% increase
over the past decade, primarily in football, handball, swimming and gymnastics. The
same decade similarly saw a strong increase in physical exercise across generations.
Of the ten largest cities in Norway, Kristiansand has the highest coverage of sports
centers and arenas per capita (Kommunedelplan Idrett- Og Friluftsliv, 2015-2018, 2014).
Local businesses and even the city council sponsor the national population health
project Cycle to Work, enabling Kristiansand’s citizens to participate for free. In 2014,

7  IK Start still enjoys an annual Church service in their honor at the local church.
38   Clusters of Prestige: Social Media and Social Order in the Norwegian Bible Belt

participation had reached a national record high of 10%, five times higher than other
comparable cities.

4.2.4 Characteristics of Kristiansand’s Social Order

From the above we might glean some general characteristics of Kristiansand’s social
order.
One characteristic is a particular church culture. During interviews with project
leaders and key people found through “snowballing” methods, remarkably many
informants referred to “church culture” or “church power” as a key factor in the city’s
social order. These were less precise attributions than expressions of a general sense
that in Kristiansand it matters whom you know, and that decisions can often appear
to have been made after church services as much as around official negotiation tables. 
Another  characteristic  is a strong focus on nuclear families. We see it in how
the  Children’s City project not only seeks to cater to this demographic for tourism
purposes, but also in the effect it has on local businesses, who even outside of the
tourist season have to target families with children, even if this would not be their
‘natural’ customer base. A further indication is the changes made to Cultiva’s statement
of purpose, which at the time when this research was conducted primarily targeted
nuclear families with children. 
A third characteristic  we see across various arenas  in Kristiansand  is
a  general  celebration of physical exercise and experiencing nature. This
is evident in the high number of memberships in sports clubs, and in
the  mediatization  of and official  subsidizing  of fitness events such as  Cycle to
Work or Terrengkarusellen. Similarly, the promotion of a large new neighborhood 
as “the sportiest  neighborhood  in Norway”  speaks to the importance of physical
exercise as a symbol of prestige and high status. 
In isolation, none of these are peculiar to Kristiansand; many cities promote
themselves in similar ways. However, we contend that the particular combination of
these gives Kristiansand’s social order a distinct local “flavor” which is recognizable
as “typical” of the place. In the next section, we turn to the question of whether social
media in Kristiansand tend to challenge these norms, or rather serve to reinforce and
reproduce them.

4.3 Social Media in Kristiansand

Social  media are frequently imagined as vectors of transformation and disruption,

and as a result very little existing research considers the continuities and conservative
schemas that are reproduced by these platforms (Benkler, 2007; Castells, 2008). It is
often overlooked how algorithms reward engagement in the form of likes, comments,
 Social Media in Kristiansand   39

mentions, referrals, and so on, which means that online visibility depends on
affirmation, and that different forms of affirmation provide different levels of
visibility. In contrast to such accounts, Alice E. Marwick convincingly argues that just
like the tech-entrepreneurial scene in San Francisco where they were first designed,
“social media applications encourage people to compete for social benefits by
gaining visibility and attention [...] adopt[ing] self-consciously constructed personas
and market themselves [...] to an audience or fan base”  (Marwick, 2013, p. 5).  One
point being made here is that the technology itself is structured in order to create
and facilitate ever-more conforming clusters of users with similar sensitivities and
aspirations. In these clusters, most signs of affirmation go to a few very active and
comparatively central users with a lot of followers. Receiving affirmation from a
cluster of users, or indeed from one central user within such a cluster, ensures
visibility within that cluster.
Again, Elias’ figurational sociology lends itself particularly well to this reading
of social media logics. In his book The Court Society (1983), he describes the social
life at the seventeenth-century royal court, which has several striking parallels to the
social dynamics on social media platforms. For instance, in order to rise in the social
hierarchy of the court, the important thing is not so much to be rich and powerful,
as to be perceived as such.8 People at the center of this universe display their status
with ever-new attire and performances, which people in their orbit seek to emulate
and mimic. In the same way, social media users tend to orbit central celebrity users
– so-called influencers – within specific fields of interest that one simply has to follow
in order to belong.
Furthermore, like at the royal court, social media users tend to display themselves
in situations signaling high status, while at the same time trying to stand out from the
crowd as authentic and original. Success in this endeavor is relative to feedback in
the form of likes, comments, tags, shares and mentions. This “traffic” makes users
visible to others, just as their own affirmative gestures determine what and who will
(over time) become visible and available to them. Negative feedback most often takes
the shape of scrolling past content, unfollowing, or quietly ignoring – though outright
shaming also occurs.
Drawing on these theories, the  Cultural Conflict 2.0  project  has sought to
investigate how social media is reshaping social relations in particular cities, looking
especially at how social order is generated, reinforced, and challenged both on social
media platforms and at their intersection with life in the physical city.  What then
can be said about the social order and social media in Kristiansand? We began our
investigation by focusing on Instagram, because this platform’s strong emphasis on
visual communication and affirmation in the form of following, likes and affirmative
comments,  together with a comparatively  limited possibility for verbal messaging,

8  I am grateful to Justus Uitermark and John Boy for highlighting this point.
40   Clusters of Prestige: Social Media and Social Order in the Norwegian Bible Belt

means it lends itself particularly well to this kind of analysis. With Instagram we were

able to combine interviews with computational methods, as we had formerly done
in Amsterdam (Boy and Uitermark, 2016). In addition, and on a more practical note,
this data was freely available before the platform was acquired by Facebook in June
2016.

4.3.1 Local Clusters

In order to  locate user networks and clusters, we identified geotagged posts from
Kristiansand posted between June 2015 and May 2016, from users who post at least
every 14 days (to eliminate potential tourists). We assigned a relational tie every
time users expressed mutual appreciation in the form of likes, comments, mentions,
tags, and so on. In this way, we identified 8 Instagram user clusters in Kristiansand,
each centering on about 10–15 top users. The pattern of distribution of social status
typical of Instagram also holds on this level: most likes and comments go to the top
users, who could be seen as modelling the successful symbolic entrepreneur in their
respective clusters.
We manually viewed all the posts posted in this period by the ten top users in
each cluster and compared each of their feeds against ten randomly selected users
in the same cluster. Most of these users had an open account, so we were able to see
all their posts. The few who had private accounts generally seemed (from the look of
profile pictures, or from emojis or hashtags used in their bio) to affirm the general
sense of their respective clusters’ circulating symbols of prestige (so, for instance, a
private account near the top of a cluster focusing on CrossFit might typically have a
profile picture of someone performing CrossFit exercises). 
Table 4.1 below shows the eight largest clusters, the name we gave the cluster
according to the typical themes that circulate among its most central users, the
clusters’ size in terms of connected users, their top tagged locations, and which
businesses were found among the top ten users. Names of businesses related to
specific informants have been changed for the sake of anonymity.

4.3.2 Local Top Users: Navigating Hierarchies

We located the ten most connected users in each cluster. Some of the top user profiles
were businesses or hub accounts where several users share photos in specific genres
(like in C1). Some users were 16 or younger (like most top users in C4), while others
had since moved to other cities. We contacted three randomly selected top users with
open profiles in each cluster. We also contacted some users who were most connected
across the city as a whole, even if they were not prominent in any one cluster. Most
responded, but some refused to be interviewed – though a few changed their mind
 Social Media in Kristiansand   41

when learning that they had been selected among local top users. In total, we ended
up interviewing 12 Instagram users, 10 of which were randomly selected top users.
Most were interviewed face to face, though two were interviewed via Skype. In the
following their names (and the names of associated businesses, if any) have been
changed.

Table 4.1: Overview of the eight largest clusters obtained from community detection on relations
among Instagram users in Kristiansand.

Number Cluster Size Top tagged locations Businesses among top

users

C0 Unclustered – Dyreparken; Scandic Kristiansand Kristiansand Avis;

users Bystranda; Kilden Teater- og Moods of Norway,
Konserthus; Vågsbygd, Kristiansand; Sorlandssenteret; NRK
Sørlandssenteret Sorlandet;

C1 General 762 Vågsbygd, Kristiansand; Hamresanden;

cluster Flekkerøya, Kristiansand; Flekkerøy;
Lulu’s

C2 Event 509 Vågsbygd Videregående Skole;

cluster Vågsbygd, Kristiansand; Flekkerøy;
Dyreparken; Flekkerøya, Kristiansand

C3 Fashion 307 Flekkerøy; VOLT Sandens; Berglihn

cluster I Gullsmed; Flekkerøya, Kristiansand;
Bønder i Byen

C4 Church 304 Vågsbygd, Kristiansand; Vågsbygd

cluster I Videregående Skole; Flekkerøy;
Flekkerøya, Kristiansand; Fiskebrygga

C5 Fitness 301 Viking CrossFit; Spicheren Viking CrossFit

cluster Treningssenter; Emijoly Yoga & Pilates;
Power CrossFit; Power CrossFit KRS

C6 Fashion 295 Vågsbygd, Kristiansand; Fiskebrygga;

cluster II Odderøya; Jordbærpikene Sandens;
Baneheia

C7 Outdoor 248 Odderøya; UIA Universitetet i Agder;

cluster Hamresanden; Baneheia; Vågsbygd,
Kristiansand

C8 Church 233 Flekkerøy; Pentecostal Church;

cluster II Vaya con Dios Coffee Shop; Bohem;
Flekkerøya, Kristiansand
42   Clusters of Prestige: Social Media and Social Order in the Norwegian Bible Belt

Local top users boast between 1,000–2,000 followers (though not all of these are
local), while they themselves follow less than half this number. Most of them spend
at least one hour editing photos (always taken with phone camera or digital camera,
never the Instagram camera function) before they post them, and most of them use
the VSCO app for editing. They also have some idea (more or less substantiated) about
how or when one should post to generate higher levels of engagement.
We found that top users navigate two social worlds simultaneously that in some
respects work according to different logics. On the one hand, there is the exclusive
online-only community of Instagram. Here, they actively seek affirmation from
influencers at the top of the hierarchy in specific lifestyle areas, such as physical
exercise, fashion, foods, etc., whose presentation style they try to emulate, and whose
affirmation they actively seek.
For instance, top users Erik (27) and Sonja (25) in the Fitness cluster (C5), both
active at the Viking CrossFit center, seek out world leading CrossFit performers in
order to follow them. On average, Erik’s posts receive around 500 likes. But on a post
featuring himself and a particular CrossFit influencer, he has received over 1,800 likes.

Erik: “I got 1,600 new followers in one day. That’s pretty cool […] all their followers came over
to me.”

Similarly, Beate (28) uses the platform to showcase photos of architecture or

natural landscapes. She deliberately seeks out influencers within these genres, and
occasionally receives acclamation from them. Over time, she says, she has developed
a sense of what specific influencers (and their followers) might affirm.

Beate: “Like this building […] I spent 20 minutes just getting the angle right. Here, [the
influencer’s] response means a lot [to me], because I put so much effort into it.”

But this online-only exclusive “royal court” is not the only one the local top users
navigate; there is also the world of personal friends, and the signs of affirmation
that circulate in local on- and offline networks. Here, users police each other (and
themselves) according to unwritten but strict codes of prestige and shame, where the
fear of being ignored is more significant than the fear of explicit negative response.
Beate (28), a top user in the Church cluster (C8), engages in political work, but
avoids politics on her Instagram profile because her friends might not be interested.
As one of the most connected users across the city as a whole, she puts strict demands
on herself regarding what she posts or likes and spends a lot of time finding the
hashtags that she believes will bring influencers to her profile. Yet for local friends
not part of the genre-specific community, she operates with a different set of criteria.

Beate: “[If] a friend posts a picture, then I like that picture regardless of what it is. Because I like
my friends, and if they post it, then it’s important to them, I reckon.”
 Social Media in Kristiansand   43

Other top users similarly speak of liking all their friends’ posts, even the posts they
dislike. Ragnhild (19) spoke of her own criteria for liking posts.

Ragnhild: “I like a lot of posts. To me, that’s a way of supporting people [laughs], like ‘Nice pic!,’
even if I don’t think it’s a good picture, I… well, we’re friends, so…”

Jon (38) feels his pastoral responsibilities in a local free church prevent him from
unfollowing users that he knows offline, even if he dislikes their posts.

Jon: “I’m the kind of guy who’s worried about hurting people’s feelings. If I unfollow someone, I
feel so awkward [laughs]. So… I’ve never done that.”

Visibility in the respective worlds – online lifestyle networks and local personal
friends – in both cases depends on engagement and active affirmation. If more
engaged in one world, our informants will gradually become less visible in the other.
For instance, engaging too much with friends’ posts even if these are irrelevant to
their online lifestyle communities means that their friends’ posts will become visible
to users in the more prestigious online communities, which might result in them
unfollowing our informants, practically rejecting them from the hierarchy they are
trying to ascend. However, ignoring friends’ posts in order to preserve one’s position
in the online hierarchy means an increased risk of having to explain oneself to those
friends offline.
Several informants have examples of instances where they, having initially
“liked” a picture they would otherwise consider inappropriate, later confronted the
friend face to face about it. Maria’s (19) friend, for instance, posted a selfie from a
party together with someone she barely knew, and afterwards did not remember
taking the picture. Still, she was “scared of deleting it because of what others might
think.” Similarly, Beate tells of a friend who posted a selfie revealing what she (Beate)
considers too much naked skin. This resulted in several friends confronting the girl.

Beate: “[W]hen we got together we were like ‘why do you have to post pictures like that,’ and then
we had a nice talk about confidence and looks and stuff.”

Elias describes the “courtly art of human observation” as a joint observation of the self
and of others in relation to a specific social context (Elias, 1983, pp. 104–106). “This
self-observation and the observation of other people are complementary,” he writes,
“[o]ne would be pointless without the other.” We can observe this in how top users
police their own presentation in light of how they expect others to respond. Maria
(20, Kristiansand) speculates on why her efforts to secure followers occasionally fail.

Interviewer: “Has it happened that people you wish would follow you have unfollowed?”

Maria: “Yes [laughs] If I want to follow them, then it sucks when they don’t want to follow me […]
I put so much effort into posting good stuff, so when it’s people I know, it really sucks when they
44   Clusters of Prestige: Social Media and Social Order in the Norwegian Bible Belt

unfollow me. I mean, it can’t be because my pictures are bad, then I would get it, you know? I am
really trying to post good pics.”

Here, it is not receiving negative feedback that causes frustration, but the sense of
being ignored. As in the pre-modern court, visibility is an existential necessity, and
recognition of status in the hierarchy depends on being seen and affirmed. Several
top users, such as Anne (20) has an app tracking who unfollows her and when.

Anne: “If someone unfollows me, then I unfollow them. I mean, unless they’re, like, really big
[on Instagram], then I totally get it.”

The self-policing does not require actual feedback from followers, only a general
fear of being ignored. Ragnhild (19) describes removing a picture she later regretted
posting. Her insistence that she does not care what other people say behind her back,
and that the decision to delete the post is entirely her own, go together with her
explicit awareness that people might disapprove without telling her directly, and that
she must maintain a positive attitude in order to be perceived as “inspiring.”

Interviewer: “Did you receive any negative response on the post itself?”

Ragnhild: “No, it was my own decision. No one said anything […] not to my face anyway […] but
probably behind my back, you know.”

Interviewer: “What do you think they say behind your back?”

Ragnhild: “I don’t know. People say so much. I don’t really care anyway. I’m just trying to have
a profile that’s inspiring to other people, and I try to have a happy tone in what I’m writing. It’s
important to stay positive.”

4.4 Reproducing the Social Order

In their seminal study of the town “Winston Parva,” Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson
describe how local family networks where characterized by unspoken criteria for how
people were ranked in social hierarchies. While these criteria are known to everyone
in the group, this is not explicit, but primarily on the level of practice (Elias, 1994, p.
xxxviii). In our interviews with the top users in Kristiansand’s local Instagram clusters,
we find a similar dynamic. All our informants demonstrate a high awareness of how
Instagram functions according to a logic of status displays, exchange of symbols of
 Reproducing the Social Order   45

prestige, mutual policing, and stratification into offline and online hierarchies, even
if they might have differing strategies for navigating these logics.9
The central question for the present purposes is whether what is associated
with prestige in the local clusters corresponds to the symbols associated with
“established” groups in Kristiansand. To answer this question, we might look to the
symbols circulating in and characterizing particular clusters – such as C5 the Fitness
cluster or C3 and C6, the Fashion clusters. In these typical Instagram genres, top users
are typically sponsored by famous brands. Harald, for instance, claims not to care
why people often like his posts, but at the same time reveals the degree to which he
actively seeks the affirmation of particular brands and people in the fashion world.

Harald: “My friends say my Instagram feed is an ’inspofeed,’ like an inspiration for others. I don’t
know about that. I don’t think a lot about it […] But what I often do is tag famous fashion people
or where I bought my clothes.”

Interviewer: “In this picture you’re enveloped in smoke.”

Harald: “Yes, we bought a smoke bomb [...] and right here, the shop where I bought the trousers
have commented on the picture. An emoji. And it’s not the first time!”

The Fitness Cluster (C5) is another example. Sonja used to post both CrossFit and
fashion pictures, but lately she has been “concentrating on the former.” She is
sponsored by various clothing brands and the Viking CrossFit center, and works
out for free as long as she keeps tagging their username in her posts. Erik uses a
professional photographer for most of his posts and insists that all his photos are
“authentic” because they are taken during actual training sessions.

4.4.1 Prestigious Consumption

The clusters also indicate the socio-economic aspirations of the users. One indication
is the shops and businesses found among top tagged locations. Here we find medium-
to high-end jewelry or fashion outlets (such as Lulu’s, Berglihn Goldsmiths, VOLT
Sandens, and Bohem) targeting young adults. Other businesses found among the
top users across the city as a whole (cluster association in parenthesis) include the
music festival and event Palmesus (C0), Hansen & Co (C3), Bik Bok Sorlandssenteret
(C3), Slottet Shopping (C1), and Image (C1). Cross-cluster tagged locations also

9  This awareness also manifested in their being confused to be considered a “top user” in the first
place; many were initially reluctant to be interviewed because they felt had no reason to be considered
“big” on Instagram.
46   Clusters of Prestige: Social Media and Social Order in the Norwegian Bible Belt

include dining places popular among middleclass consumers, such as the waterfront
restaurants at Fiskebrygga (C6), Bønder i Byen (C3), and Jordbærpikene Sandens (C6).
We should note that when locations appear in various forms (such as Flekkerøy,
Flekkerøya, Flekkerøy Kristiansand) it suggests that these are not established
hashtags, but instead highlights the location itself and its connotations as worthy
of display. Some informants speak of actively using Instagram to discover locations
recommended by users they admire, whether it be shops, popular hang-outs, or
weekend trip destinations. The areas Baneheia and Odderøya (both C7) are popular
recreational areas where people go for runs or Sunday walks. In addition, Odderøya
is a gentrifying area boasting cafés, museums, art galleries, and occasional music
festivals (the Kilden Concert Hall (C0), as well as parts of Fiskebrygga (C6) are located
in Odderøya). The area of Flekkerøy(a) is among the top tagged locations in C1, C2,
C3, and C8. An island just off mainland Kristiansand, Flekkerøy generally has a more
rural feel. It is a popular site for nature photo enthusiasts and is associated with
conservative and somewhat charismatic Evangelicalism.

Figure 4.1: Density of clusters according to neighborhood.

The status and prestige associated with the neighborhoods represented in the
clusters is further underscored by which areas are not represented. Table II shows
the density of clusters in each city neighborhood. Darker colors mean that a higher
proportion of posts in the particular cluster was posted from that neighborhood. As is
 Reproducing the Social Order   47

evident, C0 is evenly spread out across the city’s neighborhoods, reminding us that
people use Instagram whichever part of the city they live in. The locations appearing
prominently in the clusters, however, have important contrasts to the neighborhoods
that do not. Flekkerøy, for instance, appears in official statistics as a neighborhood
characterized by medium- to upper-medium income levels, relatively low numbers
of single parents and unmarried people between 30–49, and with the city’s lowest
number of immigrant inhabitants (7%). Relatively low numbers of immigrants also
characterize the larger neighborhood of Vågsbygd, which is tagged in clusters C1, C2,
C4, C6, and C7.
By contrast, the neighborhoods of Grim, Hånes, and in particular Slettheia, all have
very low density of Instagram clusters. According to the numbers from the municipality
website, they also have the highest rate of visible ethnic-religious minorities, receivers
of welfare, and typically medium- to low-median income levels. What this shows is
that people living in neighborhoods with poorer households or a higher rate of visible
ethnic-religious minorities might be on Instagram, but they are not included among
the top users in the local clusters of online affirmation. Their neighborhoods remain
invisible on social media. The point is underscored by the fact that out of all the top
users across the clusters, only a handful appear (from their profile photos) to be non-
white, and of these at least two identify as Christian (as signified in user name, profile
picture, or post content), while none are (openly) Muslim.

4.4.2 City-Wide Symbols of Prestige

Some symbols of prestige are found across several of the clusters. Here, together with
the manual examination of online profiles, the interviews help provide insight into
symbols that are circulating more city-wide, at the interface of online and offline
communities.
Sports and outdoor life are, as we have seen, associated with high status in
Kristiansand’s social order. In addition, several of the informants in clusters centering
on landscape photography or fashion turn out to be active in various prominent
fitness centers and free churches alike. Jon (37), for instance, a top user in the Church
cluster is an active member of one of the CrossFit centers prominent in the Fitness
cluster. Yet he never posts pictures of himself exercising, because he thinks this would
contribute to an unhealthy focus on physical appearance. Still, he mainly follows
CrossFit celebrities and instructors from the Viking CrossFit center, where he regularly
works out. Jon’s own posts feature pictures from the his church’s conference center, a
few natural landscapes, and him and his family on vacation.
Posts featuring nature and landscape photos are among the top shared and liked
across the city – often intersecting with users emphasizing outdoor life as a form of
healthy exercise. Some informants post semi-professional photos that have taken a
long time to prepare, while others, like Cecilia, edit and post pictures from evening
48   Clusters of Prestige: Social Media and Social Order in the Norwegian Bible Belt

walks or weekend outdoor treks. Harald, a top user in one of the fashion clusters, says
he enjoys going for walks and posting pictures of “nice scenery.” For Beate, whose
Instagram profile is prominent both across the city and in the Church cluster, it was
nature photos that drew her to Instagram as a social media platform.

Beate: “You know… sunsets draw a lot of likes [laughs] […] That’s what I like, seeing other
people’s lives and where they are, where they are travelling, and where they are heading.”

Finally, the local social order’s celebration of nuclear families is reflected and
reinforced across the clusters, not primarily because there are many photos of families
–  though there is arguably a certain prestige associated with displaying a happy
family situation – but also in that the family networks of the “established” seem to
be reinforced in and across clusters; some of the families enjoying high status in the
social order also enjoy high status in the local online hierarchies. For instance, top
user Ragnhild belongs to one of Kristiansand’s prolific Christian business families,
and some of her younger family members have also built up prominent Instagram
profiles. These are all found among the top users in the Church cluster, and their
connections to recording artists and other influencers in various fields are visible both
in post content, likes, and comments. The post that received most likes on Ragnhild’s
feed features her with some of these family members and famous influencers.

Interviewer: “Why do you think this picture received so many likes?”

Ragnhild: “I don’t know. It’s got [influencer] in it, and that’s fun. And I notice that people like it
when I show pictures with my family. That often generates a lot of likes […] most people know
we have a strong family bond, that we are very close and love each other. So, I suppose people
[…] want to support that.”

Finally, the Christian culture evident in Kristiansand’s self-promotion and social order
is likewise evident in and across local social media clusters. In terms of content, there
is the Christian variation on a common Instagram theme: the inspirational quote
on the background of a full teacup, and open landscape, and so on – only here, the
quotes are Bible verses. Signs of users identifying with Christianity are also found in
usernames, bios, or Christian symbol emojis. More importantly, the interviews reveal
networks not immediately visible online. Several informants turn out to also belong
to the offline church networks. Cecilia, a fashionista who is one of the most well-
connected users across the city as a whole, does social media work for a large free
church, but deliberately avoids Christian symbolism on her own Instagram feed.

Cecilia: “I’d say I go to [church] maybe once a week [...] but [on Instagram] I’m kind of laying
low… I mean, I have friends who go there too, but… I follow very few friends. So, I very rarely
‘like’ pictures of, say, coffee cups with a Bible verse on it [laughs], even if I’m sure I could post
pictures like that myself. But, yeah, I don’t tend to ‘like’ those anyway.”
 Concluding Remarks    49

Harald is another case in point. He mainly posts pictures of fashion outfits and is
proud of his “inspofeed.” He also enjoys administrative access to one of the nature
photo hubs in the General cluster which reposts landscape photos from around the
region. At the same time, he occasionally volunteers in a large free church’s media
department – indeed, it was a youth pastor who first recommended Instagram to
him. And it was Beate, top user in the Church cluster, who invited him to co-run the
landscape photo account.
In summary, while the clusters to some extent make it possible to identify groups
according to shared interests – fashionistas, church affiliates, and fitness enthusiasts –
the clustering does not imply segregation. The General cluster C1, the largest cluster we
have been able to locate, embraces all of these groups. Its top users include the former
user profile of a free church’s congress center, designers, nature photographers, and
fitness enthusiasts. The most locally connected Instagram users in Kristiansand seek
to distinguish themselves by displaying symbols of prestige that largely correspond to
the ones we have found to characterize the local social order: they picture themselves
with family and friends, in nice outfits, at shops or businesses associated with an
aspiring middle class, exercising in picturesque natural surroundings, or on their way
to church-related activities.

4.5 Concluding Remarks

Social media are often assumed to be vectors for social change, for challenging existing
structures, and facilitating the forging of new and original identities unhampered by
traditional norms. Our evidence points in the opposite direction. Using computational
methods in combination with qualitative interviews and participating observation,
we have located several social media clusters of users who affirm among themselves
certain values and norms through public affirmation in the form of likes, comments,
mentions, and so on. Indeed, without computational methods combined with local
knowledge and ethnographic sensitivity, these local influencers would have been
very difficult to locate, and the meaning of the symbols of prestige they circulate
would be near impossible to interpret. Interviews show that top users are aware of
the unspoken criteria for rising in the online as well as offline social ranks, and these
criteria largely correspond to the symbols of prestige we were able to define in the
social order of the city. Where one might have thought that social media would level
the playing field between diverse groups in a medium-sized city, what we see is the
reproduction of a social order where one group tends to dominate other groups in
terms of visibility and influence.
50   Clusters of Prestige: Social Media and Social Order in the Norwegian Bible Belt

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5 Meme Collectives and Preferred Truths in Assam

Sagorika Singha

5.1 Introduction

This chapter focuses on memes and their rising popularity in the geopolitical region
of Assam. It explores that which gives local memes their agency; in short, how
diverse social media groups use memes to propagate or build public opinion among
a new emerging public of internet users. Of late, social media has become a popular
news source globally, and this is also true for Assam. But on social media, the news
does not merely spread in a straight forward manner via numerous posts. Paratexts
accompany these posts. In this context, paratexts – a term derived from literature –
refers to the multitude of extraneous, ephemeral popular cultural by-products that
populate our contemporary mediascape (Pesce & Noto, 2016). Memes these days act
as a popular form of such paratexts, and they help put a spin on a news story or event
through their movement in the digital space. This chapter considers certain instances
where memes surface as vehicles propagating discussion around the socio-cultural
and political situation in the form of a local situation or an inside joke and what this,
in turn, tells us about the manifestation of the social order that exists in the social
media space in local territories.

5.2 Memes as Digital Objects

In order to critically discuss meme as a cultural artefact this chapter reads meme as a
“digital object” and borrows from Yuk Hui’s On the Existence of Digital Objects (Hui,
2012). In Hui’s analysis, digital objects move beyond the realm of representation,
hence he considers them to be material objects. Considering the materiality of
digital objects helps us engage with the socio-economic systems that lead to their
emergence. Borrowing from and extending Hui’s methodology, this chapter maps out
a framework to delve into local digital objects, and in doing so, reimagines cultural
geography as an associated milieu wherein memes reveal mechanisms of local
“truth-making.” Digital objects are bereft of the definitive qualities of “objects.” What
happens then when people find themselves representatives of an era of digital objects
­– digital objects which serve as floating objects of communication drifting from one
screen to another, shared by one user with another? In doing so, they form chains and
networks of connections which involve not just the sharing of those objects but also
the knowledge of the social order of each user.
 Memes as Digital Objects   53

Memes are a ubiquitous form of popular culture digital objects such as jokes,
rumours, videos and websites which are circulated from person to person via the
internet. People’s interaction with media and infrastructure reveals their relation to
the world and their respective nation-state. In accepting this, there is also the potential
to foresee that the effect of individuation of digital objects is not only experienced by
users and “machine agents” but is equally affected by the geographies they inhabit
(Simondon, 1980). While objects have been historically understood as tangible things,
here digital objects, memes, emerge as intangible artefacts that link users through
their circulation. Further, memes serve a dual presence; they allow users to leave
a digital trace online (as an extension of the self) while indicating an offline world
(which our real selves inhabit).

5.2.1 Digital Objects and Generation of Social Knowledge

There is a distinctive difference between digital objects and their physical counterparts,
including cultural records. While the latter is rooted in “solid, self-evident nature,”
the former remains evasive (Kallinikos, 2010). The signatory attributes of digital
objects are editability, interactivity, openness, and distributedness (ibid.). While all of
this holds true for memes, they are often evasive, ambivalent, paradoxical – features
which affect not only their creation but also their circulation and meaning-making.
Throughout this chapter, we witness these attributes at work with one another. As
digital objects and despite being embedded “in local cultures and power structures,”
memes have allowed for a change in the way users interact and, more importantly, in
the way social knowledge is generated online (Shifman, 2014). Most of the time, these
digital artefacts or objects or things and their creators are themselves oblivious of
the limit to their potency. This narration is an exercise in understanding how digital
objects and artefacts have a life of their own, and how they bring forth an experience
which pervades and affects various aspects of our lives.
Gilbert Simondon’s notion of individuation deliberates that the genesis of an
individual (either an individual or a social group standing for an individual) is a
continuous process within an “associated milieu.” As digital objects go through the
process of concretisation, there is a presumption of improvement. Web 3.0 is supposed
to be more enlightening than Web 2.0; GIFs are better than still images, and so on.
However, following Simondon’s idea of individuation, the never-ending process of
concretisation allows for numerous possibilities. What we conceive at a point in the
upgrade is just one of those multiple possibilities. In this chapter, local memes reveal
different stages of apprehension or individuation, and not all of them engage with
the same purpose. Within a regional milieu, as these digital objects grow, one of their
potent objectives is the generation of social knowledge within the geography where
they circulate. The caveat is that the social knowledge generated is also reflective of
the composition and the order of society. This is revealed by the contesting mode of
54   Meme Collectives and Preferred Truths in Assam

after-effects that the circulation of the digital objects leads to. While these artefacts
are supposed to take on physical forms, what happens is that the instances triggered
by these artefacts start reflecting the features of the objects themselves, namely,
being evasive and ambivalent. This vagueness appears in the emergent post-truth
era, marked by a rampant increase in the circulation of fake news, particularly in
economies such as India. This is a transformation on a massive scale with far-reaching
effects in the ways people interact, form opinions, and consume media information,
as well as their experience of the “real” world which they inhabit.
The most fundamental way in which mobile media has transformed the
contemporary world is by altering our relationships in social spaces. By demonstrating
the sharing and creation of specific memes on social media platforms, mainly
Facebook and WhatsApp, this chapter highlights the role such contemporary social
digital objects play in driving this transformation in Assam. Users often create popular
memes in the region in local languages such as Assamese, Bodo and Sylheti, among
others. Language becomes a means for self-assertion, which is also a marker of
“localisation” and the establishment of “cultural individualism.” This development
affects the tensions between the peripheral region of Assam (in northeast India) and
the larger nation-state. The circulation of these memes leads to the emergence of
a new vocabulary to discuss offline socio-political situations within specific social
media groups. Additionally, they play a part in constructing conversations and events
catering to a cluster or social group. The central concern here is how memes emerge
as a newfound language and can develop platforms through their creators and users,
in turn, transforming, asserting, and establishing new emerging publics.
Scholars have always looked at the northeast region of India as a politically
unstable state with a history of secessionist movements and unrest (Mitra, 1993;
Baruah, 2005; Bhaumik, 2009; Gill, 2013). However, there has been no significant
attempt to read the region post the digital inroads, which have led to overwhelming
changes. Propaganda and other pursuits go hand in hand with increased mobile
internet penetration, and access to the internet ensures a new kind of landscape which
no one has tried to gauge from a cultural study perspective. How are local citizens
dealing with these changes and how are they affecting not only their appraisal of
things and popular culture around them but also the production of these digital
objects? Often, we find an incoherence in dealing with it. For example, on 18 May
2017, the Assam government issued an order announcing stricter monitoring of the
use of social media (PTI, 2017). This order came after a series of unsavoury incidents10
concerning government officials went viral. In this context, a decision like this does

10  A slew of such incidents included the leak of a video showing MLA Ramakanta Deuri in a
compromising position with an unidentified women in a hotel room (The Asian Age, 2017). In another
incident, MLA Aminul Islam broadcast his Assembly speech through Facebook Live (Roy, 2017).
 Memes as Digital Objects   55

not come as a surprise. It reflects poorly on the inability of both the users and the
authorities to understand and control the online space.
Rumourmongering-instigated episodes and incidents riddle the current news
landscape of the state, often accelerated by the use of memes on social media. In
March 2017, there was a case of a Fatwa (that never was) issued against the popular
reality show runners-up from Assam, Nahid Afrin (Saikia, 2017). The only evidence of
any Fatwa was a leaflet signed by 46 clerics requesting residents not to attend musical
performances or magic shows since they were against the Sharia.11 But the photo of
the leaflet, written in the local Assamese language was shared extensively on social
media and the non-existent threat on the life of the young singer was considered so
real that the news received prime-time national TV and print media coverage (Saikia,
2017). As Sergio Sismondo remarks, “If the post-truth era starts by blowing up current
knowledge structures, then it isn’t very likely to be democratisation, and in fact most
likely leads to authoritarianism” (Sismondo, 2018). There is a certain pattern to such
propagations, as could be witnessed in the two cases mentioned above and many
others which have cropped up in the past year in India. Most such incidents have
taken place in tier II and III cities.12
There has been a definite shift in the way users access, interpret and consume
information. The socio-economic and cultural milieu, along with users’ interactions
and adoption of the new technological dimension of information consumption affect
this process. While the influence of social media and the behaviour of the youth
has been chronicled (Tripathi, 2017; Arora & Rangaswamy, 2015), there are gaps in
analysing these phenomena from the perspective of the formation of the user units
and exploring how social media changes the interpretation of current events within
a particular user unit. The primary question here is how the increasing presence of
social media platforms affect users in realising their selves in the way social media
stages an event within such cultural discourses. How does it, for instance, encourage
their view of themselves as mediated users? In the online space, how does their
participation affect the functioning of the social establishment? In Assam, political or
institutional participation in the online space has been prominent, and employees of
various government departments are encouraged to participate in WhatsApp groups

11  Sharia law is part of the Islamic religious tradition. It is derived from the religious precepts of
Islam, particularly the Quran and the Hadith.
12 The Reserve Bank of India classifies cities based on their population. Tier II cities population
(between 500,000 and 5 million) and category Z or tier III cities (population below 5 lakh). Police,
when asked by journalists about the recent bout of mob lynching which took place in the country
following rumours of child-lifters, mention how the places where such incidents took place had a
high concentration of poor and illiterate people (Raina, 2019). Pamposh Raina, “New Media and
Indian Elections 2019” (The Indian Express & Jindal School of Journalism and Communication’s (JSJC)
panel discussion, New Delhi March 29, 2019).
56   Meme Collectives and Preferred Truths in Assam

informally. Such institutions often use these groups to disseminate news and circulars
within those sets of official participants.
Poe’s law, first articulated in online forums, states that without a clear intention
from the author, some readers might accept “obvious, exaggerated, parody of extreme
views” to be true (Poe, 2005). Memes and GIFs take on a different value because they
not only bring forward potent conversations in a casual and accepted way but are
susceptible to Poe’s law. It becomes all the more true for users who are becoming
accustomed to this form of news dissemination. Once the user-base acknowledges
this reality, it will be easier to understand the implications of the social makeup and
to interpret political events through social media in a specific regional geography.
This will bring evidence to the interpretation of culture and society among a relatively
new kind of user-base and a new kind of political geography. Studies similar to this
can ultimately help us understand in an ethnographic sense how events and popular
culture deviate from textbook understanding when new media percolates into
everyday plebeian discourse. When a user circulates a video or a meme online, an
“apolitical” creator or propagator may remain “oblivious” that the readers and the
receivers will interpret it in their own way. There is a lack of an established hierarchy
in the comprehension of such information.

5.2.2 Public Opinion Formation and the Meme-Machine

Meme production is a machine exercise as it encourages an endless process of mining

memes for their relevance and popularity. Memes work because they exhibit the
classic attributes of the contemporary digital age – they are short, visual in nature,
attention-grabbing, and users can discard them easily. They are easy catalysts for
events of all nature. With the widening of the internet’s reach, the relevance of memes
has been growing, making the potency of the artefacts more visible and impending.
Memes and discussions surrounding them act as crucial opinion generators. There lie
two facets in the “humour element” that is intrinsic to the form – which often features
a text tag overlaid on an image – while it grants the meme its momentum, the humour
of a meme can often dilute the gravitas of an event.13
The asset of a meme lies in the latent potential of funny photoshopped images.
The image referent with its instant political quality and easy shareability makes it
impossible to ignore. Through memes, we witness the birth of “portable politics” for
instant consumption on social media. In Assam, popular memeable characters are
often local celebrities or figures in local media and politics. Posts which seem to be all

13  In reference to this, it is interesting to think of how the Amul hoardings (which also get published
in newspapers etc.) precede the idea of a meme in terms of the usage of image and text and allusions
to prevailing news scene in the country.
 Network Economy and the Meme   57

the rage mainly involve caustic reactions to socio-political and cultural scenarios. The
sarcasm-fuelled conversations provoked by such content become noteworthy when
viewed through a lens of the “meme-synthesis.” In essence, these conversations
become significant because they reflect that the crises of the place, the region, are
always a popular rhetoric and it comes as a small wonder that such content has the
characteristics of vitriolic conversations and “strong” opinions.
Bjarneskans and his colleagues postulate that people strive to join a circle of
individuals who “share the joke” (Bjarneskans et al., 1999). While this results in the
creation of a group, often the participants strive to share individual opinions and
issues which conform to the group’s preferences merely because it seems cool to
belong to the trendy crowd sharing similar beliefs. With regards to internet addiction,
Jonathan J Kandell observed how a psychological dependence to being online could
result in anxiety when one feels disconnected, thereby leading to a fear of missing
out (Kandell, 1998). In a rush to belong, to find ever-popular and powerful memes, a
user can inadvertently present an unpopular opinion which might prosper owing to
the general propensity to “follow the crowd” on social media. We can see this in the
contagious sharing of opinion that follows on social media.

5.3 Network Economy and the Meme

“Sharing” is the exhortation of the present generation, not just sharing one’s private
life and politics but also tastes, skills and capabilities. As Limor Shifman clarifies,
sharing in this age stands both for distribution and consumption (Shifman, 2014).
Sharing is also a way to network because when you share (and share widely) you
also forge a network which spreads further depending on the amount of effort a user
puts into that sharing. Sanjeev Goyal describes a network as a collection of nodes
and links between them – individuals, firms, countries, or even a collection of such
entities (Goyal, 2007). He also focuses on how structures of relationships assisted by
such networks shape or influence individual behaviour in both a social and economic
context. This reading is in opposition to another network approach, the Actor-
Network Theory (ANT), which espouses a material semiotic method to understand
networks (Latour, 2014). ANT focuses on the relational ties within a network – “the
tracing of associations” (ibid.). With users sharing memes, naturally, the circulation
occurs within specific networks of individuals, and most of the time we find groups
affirming to a common interest in terms of acceptance of ideas and political voices in
order to belong to the socially desirable networks.
Ryan Milner introduces the concept of “polyvocality,” the possibility of a varied
range of voices to be heard, which is enabled by memes and other digital objects
(Milner, 2012). Even though as a concept it seems promising, in an economically weak
state its probability is questionable. Even when the infrastructure is in place, it is
not easy for the economically and socially marginalised to readily access information
58   Meme Collectives and Preferred Truths in Assam

owing to illiteracy or a lack of basic familiarity with the technology. In such regions,
a different form of digital literacy evolves. As late adopters, users often associate the
internet with social media since they access the internet’s possibilities only through
social media and smartphones. Even though mainstream media still exists as the vital
component of opinion formation, particularly in public discourse, new media and
its tools, such as memes, exist to dent its influence, questioning and – in this case –
even trolling it. For a new range of viewers, old media has become superfluous; an
unavoidable, non-functioning necessity. In contrast, new media is the alternative; the
substitute that they desire and one that they can customise.
Shifman observes how, in spite of the trend of a specific meme form, “the
common ideas and forms shared by many internet memes might tell us something
about digital culture” (Shifman, 2014). Memes do not exist in isolation. The sharing
of images, memes, statuses, reviews to release emotional sentiments, among others,
all contribute towards building the network. She considers this phenomenon as
emergent of a central cultural logic which goes beyond the “sharing economies”
(ibid.). In economic parlance, there is a value attached to such network formation.
We can observe this pattern of value-making explicitly in the phenomenon of virality
and which we often use as the barometer for measuring the success of online shared
content. As Manual Castells muses, the new technological regime also results in a
new networked, interdependent economy which ideally should encourage greater
productivity and efficiency and which, in turn and with the right conditions, gives
rise to equally dramatic organisational and institutional changes (Stark & Castells,
1997). However, memes, which distinctly rely on “networks of mediated cultural
participation in their creation, circulation, and transformation,” go beyond those
organisational changes (Milner, 2012). Memes have the potential to work on social
representations and public discourse owing to their informal engagement as an
everyday pop-cultural artefact. Their propagation through personal social networks
can simultaneously give birth to an alternate social voice, with both its advantages
and disadvantages.

5.3.1 Memes Experience and Existence: Offline Dynamics Acting on Memes

TAM, a vaguely defined acronym standing for multiple terms such as Trolls and Memes,
and Trolling Assamese Media among others, is a meme collective based in Guwahati,
Assam. It started by targeting local Assamese media extensively, and they pointed
out flaws in their shoddy reporting, factual incongruencies and grammatical errors.
Ironically their own memes had typographical errors and were poorly written most
of the time. There seemed to be a fascination with targeting individuals. Even when
talking about the media, the target was usually a particular reporter, owners of specific
 Akhil Gogoi, or How a Peasant Leader Became a Meme    59

news channels, activists and others. If Assamese journalist Hemen Rajbonshi14 was
the most trolled person in their memes in the early period of the group’s existence,
he was later replaced by activist Akhil Gogoi. Every time they targeted someone, they
garnered a group of users who shared the sentiment towards that person.
Furthermore, the group succeeded in creating an echo chamber of their own.
The pop-cultural rehashing of the politico-cultural events via such groups links
back to the question of trivialisation. However, it is this trivialisation that makes a
post or a meme go viral, and we can consider that these meme groups curate such
echo chambers based on their inherent politics and ideology. It further heightens the
societal divide between those with access and those without. In an already contested
terrain, access become the criteria for determining who is privileged and who is not.

5.4 Akhil Gogoi, or How a Peasant Leader Became a Meme

Memes certainly have a specific agenda and, not surprisingly, they thrive while
promoting that agenda in their own informal ways. Nevertheless, the Facebook
groups discussed in this chapter which create vernacular memes (hereon referred
to as meme collectives) generally deny any overt support for a particular ideology
or political preference. When questioned, they profess to stand for a more common
community approach with the primary purpose of being humorous in dealing with
everyday crises (Administrators, 2017). Treating social events through that prism, they
have their agenda in place, and this is reflected clearly in the kind of memes they
come up with. In this regard, there are numerous categories and subjects that such
meme collectives seem to favour. Considering the scope and limits of this chapter, I
am taking only one such category of meme as a case study – the category of memes
featuring peasant activist Akhil Gogoi. Gogoi is one of the most in-demand memeable
entities within this meme collective.
Akhil Gogoi memes are a special case because of what he is associated with and
how the collectives exploit their understanding of his politics. Gogoi is a well-known
peasant and Right To Information (RTI) activist in Assam, India. He is the president
of the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS) (Farmers’ Freedom Struggle Committee)
and a vehement critic of the right-leaning Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s
Party) that leads the government at the centre. His critics have attacked him for his
vitriolic speeches against the government’s decisions, particularly regarding the

14  In August 2015, Hemen Rajbongshi, a reporter with the local Assamese channel, Pratidin Time,
aired a news capsule on “scantily clad women” in Guwahati and described them as a nuisance during
summer time. He was referring to women who wore mini-skirts or any version of the skirts. The
viewers harshly criticised the sexist reporting on social media resulting in the birth of the “I am so
Assamese” memes.
60   Meme Collectives and Preferred Truths in Assam

granting of citizenship to Hindu Bangladeshis.15 The state has also accused him of
instigating people to take up weapons to attack the government’s “malicious intent.”
Considering the impact of Gogoi’s activism on Assamese society and politics, it is
not surprising that he is a regular feature in newspaper articles. What is interesting,
however, is how an agrarian peasant leader, far removed from social media, has
become one of the most popular memes in the region. Gogoi has been a meme-
friendly target of the Troll Assamese Media group since their inception in 2015. There
is a self-vigilante sense of justice in the tone used by the people behind such memes.
However, their notional value is contested owing to the collective’s general, overt
“ethno-nationalistic” leanings.
In this particular instance, the meme collective dissolves the public persona
of a well-known and respected activist with the active use of topical memes which
present a very different version of Gogoi – the activist. This section outlines the role
such contemporary forms of social digital objects play in driving a construction of
the image of specifically targeted individuals in Assam. This chapter assessed this
by observing the sharing and creation of memes on social media platforms such as
Facebook. In this way, apart from recognising the spatial and virtual connections
that appear within the meme-world, the segment also reveals the inherent potency
thriving in digital cultural objects and how they are employed to construct “preferred
truths” to a cluster of social groups.
The TAM collective has two administrators. Owing to the rampant online threats
they received, they asked to remain anonymous (Administrators, 2017). Both of them
claim to work in print media but lack any formal training in the field. The convergence
of print media and online media which led to the evolution of the collective could
also highlight the patterns of access in the state itself. Even though internet access
(primarily through mobile data) has increased, it is yet to replace print or other
traditional media. When I asked one of the administrators what led him to create the
group on Facebook, he replied, “During th(e) time Assamese media started yellow
journalism. First, we started by trolling media, and then we trolled issues based on
news. We have done it like a (sic) dynamism – to awaken people. To spread awareness
among commonality (sic)” (Administrators, 2017). Their rationale for choosing
Facebook as the platform and memes as the medium was that “Facebook is for
common people and memes can attract (sic) easily in an attractive way … there was
no such meme page in Assam then” (ibid.). What caught my attention, though, was
the passionate tone they used to explain their objective behind founding the group

15  In the 2014 General Election, the BJP government promised to amend the Citizenship Act, 1955
and introduced the Citizenship Amendment Bill of 2016 which will make illegal Hindus, Sikhs,
Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians migrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan eligible
for citizenship.
 Akhil Gogoi, or How a Peasant Leader Became a Meme    61

which was to tackle what they perceived as the misuse of journalism in victimising
people in a prejudicial manner.
From the example of the rise of the anti-Gogoi memes, what we can realise is
that the activities of such meme collectives are disturbing, especially considering
their trolling agenda. Their agenda seems innocuous and fun, but it is their political
underpinnings that actually drive the conversations. In the case of this group in
particular, the issues they project have a strong “Assamese identity, neglected state”
sentiment to it. They discuss the poor infrastructure in the state, parental pressure,
joblessness and unemployment and the underdeveloped media industry in general;
they vocally display their united hatred against Bangladeshis and their shared love
for Zubeen Garg16 and sports. All of these issues magnify the united identity of the
“typical” Assamese youth and also vouch for a right-wing inspired political ideology.
While the TAM collective refrains from claiming any political affiliation as such, they
have no qualms in attacking others because of their political affiliations. Meanwhile,
the popularity of the Akhil Gogoi memes which gradually grew to become a genre of
their own in the meme collective’s page reflects the value attached to what Gogoi-
bashing stands for and how it is successful as a perspective.
The increasing attacks on him in real life reflect the infamy of Akhil Gogoi on
the page. For those witnessing this phenomenon, the alarming question is whether
one is affecting the other or is it because Gogoi ceases to be of interest in real politics
that he becomes a staple on the online group’s page. Talking to the young people in
the group, it is interesting how the anarchism otherwise attributed to Gogoi become
tepid in comparison to the hatred they shower on him. Memes often appropriate
dominant discourse. However, Gogoi’s support base, which lies among the liberal
demography, draws a contradictory picture lauding him as “Assam’s new voice of
dissent” (Barbora, 2019). Diversity in any form of artefact circulation is important.
However, when the means to create memes is accessible only to a specific group of
people, the lack of diversity becomes troubling. It is a reminder of what Milner writes:
that in the competition of meme creation, even though there is scope for a variety
of perspectives to participate, it is only certain perspectives, values and references
which gain ground (Milner, 2012). Here the digital transformation has occurred at
a fast pace. However, users have difficulty coping with these transformations since
the development in access is incongruous to their literacy and economic growth.
Meanwhile, the creators of these online collectives have access to more resources and
knowledge, allowing them to direct the conversation in the way they want because
the majority of the consumers would not have the same agency and would be inclined
to accept the creator’s version as truth.

16  Zubeen Garg is a popular music artist from Assam. Garg is one of the most influential contemporary
representatives of Assamese culture and identity.
62   Meme Collectives and Preferred Truths in Assam

Figure 5.1: Akhil Gogoi Meme.

The original image in the meme (see figure 5.1) appeared for the first and only time
on Twitter when Goutam Baruah, a self-proclaimed Sanatan Hindu, posted it in
September 2016 right after the Kaziranga eviction incident. In his tweet he writes
“#Kaziranga Eviction Thnx AKHIL GOGOI 4 Uniting Assamese Ppl redardless (sic)
of Political Differences..Great Job Assam Govt” (sic) (Baruah, 2016). The TAM meme
collective rehashed the context of the image and used it numerous times on their page
to propagate Gogoi’s support for the illegal Bangladeshis. A sexual, more intimate
pretext is used to underline the image as a visible form of the meme. Two other memes
also establish a similar viewpoint of Gogoi demonstrating a deep, even sexual,
attraction towards Bangladeshi immigrants. According to Milner, “Memes were a
means to transform established cultural texts into new ones, to negotiate the worth
of diverse identities, and to engage in unconventional arguments about public policy
and current events. Memes were a mix of old inequalities and new participation”
(Milner, 2012). Others though, including Liesbet van Zoonen, have questioned this
position. Van Zoonen outlines how powerful institutions use populist forms of public
discourse to influence the public (Van Zoonen, 2006). With cases such as these, we
observe how emerging alternative media can also be used by individuals and groups
to manipulate people into spreading their preferred view of the world.
Geert Lovink points out that since most memes spread within specific bubbles
of people who share a viewpoint, the primary challenge lies in creating “bubble-
breaking memes” (Lovink, 2017). Lovink rightly observes the method of using memes
as a weapon, something exhibited in the US with the alt-right. According to him,
 Akhil Gogoi, or How a Peasant Leader Became a Meme    63

memes are weaponised “as in shitposting17 on Twitter, a form of cognitive denial-of-

service attack.” As he concludes, this sense of thematic identification is something
that glues the sharers of the memes together. The localisation of memes, thus, inertly
hints at the transformation of an original form, but a form which is nevertheless
malleable. Thus, we can assume societies favouring certain memes also believe in
their transformative potential. For example, sharing memes about consistent power
cuts in the region can perhaps help when they reach the right officials who can
improve the existing conditions so that the jokes about the problem no longer exist.
Alternatively, vilifying and belittling a peasant activist and his stances can ultimately
make him redundant and unnecessary in the eyes of the public. In a way, we can
interpret this as the users’ attempt to focus on issues which they imagine will improve
when they are repeatedly discussed or pointed out on social media.

5.4.1 The Media Event and the Meme

Does a meme function as an event itself? In May 2017, following a series of WhatsApp
circulated rumours, three men were lynched in Jharkhand’s Singbhum district on
suspicion of being child abductors (Special Correspondent, 2017). In Assam too, there
have been numerous similar reports where information shared via social media was
used to trigger incidents, including one identical to the Jharkhand incident (Karmakar,
2018; Anon., 2018; Anon., 2017). It is thus imperative to assess the effectiveness with
which memes may trigger events by taking up a fake issue or news and plastering it
over related images.
Moreover, its viral circulation makes its all the more probable for an event
to become bigger in scope and consequently reach a larger group of people. Even
though social media seems like a popular means to instigate or further prioritise a
current issue, holding memes single-handedly responsible for creating an event will
be too farfetched. Memes, though, act as indicators that gauge the importance of a
current issue. In the case of the Akhil Gogoi trolling, one can see it as propaganda;
an emotional, political issue is taken up and even mocked and associated with an
assortment of other agendas, to make the memes surface repeatedly. When trolling
him with that dose of humour and sarcasm, the desire is not only to make the collective
hatred escalate but also to make it palatable and far-reaching.
Just like memes, we can also study how a personal form of exchange can be made
responsible for a media event which is more public and widespread. It can thus be
seen as an atomic response accumulating to form an event. So, can a meme be simply
an agent of a media event and without the potential to be an event itself? To what

17  Shitpost is the internet slang for a  worthless  post  on a  message board,  newsgroup, or
other online discussion platform.
64   Meme Collectives and Preferred Truths in Assam

extent is a meme central to the mobilisation of issues? If designed and received in

the right way, a meme has immense potential to provide required value to a cause.
The importance of the event does not have to be grand or its scale large. It can be
local, or niche and its potency has to do with the impact it has – sometimes even
at an individual level in the real world as witnessed by the lynchings instigated by
WhatsApp rumours.
While a meme’s potential is difficult to fathom, and it is questionable whether one
meme alone can have a significant effect – sometimes its potential depends on the
ambition of its creator and the user-base. There is every possibility of players misusing
memes to a great extent, so we need to organise the meaning of the event itself if we
want to understand the meme as a media event. Currently, with the examples at hand,
a meme and its function are quite medium-specific. In other words, it transforms into
something depending on the desires of its sharer and user-base. To the rumourmonger
it is a vicious tool, to the exasperated armchair activist it is a cathartic rejoinder, to the
humour-loving general public it is more of alternative entertainment and a valid way
to contemporise their recreational media. Memes thus fall into the strange category
of malleable objects, just like their malleable selves – photoshopped countless times,
in numerous languages, the same image and the context may stand for one idea but
might be loaned to many.

5.5 Conclusion

This chapter discusses the potency of apparently mundane digital artefacts to come
together to reveal newer ways of expression and to emerge as the driving force behind
such participation. We can conclude that the ingrained socio-political notions of
online users steer obsessively popular meme topics and issues that ultimately ended
up as inconsequential material for consumption by online users. Through meme
collectives, the youth have found ways and means of fuelling old sentiments in a new
garb. In many other instances (not discussed in this particular chapter), memes have
highlighted burning issues in a way which makes them comprehensible and far more
accessible to a new user-base. In the process, it is also evident that contemporary
civil issues are morphed into their corresponding digital counterparts to suit current
times. However, while it acts as a critical stance to whatever seems to be the problem
at hand, it is also disturbing when the reins only seem to be available to a select few
and issues can be equally subsumed as made prominent. The chapter contemplated
how new media technologies bring change in the way small towns communicate,
particularly in the way in which they discuss crises. While the traditional way of
participation gets gradually but invariably transformed, particularly in the methods
chosen for communicating ideas and events, it is clear that only particular sentiments
and ideologies spread through these newer platforms. The creation of these platforms
References   65

helped in building a cultural autonomy for the people of the region and also allowed
for other controversial stances to exist and breed.
The growth of a new digital userbase participating, collaborating and building
a sense of presence allowed for peripheral voices to thrive through their own energy.
However, this occurred simultaneously with the proliferation of preferential views
and the ease in creating factions and in circulating them. Those with keyboards at
their fingertips had more say in this emergence. In this gradual transformation of
the socio-cultural space in Assam, memes exist as a potent pursuer, as an easy
catalyst extending the new media platform and encouraging the development
of a contemporary local vocabulary which is aspirational but also has a succinct
personality. While we cannot necessarily call memes tools of resistance, users do
employ them as an effective intervention, and on the global stage they present a
window for the local meme collectives’ agenda-setting capabilities.

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6 Insurgent Ways of Looking: Gendering the Witness
and the Land in the Visuality of Israel-Palestine

Liat Berdugo

In 2014, I was introduced to a special unit of exclusively female soldiers called

Tatzpitaniot (“The Watchers”) on a visit to an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) army base
in the occupied Palestinian Territories. As a woman and Israeli citizen myself, I have
long been interested in the Israeli military and its gendered roles: under Israeli law I
would have been conscripted into service, had my status as an American citizen and
resident not exempt me. My visit thus evoked in me a vision of a life that might have
been mine, but which I had, for better or worse, dodged.
It was vision, itself, that comprised the key task of these female soldiers whom
I visited. Their sole job was to watch live video streams of the IDF’s network of 1700
security cameras mounted along key sites in the West Bank and Gaza, in an effort
to surveil Palestinians and secure Israel’s borders (Harel, 2017). Often, these women
watch multiple screens at once, staring at video feeds for hours at a time as they scan
for movement. They report any “suspicious” visual activity to their army superiors,
who then order on-the-ground action when deemed necessary (Gross, 2015). Put
differently, the sole task of a Tazpitaniah, a “watcher,” is to weaponize her sense of
sight.
The assignment to the Tazpitaniot brigade is deeply unpopular among Israeli
conscripts. When a conscript asked on an online messaging board, “Is Tazpitanit an
intersting [sic] army role?” others replied with comments such as “If you hate yourself
then go there by all means,” and “It is [as] interesting as is watching paint dry in
real time... Get something else... Anything!” (“Is Tazpitanit an Intersting [sic] Army
Role?”) Young Israeli women share strategies for ‘failing’ the Tazpitaniot’s correlated
vision examinations, encouraging each other to pretend not to see the computerized
blinking cursors that test the accuracy and alacrity of their peripheral vision (Yom
Hame’ah, 2015). These potential Tazpitaniot feign a kind of momentary blindness – a
failure of vision that, I argue, has become a norm for Jewish Israelis wishing to ignore
the unsightly monstrosity that is the occupation (Berdugo, 2017).
To combat these negative stereotypes, the IDF recently produced a promotional
video titled “With Her Eyes She Defends Israel’s Borders” (2019), valorizing the work
of a watcher, a Tazpitaniah. The video features a single young woman in army fatigues,
appearing an ordinary Israeli teenage soldier in every respect. The video declares,
“She may look like any other soldier, but she has a secret weapon” – the camera
zooms in dramatically on her face before the narrator continues – “her eyes” (see
Figure 6.1). In this way, the video propagandizes her sense of sight, fully laminating
together vision with weaponry. If “winning is keeping the target in constant sight” as
Paul Virilio writes, then a Tazpitaniah must keep her eyes wide open (Virilio, 2009, p.
68   Insurgent Ways of Looking

2). One former soldier described that “Tazpitaniot are forbidden from looking away
from our screens, for even a second” (Silkoff, 2018).
Perhaps predictably, the video concludes with a close up of the soldier’s eyes.
The narrator says, “It’s thanks to women like her, who keep their eyes open, that
millions of Israelis can close their eyes safely every night.” The Tazpitaniah then
winks knowingly at the camera (see Figure 6.2). A wink is a momentary closure of the
eye, a flirt – a colluding gesture that accentuates the weapon she has sharpened to
protect her nation. Her wink, we are to understand, is not a blink; instead she keeps
one eye open at all times, training her watchful gaze on her target.

Figure 6.1: Video still from the Israeli Defense Forces’ video, “With Her Eyes She Defends Israel’s
Borders,” 2019.

Figure 6.2: Video still from the Israeli Defense Forces’ video, “With Her Eyes She Defends Israel’s
Borders,” 2019.
 A “One-Way Hierarchy of Vision”   69

The women-only IDF unit relies on troubling stereotypes of the exclusively feminized
eye as a maternal force of protection: a stereotype that extends responsibilities of
an essentialized feminine, watchful gaze over children to a gaze that watches over
territory. In Israel-Palestine, in a conflict that weaponizes and structures gazes
(Azoulay, 2008, 2011a; Hochberg, 2015; Maimon & Grinbaum, 2016; Berdugo, 2021), I
argue that there has been a particular focus on the vision of and visual documentation
produced by women as a problematically gendered force of protection. A woman’s
vision is celebrated as a militarized extension of the dominant Israeli scopic regime,
as with the Tazpitaniot; as a Palestinian counter-visual tactic celebrated by the human
rights group B’Tselem, which distributes cameras to Palestinians living in high-
conflict zones and gathers the footage. I show that in Israel-Palestine in particular,
this focus on women’s sight essentializes a long history of relating Zionism to the land,
with all the feminized ideas associated with the land-based focus on “mother earth”
or “mother nature” as a sustainer of people and the celebration of women’s roles in
Zionism as Haluzot (“female pioneers”). I critique such celebrations of women by
turning towards ecofeminist critiques, which teach us to consider the ways in which
women and the land have both been historically subjugated by a shared history of
oppression. Ultimately, I argue in favor of de-gendering vision and de-gendering the
land, instead towards a kind of sightline that celebrates a disobedient, insurgent way
of looking: one that visibilizes the very frame of sight, and of the camera, as a means
towards new kinds of resistance in conflict.

6.1 A “One-Way Hierarchy of Vision”

There is a striking similarity in looking down sightlines of a camera, and of a gun,

in what many scholars have described as the joint and mutually entwined history of
visuality and weaponry (Feldman, 1997; Sontag, 2002; Lebow, 2012). Virilio teaches
that violence and visuality are concomitant, stating, “For men at war, the function
of the weapon is the function of the eye” (2009, p. 26) This lethal mutuality has been
cemented for video cameras in particular, as the first motion picture camera was
invented to mimic the design of semi-automatic, revolving rifles (Lebow, 2012).
Drawing from this history, we can understand the role of “watchers” such as the
IDF’s Tazpitaniot not as an unexpected weaponization of sight, but a natural evolution
of the militarization of the gaze. In Israel-Palestine, this is a militarization that extends
to Israeli civilian bodies as well in an effort to surveil and control Palestinians.
Architect Eyal Weizman has noted that Jewish settlements are often placed on hilltops
or mountains, overlooking Palestinian villages that largely reside in the fertile valleys
below, and thus creating a distinctly vertical separation between populations even
as they are horizontally mixed (2007). In these settlements, the directions of roads,
plots, the houses, and windows within the houses all direct an Israeli civilian gaze
“out and down” over the Palestinian residents below, enlisting a civilian population
70   Insurgent Ways of Looking

to act as a watchful eye to monitor Palestinian action (Ibid., p. 132). Such settlements
have transformed the West Bank into a network of visual monitoring stations, staffed
by civilians who might also be “enjoying the view” (Ibid., p. 133).
However, Palestinians may not look at these Israeli Jewish settlements. According
to the rules of engagement as of 2003, IDF soldiers may shoot-to-kill any Palestinian
caught observing IDF activities near Israeli settlements with binoculars or in any other
“suspicious manner” (Harel, 2003) Jewish Israelis thus maintain what Eyal Weizman
has called a “one-way hierarchy of vision” over their Palestinian counterparts. Put
differently, Israelis dominate what Nicholas Mirzoeff has called the “right to look”
(2011), as a subset of a host of other visual rights: the right to see and to be seen;
rights to look and to surveil; rights to be out of sight (of surveillance, for instance);
and rights to have one’s image trusted (rather than subject to a “digital suspicion”
(Kuntsman & Stein, 2015) through claims of photoshopping, cropping, or falsification
in post-production). If “the gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates,” as Foucault has
written, then the seer has power over the seen (1994, p. 39). An uneven distribution
of power in the realms of economics, politics, natural resources, equality, and justice
within a conflict zone also reaches the realm of visuality itself.
It is against this backdrop that, in 2015 – the same year that YouTube was founded
and video was gaining prominence on the Internet – an Israeli NGO called B’Tselem
welcomed video into its repertoire by hiring a video coordinator and publicly
including its videos as a main navigational component on its website (B’Tselem,
2005a). B’Tselem, also called The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in
the Occupied Territories, was established in 1989 by a prominent group of attorneys,
academics, journalists, and Knesset members to document human rights violations
in the Occupied Territories (B’Tselem, 2005b). Before adopting video as a tactic,
B’Tselem published statistics, testimonies and eyewitness accounts, and reports in
an effort to create a human rights culture in Israel.
At first, B’Tselem’s videos were largely comprised of videotaped testimonies of
Palestinian victims, which bolstered the organization’s long-standing initiative to
collect written testimonies from across the Occupied Territories (B’Tselem, 2005c).
B’Tselem also produced short documentary videos that catalogued the hardships
that the occupation placed Palestinians (B’Tselem, 2006). B’Tselem housed the role
of its new video coordinator within its public relations department, signaling the
organization’s belief in the communicative potential of moving images.
In 2007, B’Tselem staff toured Hebron to see the conditions of Palestinians living
adjacent to Israeli settlements (Tarabieh, 2019). Due to frequent settler attacks and
stonings, Palestinian residents living in close proximity to the settlements were forced
to erect metal grates around their houses for protection. As a result of its tour, B’Tselem
resolved to give a video camera to one family who lived inside a “cage house”, the Abu
‘Ayeshas.
In January of 2007, a member of the Abu ‘Ayesha family filmed the “Sharmuta”
or “whore” video, a short clip in which an Israeli settler attempted to shut her into
 A “One-Way Hierarchy of Vision”   71

her house (“Sit here, in the cage!”) and then bullies her by calling her a “whore”
nine times in a hissing, menacing tone (B’Tselem, 2007). The Sharmuta video became
the first ever citizen-recorded video in B’Tselem’s camera distribution project and
circulated widely within Israeli and international media outlets, to the point that it
has become part of the Israeli lexicon (B’Tselem, 2009).
Thus the B’Tselem Camera Project was born, three years before the Arab Spring
brought vast attention to the power of technology in the hands of the oppressed.
Within its first year and a half, B’Tselem’s distributed over one hundred cameras to
Palestinian families in the Occupied Territories and hired two more staff members to
support its growth (B’Tselem, 2008a and 2008b). Today there are around two hundred
B’Tselem-issued cameras in the field, and B’Tselem has amassed an archive of over
4,500 hours of raw footage, which it keeps on a handful of different servers and in
rows of original magnetic tapes behind glass doors in its Jerusalem headquarters
(Tarabieh, 2019). B’Tselem’s Camera Project is notable for the consistency of its video
publication: the project has published an average of one video per week since its
conception, often adding subtitles and other demarcations for the public.18 Today,
B’Tselem’s website prominantly features a carousel containing video footage shot
by its volunteer videographers. On YouTube, B’Tselem’s channel has over 43,000
subscribers, and its most popular video has been viewed over 4 million times
(B’Tselem, 2017).
Notably, one thing that distinguishes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the freedom
to record. Israeli law is more lenient on recording in public than is the US state of
Massachusetts. In a letter from a Public Inquiries Officer, the IDF Central Command
states, “filming in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] is permitted, including filming of
IDF soldiers, so long as nothing about the filming interferes with the forces’ operations
or serves to collect classified information” (2009). Moreover, the volunteers who film
for B’Tselem sign an explicit legal document with the Israeli Defense Forces. Certain
things are off limits to the camera’s eye, such as court proceedings, army facilities,
any persons working for Israel’s internal security services (“Shabak” – similar to
America’s FBI), and checkpoints.
B’Tselem’s Camera Project was launched with the conviction that a Palestinian
with a camera reverses the normal order of domination under the Israeli occupation.
Likewise, the citizen with the cell phone video of the police reverses the normal
hierarchy of vision, which flows from state to people, from white to black. The reversal
of the typical one-way hierarchy of vision allows for a view into the slow, suspended
violence of the Israeli occupation (Azoulay & Ophir, 2005). Yet, importantly, the
majority of B’Tselem videos are not leveraged as proof of Israeli criminality. Instead,

18  As of August 2019, B’Tselem had uploaded 631 videos to its YouTube channel, for an average of
1.01 videos per week in the twelve years since its founding. The remainder of the unpublished footage
is viewable in B’Tselem headquarters with prior permission.
72   Insurgent Ways of Looking

they are mobilized as exculpatory evidence on behalf of Palestinians, themselves,

who seek to prove their own assumed criminal bodies to be innocent (see also Finn,
2009). “When you are a Palestinian living in a place like Hebron, you are considered
by the Israelis to be guilty unless proven innocent,” said former B’Tselem volunteer,
Issa Amro. He continued: “… for us, the cameras are not only a way to document
events but also to protect ourselves when false complaints are made against us by
Israeli soldiers.” Amro summed up what I heard from many B’Tselem volunteers in
the field: the Palestinian video camera serves as a digital alibi.19

6.2 A Woman’s Camera

B’Tselem volunteer videographers frequently referenced the exculpatory, defensive

power of their cameras. Palestinian women, especially, speak of the camera as giving
them strength, as if it were a shield or a piece of armor to deflect Israeli state violence.
Among the B’Tselem volunteers, women have been growing in number in recent years,
with 49% of the Camera Project’s training sessions including women as of B’Tselem’s
most recent annual report (B’Tselem, 2018). B’Tselem makes an intentional effort
to recruit women as volunteers by offering female-only training courses, and by
appointing women as high-level paid employees for the Camera Project (Ginsburg,
in press). Traditional Palestinian culture, which retains a rather conservative and
patriarchal stance on women’s roles (Baxter, 2007), was at first resistant to women’s
involvement as B’Tselem volunteer videographers. 20 Yet recently, as these roles have
been shifting, women with cameras have reported that their activities with cameras
have become accepted and even praised within their communities (M. al-Ja’bri, 2019;
A. al-Ja’bri, 2019; Jaber, 2019).
A B’Tselem volunteer named Khadrah ‘Abd al-Karim from the Palestinian village
of ‘Asirah al-Qibliyah near Nablus, frequently videotapes the attacks from the nearby
extremist Jewish settlement of Yitzhar.21 Al-Karim has been filming for B’Tselem since
2008, just one year after the Camera Project first launched. She said:

19  For more on the exculpatory role of the B’Tselem camera, see Berdugo 2021, and specifically the
2012 case of Palestinian teenager ‘Abd al-’Aziz Fakhouri.
20  The women videographers who film for B’Tselem told me that these traditional gender roles vary
from city to city and region to region. For instance, the videographers in Hebron feel these roles limit
them more strongly than their counterparts in the Nablus area.
21  Yizhar is particularly known for its retaliatory Tag Mechir or Price Tag attacks, in which extremist
Israeli settlers seek to harm and vandalize Palestinians and their property as a ‘price’ for Palestinian
violence or for anti-settlement activity more generally.
 A Woman’s Camera   73

Filming the images is helpful to us. It has given me inner strength. I’m no longer scared. When
they [Israeli settlers or soldiers] come, I go out. I used to hide when the soldiers came by. Now, I
go outside with my husband. It has helped me very much on a personal level (B’Tselem, 2014b).

Likewise, a volunteer named Lubna Saleh, began filming with a B’Tselem camera in
2007, after Israeli settlers set her family’s car on fire. While she had previously felt a
kind of fear of the settlers that kept her sealed within the domestic realm of her home,
her camera has liberated her. She said:

I used to be scared to go out and face them [the settlers]. Now I’m not scared to go out and film….
True, I worry about getting injured, but I am more concerned about my children…. Sometimes,
men ask me why I film. I tell them: to protect my home and my children (B’Tselem, 2014c).

To Saleh, the purpose of filming is to protect her domestic sphere (her home, her
children). The camera has become a shield that safeguards the very realm over which
she, as a woman, is traditionally held responsible. B’Tselem has made a point to
call out women as the bearers of a particularly significant and unique burden of the
Occupation’s human rights violations:

Women are the ones who must find a way to run a household without regular or sufficient water.
Women are the ones in charge of caring for children and they are the ones who must obtain food
if their homes are demolished. Women are also usually the ones at home during settler attacks,
so they are the ones who must shield their children (B’Tselem, 2014a).

In a traditional, patriarchal society, the realm of the woman is the home; yet the
women from the village of ‘Asirah al-Qibliyah describe exiting the home in order to
film with their B’Tselem cameras. They speak of “going out” or “going outside” the
home as a marked difference from their previous actions of “hiding” inside their
domestic spaces, feeling “scared.” Khadrah ‘Abd al-Karim even intimated the outside
realm as a distinctly masculine location when she said, “Now, I go outside with my
husband.” ‘Outside’ is the public sphere in which her husband appears, and in which
she now joins because of her camera.
Many women volunteers who film for B’Tselem chose not to leave the home. Scholar
Ruthie Ginsburg has researched the phenomenon of Palestinian women who film out
their windows, making their own very private spheres sites for anti-colonial activism
(Ginsburg, 2016). Of course, their homes are never quite private; the Palestinian home
is constantly subject to the intrusion of the Israeli colonizing power, which ‘makes
its presence felt’ through house searches, seizures, and demolition threats. But when
women film out their windows, they achieve a superior perspective of ‘looking down’
at activity on the street, as if with the powerful view of Israeli hilltop settlements,
just for a moment. Moreover women who film out their windows remain in their
own distinct space, separate from the action ‘out there’. Their acts of documentation
therefore cannot be inhibited by physical assaults on the camera (such as grabbing,
hitting, or breaking) because the camera resides in a separate space from the action.
74   Insurgent Ways of Looking

As Ginsburg has noted, a woman’s “distinct space functions as a camera obscura – a

darkroom where she sees and is unseen, watching the event without being a part of
it” (Ibid., p. 49). In these cases, the Palestinian woman recording activates a mode of
visual documentation in which, to put it crudely, her gender “protects” her footage.
The director of B’Tselem’s video department, Ehab Tarabieh, reported that women
currently comprise 40% of the Camera Project’s volunteer videographers (2019). When
asked of the growing number of women who volunteer, Tarabieh said, “Recently we
want this,” explaining that he believed these women to be “more calm” and not
feeling the (implied masculine) urge to get involved in the altercations they record,
therefore producing what he deemed “better” footage (Ibid.). Tarabieh said that most
of B’Tselem’s published footage has been recorded by women. B’Tselem celebrates
women’s participation in the Camera Project by featuring them in “campaigns, in
articles and broadcasts that appear in the media, on the organization’s blog, and in
film festivals” (Ginsburg, in press, p.2) Tarabieh said to me, “Our dream [with the
Camera Project] is to have only women,” as they film much “better” than their male
counterparts (2019).
Taken together, these personal comments and institutional celebration of the
female videographer gesture towards something essential in women that produce the
superior visual documentation of the Israeli occupation. While perhaps appearing
feminist on the surface, this stance of celebration serves to gender the role of the
witness – even as she wields the powerful video camera as a tool and weapon. While
we might think B’Tselem’s radical, counter-visual practices work “against the grain of
normative representation,” Ginsburg notes that the celebration and essentialization of
women’s visual documentation as providing a superior or unique perspective entails
a problematic gendering that functions within – and problematically encourages –
normative representations of women in zones of conflict (in press, p. 18).

6.3 Women’s Ethical Agency in Conflict

Conflict, it is often said, is a man’s fault (as in, “Men start wars”). While sounding
trite, scholars have long researched the ways in which women and men are treated
differently in war. R. Charli Carpenter’s research shows that women are more likely
to be deemed civilians than men (2006). To the category of women, she adds other
populations that are likely to be considered civilians, no matter their context:
children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled. Put differently, in conflict “femininity
and masculinity are often coded: the former as civilians, the latter as combatants”
(Ginsburg, in press, pp. 7–8).
Moreover, women in conflict are more likely to be portrayed as victims than their
male counterparts. Wendy Hesford has noted that the Palestinian sufferer is visibilized
as a feminized victim with whom a viewer should sympathize (2011). Hesford has
noted that this feminization of the victim is problematic for its re-inscription of the
 Watching the Land   75

spectator’s Western and neoliberal values on the subject, thus confining her (often
non-Western) body to a violently partialized set of comprehensions. Indeed, B’Tselem’s
portrayal of women as innocent parties who, as Ginsburg notes, “should be shielded
from violence and saved” (Ginsburg, in press, pp. 10–11) further problematizes the
gendered portrayal.
I’d like to focus on the notion of a shield, for a moment, as an object of protection
which the feminized victim lacks, but deserves as a civilian wishing to remain safe in
times of conflict. A shield is, by definition, an object of protection. The classic shield
is a large piece of metal that one wears to protect against bodily harm (from a blow, or
a projectile weapon). Shields therefore function in a necessarily preventative manner.
Shields act as defenses, not offenses: they assume a kind of danger ‘out there’ from
which the body requires protection. B’Tselem volunteer Shuruk Saleh describes how
she “goes out” to the public realm of appearances to “defend [her] rights” with her
camera. Indeed, the English word shield derives from the proto-Indo-European word,
*(s)kelH-, meaning to “split” or “divide,” as if to separate the interior vulnerability
of the body from the violence of the exterior world. It is notably radical to portray
the danger as ‘out there’, outside of Palestinian homes and instead in the space of
appearances dominated and controlled by Jewish Israelis: such a portrayal reverses
the occupation’s narrative that it is Palestinians who are alien and violent intruders
into Jewish Israeli space, and must, for instance, be kept in their place by an eight
meter tall separation wall. Yet the very idea of a woman’s need for a shield or defense
plays into the idea that women are innocent civilians, victims, and generally lacking
in political agency within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

6.4 Watching the Land

Allow me a brief detour to another zone of conflict: the contentious border between
the United States and Mexico, where, in 2006, a program was founded to allow
remote, civilian monitoring of the border in an American effort to curtail illegal
immigration. A network of 200 security cameras were mounted along Texas’s Rio
Grande river, and were live-streamed online via a website called BlueServo.net (Moll,
2014). On BlueServo, citizens could flag and report suspicious activity, which was then
sent to the corresponding Texas sheriff’s office. The project transformed everyday
civilians into a “Virtual Border Patrol” (or as the website called them, “virtual Texas
deputies”) who aided US law enforcement agents (Burnett, 2009). While the program
ended in 2012 due to lack of funding, its website is still active and accepting new
user registrations, even though its “live” camera feeds are now reruns (Texas Border
Watchers BlueServo). At its height, though, BlueServo boasted involvement by over
203,000 volunteer watchers, representing an estimated 1 million hours in free labor
for the Texas Sheriff (Moll, 2014).
76   Insurgent Ways of Looking

Popular reporting on BlueServo focused on the role of women as watchers of the

US border. Lori Andrews reported on an Oklahoma woman “who visits BlueServo
each night after work and also tracks bald eagles online” and proclaimed, “‘I watch
eagles and illegals. That’s a fun thing to do’” (2012, p. 7). CNN focused its coverage on
a “suburban stay-at-home mom” from Rochester, New York named Sarah Andrews,
who spent at least four hours a day watching BlueServo (Suttler, 2009). According to
CNN’s reporting – which was quoted and circulated in major US news outlets such
as The New York Times – Andrews used to watch the border “when her baby girl
takes an afternoon nap,” shifting her maternal, watchful gaze away from her daughter
and directly towards the land, in what can only be described as a stunning feminized
understanding of watching that echoes the Israeli Defense Force’s Tazpitaniot brigade
(Ibid.).22 Sarah Andrews and the all-female Tazpitaniot unit do not “guard” like
soldiers, nor do they “defend” like Border Patrol agents; instead they “watch,” like
babysitters.23
Palestinian women who film for B’Tselem also watch over the land with the eye
of their lenses. In the more rural villages surrounding Nablus and South Hebron Hills,
B’Tselem cameras are given to families living at the fringes of their villages who often
are the first ones attacked by Israeli settlers nearby (a-Deb’I, 2019). Unlike B’Tselem
volunteers who film in dense urban areas such as Hebron, these volunteers use tripods
to stabilize their cameras as they record distant, sweeping, and often zoomed-in shots
of their villages’ land, its school, and agricultural or grazing fields that comprise their
livelihood. Their use of tripods transforms their cameras into something more akin to
mounted security cameras, aimed to watch the land and violations of it.
In unpublished footage from May of 2015, a B’Tselem volunteer named Thawra
‘Eid filmed young Israeli settler children who had descended from a nearby Jewish
settlement to launch an attack on her Palestinian village of Burin. Thawra films
the wide expansive landscape between her home and the hill above as one of the
settler children slingshots rocks in her direction (see Figure 6.3). As another example,

22  When asked why she watches the US-Mexican border, Andrews cited two reasons: first, she hoped
her watchful eye would prevent drugs from reaching New York via Mexico; second, she describes
herself as “nosy about what’s going on” along the border.
23  A discussion of feminized watchers in Israel-Palestine would be incomplete without mention of
Machsom Watch (“Checkpoint Watch”), a volunteer organization of Israeli women who have been
observing the “West Bank checkpoints, the separation fences, the agricultural gates, the military
courts and Palestinian villages”# since 2001 as anti-occupation peace activists aiming to influence
public opinion against the occupation and to curtail bad action by the Israeli soldiers they watch.
The group is comprised of primarily female retirees, meaning a generation of women who could be
the soldiers’ mothers. They say, “When we look at the soldiers as our sons, part of our flesh and
blood, the next generation – we fear the mental experience they have to go through and the ethical
values they trample on during the military service in the Occupied Territories” (Machsom Watch, cited
in Ginsburg, 2011). In this way, their watching ties explicitly to babysitting. For more on Machsom
Watch, see Halperin (2007), Carter Hallward (2008), and Kutz-Flamenbaum (2012).
 Watching the Land   77

a B’Tselem volunteer named Wydian Zaben filmed Israeli settlers as they torch the
fields around Burin (see Figure 6.4). She documents the land to protect it, and to
incriminate the settlers who aim to annihilate it. In both clips, we hear the women’s
children speaking in the background, reminding us that their gaze has not drifted
far from their domestic life or indeed that they may be watching the land and their
children, simultaneously.
I visited the homes of both Thawra and Wydian in 2019, accompanied by
B’Tselem’s field coordinator for the Nablus region named Salma a-Deb’i. Both women
live at the outskirts of their Palestinian village that occupies a small fertile valley
near Huwwara. As land became more expensive in the village, families like theirs
began settling the hillsides of the valley, closer to the Jewish settlements and illegal
Jewish outposts that sprung up on the hilltops above their village. Both Thawra and
Wydian suffer from close proximity to the settler attacks, but also enjoy the scopic
benefit of sweeping views of the village’s land – views that are not beautiful nor
enjoyable, but instead dangerous, heartbreaking, and rife with violence. Moreover,
as mothers, both women frequently film attacks on Burin’s single school which
both their children attend, and which their homes look down upon with a clear
unobstructed line of sight. Both women record Israeli settler attacks on the school
from their homes.

Figure 6.3: B’Tselem volunteer Thawra ‘Eid zooms in on Israeli settler children who are attacking her
Palestinian village of Burin by throwing stones with slingshots, May 20, 2015, © B’Tselem.
78   Insurgent Ways of Looking

Figure 6.4: B’Tselem volunteer Wydian Zaben films Israeli settlers torching the fields around her
Palestinian village of Burin, Aug 15, 2015, © B’Tselem.

The settler violence in Burin is characteristic of a conflict entailing history of land

disputes (Gerner, 1994; Caplan, 2011; Gelvin, 2014). Early Zionist efforts focused on
land ownership and cultivation as a key feature of a new Jewish State. As Emanuela
Rubenstein noted, “in the eyes of Herzl and his contemporaries, productivity meant
one thing: engaging in agriculture” (Rubinstein, 2015). Agriculture was considered
the key activity that transformed the character of the weak, urban Jew into a ‘Sabra’,
a ‘new Jew’ who became strong, self-sufficient, and productive.
The shift towards agriculture entailed a shift in gender roles, as well. Eran Kaplan
has written that mainstream Zionism entailed the “creation of a new society that
would challenge traditional (diaspora) social divisions, including gender” instead
fostering the images of “halutzim (male pioneers) and halutzot (female pioneers, see
Figure 6.5) who together conquered the Palestinian wilderness” – a wilderness that
was characterized as unproductive and barren by a Jewish colonial gaze (Kaplan,
2001, p. 12 ) The most radical experiment in gender equality was the Labor Zionist
agricultural communes, or Kibbutzim, which boasted a view of women as equal to
their male counterparts. Revisionist Zionists, on the other hand, continued to view the
land as a distinctly “masculine sphere of play” whose boundary was extradomestic,
while women remained relegated to the home and the family (Ibid., p. 14). However,
even then, women were called upon to participate in “building the land” to serve the
growing needs of the Jewish state (Kark, 2004, p. 139).
 Watching the Land   79

Figure 6.5: “The Po’alot (female workers) in the agricultural settlement Ayanot,” Jan 2, 1940. Source:
Schwartz Tel Aviv. From the The Jewish National Fund (JNF) Photographic Archive.

Yet if Zionism’s inclusion of women in the public sphere could be considered feminist,
it was only conditionally so. Zionism’s early focus was wedded to land, and women
were portrayed as essential to Zionism; yet, women were still characterized as having
an essentially feminine connection to the land: a connection that served to sustain the
next generation of the Israeli state through the dual responsibilities of motherhood
and subsistence farming. Like the feminized conceptions of “mother earth” or “mother
nature,” Zionism fetishied women for their unique and essentialized relationship to
children in the same way that it fetishised their unique and essentialized relationship
to the land. This view was mirrored by NGOs in the 1980s, teaches Melissa Leach,
who “put forward the view that women were the primary users and managers of the
environment at the local level” (Leach, 2007, p. 69; see also Dankelman & Davidson,
1988; Rodda, 1991). At this time, NGOs around the world argued that women’s work
tied them intimately to the environment, especially in “reproductive and subsistence-
focused activities” (Leach, 2007, p. 69).
At the same time as early Zionist factions were establishing themselves, Jewish
organizations – most notably, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) – were founded to buy
and develop land for Jewish settlement in Israel-Palestine. The JNF was founded in
1901 in what was then Ottoman Palestine, later British Mandate for Palestine. Together
with its parent organization, today the JNF owns 93% of the land of Israel, which
cannot be leased to foreigners, non-Jews, or Palestinians (Israel Land Authority,
80   Insurgent Ways of Looking

2013). Notably, the JNF executed large campaigns of afforestation – distinct from the
more common reforestation, which is planting trees where they once grew – instead
introducing “trees to sites that never supported forests, or had no forest cover for
a long period of ecological time” (Nyland, 1996). The JNF solicited donations from
diasporic Jewry for its campaigns via its iconic blue donation boxes, to great effect
and financial solvency. Today, many Jews donate money so that trees may be planted
in Israel-Palestine in honor of loved ones or familial lifecycle events, and many even
travel to Israel to plant the trees with their own hands (Jewish National Fund, n.d.).
In the early years, the JNF planted olive and fruit trees because of their romantic
biblical associations (Stemple, 1998). But these trees required a lot of care. Therefore
in the 1920s, the JNF switched to Aleppo pine trees (or Pinus halepensis), which
became the main tree planted because it grew quickly and “suited the European
image of a proper forest” (Shoham, 2017, p. 80). Others claim that the Pine was chosen
for the acidic deposits its needles leave on the ground, which prevents undergrowth
and deprives Palestinian shepherds of pasture (Weizman, 2007). The problematic
focus on monoculture has created massive “Pine deserts” that now dominate Israeli
forests, making them ecologically susceptible to devastating wildfires (Osem et al.,
2011). Moreover, as of research released in 2014, more than two-thirds of the JNF forest
sites are located on ruins of former Palestinian villages. In other words, the trees have
been structurally planted to efface the visual traces of prior Palestinian inhabitation
within the State of Israel (Ibid.; see also Weizman, 2007 and Berdugo, 2020).
What is striking about the violent colonialism of these JNF forests is the very
innocence – and generally presumed goodness – of the simple act of planting a tree.
This optimism is epitomized by the dedication of the book, Trees as Good Citizens,
which is offered up in celebration of “every man, woman and child who plants a
tree” (Pack, 1922).24 Likewise the US Secretary of Agriculture once proclaimed, “Every
tree is beautiful, every grove is pleasant, and every forest is grand; the planting and
care of trees is exhilarating and a pledge of faith in the future” (U.S. Department of
Agriculture Forest Service, 1905, p. 10). Trees are held to be uncomplicatedly positive,
and those who plant them are good. In this way they map cleanly on to the gendering
of civilians in war: like a tree, a woman is presumed to be an innocent and vulnerable
bystander – a victim just like the very scars left on a landscape itself. Certainly plants
hold scars and other memories of damage. In the former village of Deir Yassin, twenty
Palestinians were shot to death by Israeli paramilitary forces, with the fatal bullets
piercing the prickly pear hedges behind them (see Figure 6.6). The cactus lived on,
bearing the marks of this violence like a shadow, like a ghost.

24  This book even opens one of its chapters with the following poem: “What does he plant who
plants a tree? / He plants, in sap and lead and wood, / In love of home and loyalty, / And far-cast
thought of civic good / His blessing on the neighborhood” (p. 23).
 An Ecofeminist Critique of the Feminized Witness   81

Figure 6.6: Deir Yassin (also transliterated as Dayr Yasin), Associated Press, April 1948.

6.5 An Ecofeminist Critique of the Feminized Witness

The feminized land, the feminized witness: ecofeminists would argue that both
have been subjected to what Melissa Leach calls “a shared history of oppression by
patriarchal institutions and dominant western culture” (2007, p. 70). From an over
forty-year history of ecofeminist scholarship we are taught that women and nature
share a mutual state of oppression from male-dominated society: women and nature
are both seen as property, for instance; moreover, in the same way that men dominate
women, humans dominate nature. In this way, the vast afforestation campaigns
led by the JNF are part of an effort to dominate nature. Similarly, the subjugation of
women to the role of passive “watchers” are part of systematic efforts to dominate or
contain them under the patriarchy. Put differently, both women and nature have been
82   Insurgent Ways of Looking

subjected to what feminist philosopher Val Plumwood has called “the standpoint of
mastery” of the self to the other, involving “seeing the other as radically separate
and inferior, the background to the self as foreground.” (Plumwood, 1993; Plumwood,
1996; Griffin, 2001, p. 284).
Against the backdrop of an ecofeminist critique, we can see that notions of
women as possessing a natural or special relationship with the environment must be
challenged alongside notions that women possess a special or uniquely innate ability
to watch – especially over the land, itself – and to produce visual documentation of what
they see. Instead, what might it look like to treat Palestinian women camerapersons
as frontline defenders of human rights, who, like their male counterparts, record to
oppose the occupation? In a 2016 panel that followed a screening of women-recoded
B’Tselem videos at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, one of the woman videographers was
asked whether her ‘womanness’ uniquely affected her videos. Ginsburg described
that this woman answered, without hesitation, “No, I just was there” (Ginsburg, in
press, pp. 12–13). Indeed, what if Palestinian women videotape spectacular footage of
the Israeli occupation because it is a horrific, monstrous spectacle of an occupation?
Ecofeminists would argue that the notion of a uniquely feminized witness, who
produces uniquely superior documentation, must be decommissioned as a mere social
construction. An ecofeminist critique would further argue that such a conception
of a woman B’tselem videographer is intricately and intersectionally linked to the
subjugation of the land as a feminized and controllable commodity – a thing that can
be afforested, sculpted, bought, owned, and fought over.

6.6 Towards an Insurgent Way of Seeing

In San Francisco’s Prelinger Library, I came across a book titled Should Trees Have
A Standing?, published by legal scholar Christopher Stone in 1974, the same year
that French writer Françoise d’Eaubonne coined the term ecofeminism. Stone’s book
argues that trees and other natural objects should have their own legal rights, just as
people and even corporations do. Trees could then claim damages when they were cut
down; streams could demand reparations for pollution; and natural objects in general
would have rights to “seek redress on their own behalf” through lawyers (Stone, 1974,
p. 17). Perhaps this sounds absurd, but “each time there is a movement to confer rights
onto some new ‘entity’ the proposal is bound to sound odd or laughable,” wrote Stone
(Ibid., p. 8). Certainly at one point it was laughable to bestow rights onto women,
slaves, persons of color, and the incarcerated25; certainly, it is considered laughable
under the current Israeli government to bestow rights to occupied Palestinians. Stone
explains that this “is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we

25  One could argue that those rights have never been properly bestowed.
 Towards an Insurgent Way of Seeing    83

cannot see it as anything but a thing for those of us who are holding rights at the time”
(Ibid.). Rights give ‘things’ agency to be more than things. Rights remove ‘thingness’,
transforming things into bodies, entities, and states.
Palestinian women who film for B’Tselem are made into things twice over. First,
they are ‘thing-ed’ by the Israeli regime by their status as Palestinians, who lack rights
generally considered to be universally human under the UN’s Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (UN General Assembly, 1948). Secondly, these women are ‘thing-ed’
by the valorization of their position as feminized watchers, as feminized watchers and
feminized producers of visual documentation. Contemporary Palestinian feminists
remind us, though, that the primary cause of Palestinian women’s subjugation –
and Palestinian society more broadly – is the Israeli occupation, not their status as
women (Sayigh, 1981; Souad, 1994; Jad, 1995; Allabadi, 2008; Rought-Brooks et al.,
2010). These feminists – together with ecofeminists – beg the question: what might it
look like, visually, to treat the Israeli occupation itself as the preeminent subjugator
of women B’Tselem volunteers? How might it appear to pay attention, with a sincere
attention to vision and visuality, to Palestinian visual documentation of the Israeli
occupation?
Following scholars like Judith Butler (2004, 2009) and Ariella Azoulay (2008,
2011b), I argue that what is needed is an insurgent way of seeing: a kind of vision that
acts contrary to the dominant political regime by visibilizing the frames of images
themselves – or to use Azoulay’s terminology, that considers the photographic event
as a whole, not merely the image that results from a photographic act. This kind of
seeing is rebellious in its opposition to established norms and dominant scopic and
political paradigms. Indeed, it is a shift in comprehension of what injustices these
images seek to remedy, from what legal scholar Nancy Fraser defines as ordinary-
political misrepresentation to the much more severe metapolitical injustice (2008).
Injustices of ordinary-political misrepresentation are injustices in which a civil
society and its government denies people who are generally agreed to be members
of that society the opportunity to participate in decision making, as peers or equals.
As Fraser describes, these political injustices occur within political societies “whose
boundaries and membership are widely assumed to be settled” (Ibid., p. 407). For
instance, ordinary-political misrepresentational injustice occurs when a citizen is
denied a fair trial under law, for instance. Such injustices occur “when a polity’s rules
for decision making deny some who are counted in principle as members the chance
to participate fully…” (Ibid.). The citizenship or membership of such a person into
a political community has not been called into question, as it is generally agreed.
Instead, the injustice occurs from the mistreatment of that citizen by the polity.
The second and more severe level on injustice is one in which civil society and its
government wrongly draw the boundaries of citizenship. This kind of injustice, called
metapolitical injustice, entails the denial of civil membership to a population, or the
denial of its opportunity to participate in what Fraser calls “authorized contests over
84   Insurgent Ways of Looking

justice” such as elections (Ibid., p. 408).26 Metapolitical injustice arises “as a result of
the division of political space into bounded polities” or when “a polity’s boundaries
are drawn in such a way as to wrongly deny some people the chance to participate
at all in its authorized contests over justice” (Ibid.). In such cases, a person is not
simply denied the right to ordinary-political representation, but denied the very right
of constituting a body that is entitled to political representation at all. Here I think of
the American civil rights movement, and its work against the mischaracterization of
African-Americans as non-Americans who were not entitled to the right to vote. This
kind of justice is a second-order injustice. It is meta political, of a higher order than
the realm of the political, itself. This injustice is perpetrated by an act of misframing
persons outside of the edges of the political, as if pushing them outside the boundaries
of a frame, a photograph.
Just as ecofeminists teach us that what is needed to protect ecology is not a
feminized conception of nature, I have shown that what is needed is not a celebrated
feminized witness. Instead, what is needed is an insurgent, disobedient way of
seeing that conceptualizes events captured as metapolitically unjust. Put differently,
what is demanded by this way of seeing is not a celebration of the female witness,
the female gaze, or the feminized connection to nature; instead, this way of seeing
consider the frame of the image to be the problem, itself. This is, ultimately, a way
of seeing that elevates citizen videography in zones of conflict to engage in radically
new possibilities of resistance.

Acknowledgements

I thank the staff and volunteers at B’Tselem for their generosity and accomodation,
which has made this research possible. Thank you to my Arabic language translator,
Yuval Orr; and to the Dorot Foundation whose funding has enabled portions of this
research.

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7 Gender and Race in the Digital Town Hall: Identity-
Based Attacks Against US Legislators on Twitter

Sarah Sobieraj and Shaan Merchant

7.1 Introduction

In August 2018, amidst an unprecedented number of women running for public office
in the US, the New York Times released a video of current and former female candidates
talking about their experiences with harassment and sexism, much via social media,
during their campaigns (Kerr, Tiefenthäler, & Fineman, 2018). Throughout the video,
the women describe abuse that is gendered and racialized. Among the women in
the video is Iowa Democrat Kim Weaver, who pulled out of her 2016 congressional
race amid a torrent of sexist and anti-Semitic abuse (Astor, 2018). There is ample
reason to believe racist and sexist abuse plague white women and people of color
once they hold office as well. In 2017, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand received a throng of
sexist tweets after she called for Senator Al Franken’s resignation. And as recently
as June 2018, after Representative Maxine Waters called for lay people to confront
Trump administration representatives in public, she faced such intimidation on- and
offline that she cancelled two speaking engagements out of concern for her safety.
This is not unique to politicians in the US. In 2016, British Member of Parliament
Jess Phillips received 600 rape threats on Twitter in one day in response to strongly
worded remarks she made about sexism from the left (Elliot & Turner, 2017).
Previous research has identified abuse of politicians on social media but has
not identified – and in some cases not looked for – racial or gender differences. The
anecdotal evidence above, coupled with recent research documenting widespread
digital harassment of people of color and white women in arenas ranging from gaming
(Gray, 2012; Fox & Tend, 2017) and academia (Ferber, 2018; Veletsianos et al., 2018)
to journalism (Gardiner, 2018; Adams, 2018; Chen et al., 2018), suggests systematic
research is needed to explore how participation in digital publics differs for political
figures from historically underrepresented demographic groups. This research mines
the content of tweets containing @mentions to 16 US legislators, revealing that male
and female politicians on social media navigate very different digital worlds. What’s
more, we find particularly egregious hostility directed at female legislators of color,
much of it explicitly identity-based, drawing on racist and sexist stereotypes and
epithets to discredit, intimidate and shame the recipients.
These unevenly distributed consequences of public service represent tangible
evidence of patterned resistance to political voice and visibility of those from
historically underrepresented groups. This abuse undoubtedly has a variety of
personal and political costs for the legislators targeted for attack, but we must also
90   Gender and Race in the Digital Town Hall

consider the social costs: as a result of this blowback, we lose qualified candidates
and hear a narrower range of perspectives. The macro and micro implications of this
hostile work environment will need to be explored more fully, as leaving Twitter,
YouTube, and Facebook are not practical options in a political context where the
populace increasingly gets information via social media platforms and evidence
mounts that a robust social media presence helps candidates win elections.

7.2 Literature

There is a burgeoning body of literature that explores politicians’ use of social media,
particularly its role in campaigning (e.g. Bimber, 2014; Evans et al., 2014; Jungherr,
2015; Sweetser & Lariscy, 2008) and constituent interaction (e.g. Jackson & Lilleker,
2011; Larsson & Øyvind, 2013; Waisbrod & Amado, 2017). Research shows that most
political leaders prefer to use these platforms to broadcast, showing greater interest in
one-way communication than in engaging voters or constituents (Gibson et al., 2014;
Graham et al., 2013; Hoffmann & Suphan, 2016; Lev-On, 2011; Sweetser & Lariscy,
2008). This is not particularly surprising given that members of the general public
often respond to politicians in hostile, even abusive, ways. Most politicians in the US
have experience with combative town hall meetings, uncomfortable encounters while
canvassing, and being on the receiving end of rancorous phone calls. Lambasting and
jeering politicians is not a new phenomenon – there is a long tradition of lashing out
at politicians, with tactics ranging from heckling and hate mail to shoe and tomato
throwing (Bennett, 1979; Ibrahim, 2009; Temkin & Yanay, 1988).
While social media were not required to give politicians a hard time, platforms
such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram create new points of access for the
public and offer opportunities for feedback that require little time, skill or expense.
These new pathways for communication between political leaders and the public
create new venues for negative and potentially embarrassing or harmful flak (in
addition to more constructive engagement), while reducing the personal investment
and the risk of repercussions for critics, particularly for those hiding behind the veil
of anonymity.
Recent research documents harassment of political figures extending into the
social media space (James et al., 2016; McLoughlin & Ward, 2017). Yet, looking at the
findings, one might conclude that the digital abuse is evenly distributed, something
that seems empirically unlikely given existing identity-based hierarchies. James,
Farnham, Sukhwal, Jones, Carlisle, and Henley (2016) conducted a four-site, cross-
national survey of MP experiences with digital harassment in the UK, Australia, New
Zealand and Norway and found a tremendous amount of abuse, but did not examine
gender or racial patterns in their data. And, in 2017, McLoughlin and Ward conducted
an analysis of tweets to MPs and found that the gender of the MPs didn’t matter (they
did not examine race). The most extensive academic work on harassment of political
Literature   91

figures (online and offline) comes from the threat assessment literature, which
focuses on the perpetrators and evaluates risk in nearly universal psychological terms
without attending to the broader patterns of victimization (Dietz et al., 1991; Adams et
al., 2006; Hoffman & Sheridan, 2008; Meloy, 2014).
We have little research about how the digital aspects of public life vary for political
leaders with different social locations, save an Amnesty International finding that
among women, black, Asian, and minority ethnic MPs received 41% of the abusive
tweets, even though white female MPs outnumber them nearly 8 to 1 (Stambolieva,
2017). This gap in our understanding exists even though there are reasons to suggest
representatives of color and white women find digital publics more hostile than their
white male counterparts. For example, evidence suggests that women in politics
experience disproportionate amounts of violence offline (Dalton, 2017; Krook, 2017).
Recently, Krook (2017) looked at journalistic accounts and research reports from non-
governmental organizations such as the National Democratic Institute and concluded
that violence against women in politics is rampant, particularly in African countries.
And as the first African American President, Barack Obama entered office faced
with an unprecedented number of death threats (Parks and Heard, 2009). It seems
counterintuitive that digital spaces would diverge from these offline patterns.
The fact that differential digital abuse of political leaders has not been studied is
also peculiar, given the noteworthy gendered and racialized patterns to digital abuse in
other arenas (Chen et al, 2018; Gardiner, 2018; Ferber, 2018; Nakamura, 2002; Daniels,
2009; Herring, 1999; Citron, 2014; Gray, 2012; Veletsianos et al., 2018; Sian, 2018).
Watching politics – at least in the US – certainly suggests that gender and race matter.
Consider the backlash against Florida Representative Frederica Wilson; After Wilson
criticized President Donald Trump’s phone call with Myeshia Johnson, the widow of
La David T. Johnson who had been killed in Niger, she received a deluge of abuse via
social media, much of which took on overtly racial and gendered dimensions. Figures
7.1–7.5 offer illustrations. The comments are pointedly racialized in several ways,
including the disturbing suggestion that Wilson be lynched and the reference to her
and Representative Maxine Waters as “race hustler pimps.” The references to Waters’
physical attractiveness and the description of her as a “hooker” show the way that the
pushback can be gendered. These examples also offer insight into the ways abuse can
be intersectional, as seen in the reference to welfare – an implicit connection to one
of the most pernicious stereotypes of black women in the US: the lazy, entitled welfare
queen. Such vitriol is an example of what Moya Bailey calls “misogynoir,”  hatred
directed towards black women where race and gender intersect and play a pivotal
role in the discrimination, abuse and bias.27 US Representatives Ilhan Omar (D-MN)
and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have also endured venomous identity-based
abuse online. For example, the comments directed at Omar, a Somali-American and

27  See Bailey (2018) for a discussion of the origin of the term.
92   Gender and Race in the Digital Town Hall

observant Muslim, include references to her as a “rag head cunt,” a “gorilla looking
bitch,” and a “sand nigger,” as well as outlandish accusations of her participating
in cannibalism, an incestuous relationship with her brother and terrorist activity
(Sobieraj, 2019).

Figure 7.1: Tweet 1.

Figure 7.2: Tweet 2.

Literature   93

Figure 7.3: Tweet 3.

Figure 7.4: Tweet 4.

94   Gender and Race in the Digital Town Hall

Figure 7.5: Tweet 5.

Sobieraj (2017, 2020) highlights the ways in which such abuse is often heightened
in male-dominated spheres such as science and technology, gaming and sports. It
makes little sense intuitively that politics – another male-dominated space – would
be different.
In light of this, McLoughlin and Ward’s (2017) finding that gender is not a
significant predictor in the abuse of MPs on Twitter seems suspect. We suspect the
finding reflects a validity issue, generated as an artifact of the combination of the
sentiment analysis and key-word coding process, which – while excellent at capturing
obscenity and epithets –misses a great deal of hostile content. As a result, we revisit
Twitter to explore how the experiences of legislators differ based on their racial
and gender identities, but with a more interpretive approach and coding attuned to
context.

7.3 Methods

To assess gender and racial differences in the treatment of politicians on Twitter, we

examine tweets directed at legislators that incorporate three modes of harassment
identified in Sobieraj (2017): attempts to discredit, intimidate, or shame. These kinds
of abuse are more complicated to assess than the presence of particular words, but
this reliability challenge is far outweighed by an enhanced ability to capture digital
hostility in a meaningful way. We bolstered reliability through pre-testing and revision
of the codebook, which resulted in lengthy operational definitions and examples to
increase coder confidence and accuracy. In addition to checking for the presence of
these modes of abuse, coders also assessed tweets for specific content, such as: the
Methods   95

invocation of the legislators’ race and gender and references to physical appearance,
sex and the body, as Sobieraj (2017) identifies these as common in digital attacks
against women, particularly women of color. Thumbnail descriptions of the variables
are provided in Appendix A and the complete codebook is available upon request. We
use these data to test the following hypotheses:

H1a: Attempts to discredit will be more common in tweets targeting female legislators than in
those targeting men.

H1b: Attempts to discredit will be more common in tweets targeting legislators of color than in
those targeting white legislators.

H1c: Attempts to discredit will be more common in tweets targeting female legislators of color
than in those targeting other groups.

H2a: Attempts to intimidate will be more common in tweets targeting female legislators than in
those targeting men.

H2b: Attempts to intimidate will be more common in tweets targeting legislators of color than in
those targeting white legislators.

H2c: Attempts to intimidate will be more common in tweets targeting female legislators of color
than in those targeting other groups.

H3a: Attempts to shame will be more common in tweets targeting female legislators than in those
targeting men.

H3b: Attempts to shame will be more common in tweets targeting legislators of color than in
those targeting white legislators.

H3c: Attempts to shame will be more common in tweets targeting female legislators of color than
in those targeting other groups.

In terms of tweet content, we hypothesize:

H4a: The race (of the legislator) will be invoked more in tweets directed toward legislators of
color than in those directed toward white legislators.

H4b: The race (of the legislator) will be invoked more in tweets directed toward female legislators
of color than in those directed toward men of color.

H5a: The gender (of the legislator) will be invoked more in tweets directed toward female
legislators than in those directed toward male legislators.

H5b: The gender (of the legislator) will be invoked more in tweets directed toward female
legislators of color than in those directed toward white women.
96   Gender and Race in the Digital Town Hall

H6a: References to physical appearance, sexual situations and the body will be more common in
tweets directed toward female legislators than in those directed toward male legislators.

H6b: References to physical appearance, sexual situations and the body will be more common
in tweets directed toward female legislators of color than in those directed toward white women.

To isolate the effects of race and gender, we compiled a list of 16 US senators and
representatives: four are white male politicians, four are white female politicians,
four are male politicians of color and four are female politicians of color. Lack of
diversity in the House and Senate prevented us from exploring more fine-grained
racial distinctions or from taking sexual orientation and gender identity into
account. Legislators were sampled purposively based on race, gender, visibility on
Twitter, national name recognition and party. A nearly equal number of Democrats
and Republicans are represented across groups; however, due to the low number
of Republican women of color in congress, we were unable to achieve parity in that
group (three Democrats (D) and one Republican (R) were selected). The 16 legislators
included are: Leader Mitch McConnell (R), Speaker Paul Ryan (R), Sen. Bernie Sanders
(D), Sen. Chuck Schumer (D), Sen. Cory Booker (D), Rep. Keith Ellison (D), Sen. Marco
Rubio (R), Sen. Tim Scott (R), Sen. Susan Collins (R), Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R), Rep.
Nancy Pelosi (D), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D), Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D), Sen. Kamala
Harris (D), Rep. Mia Love (R), Rep. Maxine Waters (D).
We amassed a database of tweets directed toward these 16 legislators via @
mentions (in the form of @replies and original tweets) using Twitter Archiver. We
then conducted a census of the first 152 tweets directed at each legislator beginning
at a specified time on March 6, 2018. For higher profile legislators, these 152 tweets
were accrued in a matter of hours, while for others they spanned several days. When
two or more politicians from our list were @mentioned in the same tweet, the tweet
was discarded, unless the named politicians shared the same race and gender. In
addition, a number of tweets were discarded because they had been deleted by
the time of coding (in late March 2018), their links or images no longer existed, or
they were identified as spam. Of the 2,432 possible tweets, 2,216 usable tweets were
coded. Legislators averaged 138.5 usable tweets. The census (n = 2,216) consisted of
548 tweets @mentioning women of color, 566 @mentioning white women, 560 @
mentioning men of color, and 542 @mentioning white men. After training and pilot
testing, a team of three researchers manually coded the tweets. Two of the coders
identify as non-Hispanic white women, and the third coder identifies as an Asian-
American man. Inter-rater reliability testing indicates the level of agreement among
coders to be very good, with Cohen’s Kappa = 0.925 (SE = 0.021, with 95% confidence
interval: from 0.883 to 0.967).
Analysis   97

7.4 Analysis

As described above, this research involves a census of each of the first 152 @mentions
positioned toward each of the 16 legislators at the time of our investigation, eliminating
the variation that would have been introduced had we relied on random selection to
generate our sample. Because the study is based on a population, inference  is not
needed to interpret the findings, and can, in fact, be misleading (Gibbs et al., 2017;
Gorard, 2013). We, therefore, follow Kenski, Filer, and Conway-Silver’s 2018 analysis
of campaign tweets and restrict our analysis to descriptive statistics.

7.5 Findings

Our first set of hypotheses looked at three common strategies used to limit the speakers’
impact in digital publics as identified by Sobieraj (2017): discrediting, intimidating
and shaming. Tweets that were coded as discrediting attempts include insinuations
or accusations that the targeted legislator is not qualified, capable, well-informed,
trustworthy or deserving of respect, as seen in this tweet: “@RepMaxineWaters
Ms. Waters you should get ready for the asylum. You are disoriented, angry, and
paranoid,” which contains the not-so-subtle subtext that Waters should not be taken
seriously because she is mentally unstable and overly-emotional. We hypothesized
that these types of comments would be more common in tweets directed at female
legislators (regardless of race) than male legislators, more common in tweets directed
toward legislators of color (regardless of gender) than in those directed toward white
legislators and most common in tweets directed at female legislators of color.
In terms of gender, our hypothesis was confirmed: 58.44% of tweets directed
toward female legislators attempted to discredit them, while “only” 37.84% of tweets
directed toward male legislators did so (see Table 7.1 and Figure 7.6). Tweets containing
discrediting efforts are 2.31 times more likely to be directed at female legislators (odds
ratio: 2.3097, 95% CI: 1.9479 to 2.7386, p < 0.0001). In contrast, legislators of color
(48.65%) and white legislators (47.74%) received a roughly equivalent amount of such
criticism (odds ratio: 0.9645, 95% CI: 0.8164 to 1.1394, p = 0.6707). Figure six shows
the percentage of tweets directed at each subgroup of legislators that contained
discrediting attempts. The result prevents us from confirming hypothesis 1c; the
highest percentage of discrediting tweets were directed at white women (68.37%)
rather than women of color (57.12%) as we predicted. Attempts to discredit Nancy
Pelosi were particularly common; a remarkable 82.7% of all tweets she received
attempted to discredit her.
98   Gender and Race in the Digital Town Hall

Figure 7.6: @mentions containing attempts to discredit.

Table 7.1: @mentions containing attempts to discredit.

Legislators Mentioned #DISCREDIT #NONE Total %DISCREDIT

Women of Color 313 235 548 57.12%

White Women 387 179 566 68.37%
Men of Color 216 344 560 38.57%
White Men 201 341 542 37.08%
Total 1,117 1,099 2,216
Women 651 463 1,114 58.44%
Men 417 685 1,102 37.84%
Total 1,068 1,148 2,216
People of Color 529 579 1,108 48.65%
White People 539 569 1,108 47.74%
Total 1,068 1,148 2,216

Tweets @mentioning legislators that contain direct or indirect threats of reputational,

political or physical harm to the elected official, those close to them or their party are
relatively infrequent (see Figure 7.7 and Table 7.2),28 but the intimidation attempts that

28  Importantly, while attempts to intimidate are not abundant, they are more common than this
Findings   99

do appear are three and a half times as likely to be directed at female legislators than
male legislators (odds ratio: 3.5258, 95% CI: 1.5998 to 7.7704, p = 0.0018). However,
while the percent of intimidating tweets positioned at legislators of color is higher
(1.81%) than those of white legislators (1.44%), this difference is not statistically
significant (odds ratio: 1.2546, 95% CI: 0.6467 to 2.4341, p = 0.5024). Stepping back
to look at all four subgroups (Figure 7.7), we see intersectional effects at play. As
hypothesized, attempts to intimidate are more common in tweets targeting female
legislators of color than in those targeting other groups. Among legislators of color:
female legislators of color received a higher proportion of intimidating tweets (2.92%)
than their male counterparts (0.71%). Women of color also received a higher proportion
of @mentions using intimidation tactics than white women, but the difference is
smaller: 2.92% in contrast to 2.12%.

Figure 7.7: @mentions containing attempts to intimidate.

dataset suggests, as most overtly threatening tweets directed at public figures are caught relatively
quickly by Twitter. Indeed, there were a number of tweets no longer available for coding and accounts
that has been suspended at the time of coding. While these tweets may be missing for a variety of
reasons, in all likelihood a subset contained content that would qualify as intimidation.
100   Gender and Race in the Digital Town Hall

Table 7.2: @mentions containing attempts to intimidate.

Legislators #INTIMIDATE #NONE Total % INTIMIDATE

Women of Color 16 532 548 57.12%

White Women 12 554 566 68.37%
Men of Color 4 556 560 38.57%
White Men 4 538 542 37.08%
Total 36 2,180 2,216
Women 28 1,086 1,114 58.44%
Men 8 1,094 1,102 37.84%
Total 36 1,148 2,216
People of Color 20 1,088 1,108 48.65%
White People 16 1,092 1,108 47.74%
Total 36 2,180 2,216

For the purposes of this study, shaming involves efforts to taint the public perception of
the legislators by exposing something personal, rather than political, that is meant to
be hidden or private, taking a personal, rather than political, action that was initially
public and recast it in a markedly negative light, or fabricating personal, rather
than political, stories intended to be “gotcha” type moments that purport to reveal
something about the person’s character. “@NancyPelosi still hitting the booze pretty
hard @NancyPelosi?! Either that or Botox is rotting your brain!” We hypothesized that
attempts to shame would be more common in tweets directed at female legislators
than male legislators as well as for legislators of color than white legislators. Both
hypotheses were confirmed, as shown in Table 7.3. We found 7.81% of @mentions
directed toward female leaders contained personal shaming, in contrast to 2.81% of
those directed at male leaders (odds ratio: 2.3097, 95% CI: 1.9479 to 2.7386, p < 0.0001).
In terms of race, 3.88% of @mentions directed at white legislators contained attempts
to shame, in comparison to 6.14% of those directed at legislators of color (odds ratio:
1.6194, 95% CI: 1.0950 to 2.3950, p = 0.0158). And, as predicted, intersectional abuse
is compounding; women of color are by far the most likely to receive @mentions
that target them with personal shame (see Figure 7.8). One out of every ten tweets
directed at women of color involves shaming, about 40% more than white women
and almost 80% more than men of color. We are therefore able to confirm the third
related hypothesis; attempts to shame are more common in tweets targeting female
legislators of color than in those targeting other groups.
Findings   101

Figure 7.8: @mentions containing attempts to shame.

Table 7.3: @mentions containing attempts to shame.

Legislators Mentioned #SHAME #NONE Total %SHAME

Women of Color 313 235 548 57.12%

White Women 387 179 566 68.37%
Men of Color 216 344 560 38.57%
White Men 201 341 542 37.08%
Total 1,117 1,099 2,216
Women 651 463 1,114 58.44%
Men 417 685 1,102 37.84%
Total 1,068 1,148 2,216
People of Color 529 579 1,108 48.65%
White People 539 569 1,108 47.74%
Total 1,068 1,148 2,216

Often when tweets contain attempts to discredit, intimidate or shame their targets,
attackers use identity-based pushback as leverage. The next set of hypotheses were
intended to test the prevalence of @mentions containing identity-based content.
First, we hypothesized that legislators’ racial, ethnic and/or religious identity would
be invoked more often for people of color than for whites, and that among people of
color, women would receive a higher proportion of this content than men. One such
example of invoking racial identity: “@SenatorTimScott Hey Timmy boy..i see you
the black lackey at the white house.. did you take @LindseyGrahamSC coffee this
102   Gender and Race in the Digital Town Hall

morning. ? you obviously dont like people of your color..you chose a white man over
a black man..Afro-Americans going to drop you good.. your career is over.” As seen
in Table 7.4, both hypotheses were confirmed; tweets directed at legislators of color
are almost three times as likely to include references to their race or perceived race
(7.04%) than those positioned toward white legislators (2.53%) (odds ratio: 2.9238,
95% CI: 1.88827 to 4.5405, p < 0.0001). Gender compounds the abuse; 10.40% of the
tweets @mentioning women of color include race-based commentary in contrast to
2.14% of those @mentioning men of color (odds ratio: 2.9796, 95% CI: 1.7802 to 4.9871,
p < 0.0001).
The heavy burden on female legislators of color reappears when we explore @
mentions that include comments about elected officials’ gender or gender-identity.
These kinds of remarks often use gender as a means to devalue or discredit the
legislators or their contributions (e.g. “@NancyPelosi Pelousy you’re just a commie
hag,” “@NancyPelosi they are not Americans, sweetheart” and “@NancyPelosi shut
up bitch”). We were able to confirm our hypothesis that gender is invoked more in
tweets directed toward female legislators than male legislators; Table 7.5 shows that
7.99% of tweets @mentioning female leaders reference or comment on their gender,
in contrast with 2.90% of the tweets directed at male leaders (odds ratio: 2.9034, 95%
CI: 1.9211 to 4.3879, p < 0.0001). Once again, gender-talk is disproportionately directed
at female legislators of color; tweets including this kind of commentary are 1.66 times
more likely to target female legislators of color than white female legislators (odds
ratio: 1.6584, 96% CI: 1.0653 to 2.5818, p = 0.0251).

Table 7.4: Percent of @mentions invoking race (of legislator).

Legislators Mentioned #RACE #NONE Total %RACE

People of Color 78 1,029 1,108 7.04%

White People 28 1,080 1,108 2.53%
Total 106 2,109 2,216
Legislators Mentioned #RACE #NONE Total %RACE
Women of Color 57 491 548 10.40%
Men of Color 21 539 560 2.14%
Total 78 1,030 1,108
Findings   103

Table 7.5: Percent of @mentions invoking gender (of legislator).

Legislators Mentioned #GENDER #NONE Total %GENDER

Women 89 1,025 1,114 7.99%

Men 32 1,070 1,102 2.90%
Total 121 2,095 2,216
Legislators Mentioned #GENDER #NONE Total %GENDER
Women of Color 54 494 548 9.85%
White Women 35 531 566 5.12%
Total 89 1,025 1,114

Our final hypotheses involved direct and indirect comments about elected officials’
physical appearance, bodies and/or sexual behavior. For example, one such tweet
reads, “@RepMaxineWaters @realDonaldTrump I swear I think James Brown faked
his own death and returned in drag as Maxine Waters.” We predicted that tweets
directed at female legislators would more often include body-based commentary than
those directed at their male counterparts. This was confirmed: 4.04% of @mentions
directed at women included such comments, while only 2.18% of at mentions directed
at men did so (odds ratio: 1.9808, 95% CI: 1.1439 to 3.1255, p = 0.0130), as visible in
Table 7.6. We can also confirm our hypothesis that body-based comments are more
common for female legislators of color than for white women (odds ratio: 2.0334, 95%
CI: 1.0293 to 4.0168, p = 0.0410).

Table 7.6: Percent of @mentions containing body commentary.

Legislators Mentioned #GENDER #NONE Total %BODY

Women 45 1,069 1,114 4.04%

Men 24 1,078 1,102 2.18%
Total 69 2,147 2,216
Legislators Mentioned #GENDER #NONE Total %BODY
Women of Color 25 523 548 4.56%
White Women 13 553 566 2.30%
Total 38 1,076 1,114
104   Gender and Race in the Digital Town Hall

Table 7.7: Summary of hypothesis test results.

# Hypothesis Confirmed?

H1a Attempts to discredit will be more common in tweets targeting female YES
legislators than in those targeting men.

H1b Attempts to discredit will be more common in tweets targeting legislators NO

of color than in those targeting white legislators.

H1c Attempts to discredit will be more common in tweets targeting female NO

legislators of color than in those targeting other groups.

H2a Attempts to intimidate will be more common in tweets targeting female YES
legislators than in those targeting men.

H2b Attempts to intimidate will be more common in tweets targeting legislators NO

of color than in those targeting white legislators.

H2c Attempts to intimidate will be more common in tweets targeting female YES
legislators of color than in those targeting other groups.

H3a Attempts to shame will be more common in tweets targeting female YES
legislators than in those targeting men.

H3b Attempts to shame will be more common in tweets targeting legislators of YES
color than in those targeting white legislators.

H3c Attempts to shame will be more common in tweets targeting female YES
legislators of color than in those targeting other groups.

H4a Race (legislator’s) will be invoked more in tweets directed toward YES
legislators of color than in those directed toward white legislators.

H4b Race (legislator’s) will be invoked more in tweets directed toward female YES
legislators of color than in those directed toward men of color.

H5a Gender (legislator’s) will be invoked more in tweets directed toward female YES
legislators than in those directed toward male legislators.

H5b Gender (legislator’s) will be invoked more in tweets directed toward female YES
legislators of color than in those directed toward white women.

H6a References to physical appearance, sexual situations, and the body will be YES
more common in tweets directed toward female legislators than in those
directed toward male legislators.

H6b References to physical appearance, sexual situations, and the body will be YES
more common in tweets directed toward female legislators of color than in
those directed toward white women.
 Discussion and Conclusions   105

7.6 Discussion and Conclusions

As visible in Table 7.7, 12 of the 15 hypotheses were confirmed, revealing that in

the case of US legislators, identity plays a central role in determining who receives
negative pushback on social media as well as the ways they are attacked. In other
words, people from historically underrepresented groups – particularly women of
color – deal with more shaming, discrediting and intimidation, and they also manage
a barrage of messages suggesting that they have little of value to contribute because
of their gender and race. Attackers draw on racial and gender stereotypes as a way
to invalidate the ideas and efforts of people from these underrepresented groups.
Attackers are particularly aggressive toward women of color, who receive gendered
abuse, racialized abuse and abuse that is intersectional in nature.
While this research documents some of the uneven terrain navigated by US
legislators, we suspect the differences are of a greater magnitude than we have been
able to capture. Future research would be well served to examine variation in tone
and intensity of the messages directed toward political figures from different groups.
In looking at the tweets, it is not uncommon to find that even when body-based
commentary, for example, is present for white male legislators, it is relatively mild.
Mitch McConnell, for example, is often called “turtle,” a long-running reference to Jon
Stewart saying that McConnell looked like a turtle on The Daily Show. While this is rude
and may be hurtful, it feels substantively different from a tweet @mentioning Tammy
Duckworth that says, “Bitch please go fuck yourself with a cactus.” We attempted
summary measures for overall tone, but in examining the interrater evaluations,
determined that they were not adequately reliable and were forced to discard them.
Future research should work on capturing these critically important distinctions.
Much of this story is bleak, indeed, even white male legislators are unlikely to
find Twitter a fully-comfortable environment – almost 40% of the tweets directed
at them include attempts to discredit them. But we were looking for nastiness and
did not code for prosocial interaction or substantive political engagement. Had we
done so, we might have been able to capture the tweets we read that addressed policy
preferences, raised questions and revealed that amid tweets telling Maxine Waters
that she is, “a loud mouth neger liberal pile of shit,” or telling her to “TAKE OFF THAT
SKANKY WIG,” there are also tweets that point legislators to attend to issues they feel
deserve attention, some that ask questions about how representatives’ stated goals
would be accomplished, those that work through stories in the news, and those rife
with gratitude and celebration. There is value here, at least for some.
These unsettling attempts to limit the political voice and visibility of those
from historically underrepresented groups remind us that winning an election does
not mean the victors have overcome discrimination. Indeed, the near mandatory
presence in digital town halls may place elected officials into closer contact with
misogyny/misogynoir and racism than they have had to deal with in the past. This
abuse has a variety of personal and political costs for those targeted for attack, but it
106   Gender and Race in the Digital Town Hall

also has social costs: if we lose qualified candidates or hear from people of color and
white women less often or more guardedly as a result of this abuse, our digital public
spaces contain a narrower range of perspectives. The macro and micro implications
of this hostile work environment will need to be explored more fully, as leaving
Twitter, YouTube and Facebook are not practical options in a political context where
the populace increasingly gets information via social media platforms and evidence
mounts that a robust social media presence helps candidates win elections.

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 ATTEMPTS TO DISCREDIT   109

Appendix A: Thumbnail Descriptions of Key Variables

ATTEMPTS TO DISCREDIT

This variable is intended to measure whether the tweet suggests that the elected
official is not qualified, capable, well-informed, trustworthy, or deserving of respect.
Attempts to discredit generally work to deflate or undercut a person’s status (see
codebook for detailed examples).

INTIMIDATION

This variable is intended to measure whether the tweet contains direct or indirect
threats of reputational, political, or physical harm to the elected official, those close to
them, or their party. This code was not be used for dispassionate political forecasting
(i.e. “this could hurt their chances for reelection”); it was be reserved for attempts to
intimidate (see codebook for detailed examples).

PERSONAL SHAMING

This variable is intended to measure whether the tweet includes efforts to publicly
humiliate or contaminate the public perception of the target as a person. Personal
shame: 1) exposes something personal that is meant to be hidden or private (or pile on
when someone else does so), 2) takes a personal action that was initially public and
recast it in a markedly negative light, or 3) fabricates personal stories intended to be
“gotcha” type moments that purport to reveal something about the person’s character.
Note that political shame, such as suggesting someone’s political decisions have been
shaped by financial interests, were counted as “discredit,” not personal shame (see
codebook for detailed examples).

RACE/RACIALIZATION

This variable is intended to measure whether the tweet contains direct or indirect
comments about the elected official’s perceived racial, ethnic, or religious identity.
The variable is – at its heart – intended to capture how often and for whom racial /
ethnic / religious identity is invoked. (see codebook for detailed examples).
110   Appendix A: Thumbnail Descriptions of Key Variables

GENDER TALK

This variable is intended to measure whether the tweet contains direct or indirect
comments about the elected official’s stated or perceived gender identity. The variable
is – at its heart – intended to capture how often and for whom gender identity is
invoked (see codebook for detailed examples).

BODY-BASED COMMENTARY

This variable is intended to measure whether the tweet contains direct or indirect
comments about the elected official’s physical appearance or sexual behavior. (see
codebook for detailed examples).
8 Participatory Propaganda: The Engagement of
Audiences in the Spread of Persuasive Communications

Alicia Wanless and Michael Berk

Rapidly evolving information communications technologies (ICTs) and increased

connectivity to online sources have drastically altered the ways individuals engage
in the public information domain and, in turn, become influenced by it. As citizens
become increasingly plugged-in, a savvy propagandist can acquire enhanced means of
swaying opinions around the world by combining tech-enabled formats of persuasive
content, automated dissemination and audience engagement in content propagation.
In addition, by obfuscating the origins of propagandistic content through audience
participation via the internet and social networks, the propagandist can also increase
its receptivity and influence effects. For example, people tend to find recommendations
from their personal social network more credible than others (Nielson, 2015). Such
subtle mass persuasion, through and by means of personal networks, is problematic
in liberal democracies founded on the premise that freedom of choice by citizens on
political matters is expected to inform public decision-making and power structures
(Lippman, 1922; Irwin, 1919; Marlin, 2011).
This paper is broken into three sections. In the first, a multidisciplinary literature
review aggregates individual studies published recently that analyze the known
digital, behavioral and psychological tactics available to propagandists aiming to
engage target audiences online. Extensive research conducted by scholars over recent
years on new ICT tools, social networks, influence tactics and their manifested effects
on consumers of online information, including their political choices, has been
instrumental in acquiring the first appreciation for the scale, complexity and social
repercussions of modern persuasive communications – what we called “participatory
propaganda.” In the second section, the paper draws on original research conducted
during the 2016 US presidential elections to analyze how Trump supporters applied
these tactics to engage Facebook followers in the promotion of persuasive content,
thus encouraging them to become propagandists themselves. In the conclusion,
the research results are placed into the broad context of the emerging information
environment describing possible repercussions for citizens’ political engagement and
arguing that further modelling of digital propaganda is required to better understand
the risks to liberal democracy associated with using such techniques.
112   Participatory Propaganda

8.1 Modern Propaganda and the Evolution of Its Participatory

Model

Propaganda is a much-contested term applied in many contexts under different names

either to explain and justify more acceptable forms of public influence, or to denigrate
and dismiss similar efforts done by perceived opponents. This difficulty in defining
propaganda stems in part from its complicated relationship with liberal democracies
where public opinion is expected to influence political decision-making and the act
of manipulating it calls into question the agency of voters and the democratic system
itself.
Traditionally, propaganda has been described as the use of persuasive information
to manipulate a target audience into a behaviour desired by the propagandist (Bernays,
1928; Lasswell, 1948; Ellul, 1965; Marlin, 2013; Jowett & O’Donnell, 2015). In this top-
down communications model, the sender-receiver roles were typically static with
the propagandist (government, corporate, military) issuing persuasive messaging to
achieve a specific outcome among the target audience (general public). Early pioneers
in the field of public relations, who also led American propaganda activities during
World War I, saw how easily public opinion could be swayed and, yet, saw domestic
propaganda as an acceptable tool for the management of popular views (Bernays,
1928; Lasswell, 1934; Lippmann, 1922). Around the same time, propaganda began to
acquire a pejorative connotation as it was “associated mainly with totalitarian regimes
and war efforts” and “was perceived as a threat to liberal democracies” (Ross, 2002,
p. 17). To differentiate between acceptable forms of influence, domestic- and foreign-
bound, other terms such as public affairs or public relations (Moloney, 2006), or
public diplomacy or information operations (Garrison, 1999) were introduced.
This classic understanding of propaganda, however, must be adapted for the
Digital Age. With the internet and social media, the traditional separation between
“the propagandist” and “target audience” is rapidly blurring, with the latter beginning
to play a more significant role in spreading propagandistic content and influencing
others through personal networks – a more dangerous development since people are
more likely to believe those familiar to them (Garrett & Weeks, 2013) or those they
view as influential (Turcotte et al., 2015).
In this context, a new concept for the understanding of modern propaganda
is suggested – participatory propaganda – that adapts the traditional definition
proposed by Jowett & O’Donnell29 to the Digital Age’s technological capabilities
allowing modern propagandists, at least in theory, to exert a qualitatively greater
influence.

29  The original definition of propaganda by Jowett & O’Donnell reads “Propaganda is the deliberate
and systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve
a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.” See Jowett & O’Donnell, 2015, p. 7.
 Modern Propaganda and the Evolution of Its Participatory Model   113

Participatory propaganda is the deliberate and systematic attempt to shape

perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behaviour of a target audience while seeking
to co-opt its members to actively engage in the spread of persuasive communications, to
achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.
The nuanced difference from the traditional interpretation of propaganda lies in
the fact that in the Digital Age modern technologies allow propagandists to not just
push a message, but get audience “buy-in” through content that triggers engagement
with it.30 The ease and convenience of social media offer users a psychologically
rewarding and socially acceptable opportunity to “take action” online, empowering
them to influence their reality with a few mouse clicks (at least to the extent the
size of their network allows it). This superficial and illusory influence, which
nonetheless may appear quite real to users, transforms them from passive consumers
of propaganda into active campaigners. Through this engagement, propagandists
can amplify their message, and by obfuscating its provenance, increase its receptivity
among wider populations.
From a methodological perspective, participatory propaganda transcends a
traditional, vertical and unidirectional form of persuasive communication where
a clearer distinction, but also connection, between a content originator and target
audience existed. The diffusion of interconnected networks abetted by users’ inter-
connectivity to and across various online platforms creates a borderless network for
distribution and amplification of persuasive content where each “object” of influence
(a target individual or group) can, and does, also become the new “subject” of content
production and distribution in a “snowball” fashion. In this dynamic environment,
an original message would continue to trigger, reinforce, or exacerbate pre-existing
sentiments associated with it, prompting its consumers to actively engage in its
propagation, both on and offline, for as long as it continues to reflect their entrenched
values and perceptions. Whether modified or not by the consumer, the core message
often remains intact, acquiring a “new life” in each new wave of content dissemination.
Easy access to online monitoring tools allows the original propagandist to follow and
assess the spread of their messaging, adapting strategies in a constant feedback loop
and inserting additional content, as and if required.
Participatory propaganda offers the ability to truly dominate the information
space through volume of messaging, delivered through a mix of real people and
automated accounts, effectively making it difficult to discern where fake ends and
authenticity begins.

30  In modern practice of campaign management, the evaluation of a campaign’s effectiveness

commonly relies on engagement statistics offered by social media platforms. These statistics are
presented as a manifestation of the message’s effectiveness, which of course could be misleading
since it often demonstrates the potential spread of messaging but not its actual effect on an audience,
if it has any. Sharing of content and commenting, on the other hand, could be perceived as a truer
engagement, unless it is accomplished through unauthentic behaviour (e.g. bots).
114   Participatory Propaganda

The analysis of modern political campaigns with their increasing reliance on

social networks demonstrates the case in point. While many campaigns still push
messages as traditional propaganda, as defined by Jowett and O’Donnell, namely
the “deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions” (e.g. popular opinions of
Trump supporters) such that it “directs behaviour to achieve a response” (e.g. support
for Trump in the form of online participation and voting) furthering “the desired
intent of the propagandist” (e.g. the Trump campaign), they increasingly acquire the
characteristics of a participatory propaganda model. This research, based on analyses
of recent academic studies and the US presidential campaign by Donald J. Trump,
identified six digital tactics for engaging a target audience online to draw them into
active dissemination of persuasive messaging. The order in which these tactics are
presented below corresponds to the order of steps a propagandist would take to
develop and disseminate the original persuasive messaging.

8.1.1 Hyper-Targeted Audience Analysis

Using behavioural advertising methods, propagandists acquire information about

their target audience’s activities online, which enables them to position highly
targeted ads in front of users (Matthew, 2017). Trackers that facilitate the collection
of this information were found on 114 websites supporting Trump during the 2016
election (Albright, 2016a). This information can be used to segment target audiences
by psychographic categories (Psychometric Centre, 2017), providing a propagandist
with an extremely accurate assessment of user preferences and what might provoke
them into action (Cohen, 2017). Social networks facilitate the application of this
knowledge to targeted ad placement (Solon, 2017), as was demonstrated by the Trump
campaign (Nix, 2016). After targeted audience analysis is conducted and profiles
created, the creation of provocative content ensues.

8.1.2 Provocative Content

Provocative content aims to appeal to pre-existing user beliefs and perceptions,

triggering an emotional reaction in return, which is then expected to manifest itself
through engagement both on and offline. At least three types of content aimed at
provoking a response among target audiences were used by Trump supporters: fake
news, memes, and data leaks.
Fake News. Facebook defined fake news as “articles that purport to be factual, but
which contain intentional misstatements of fact with the intention to arouse passions,
attract viewership, or deceive.” (Weedon et al., 2017). Since lies spread faster online
than the truth (Silverman, 2015), fake news has become a global problem (Connolly
et al., 2016). Conspiracy theories, often a feature of fake news, reduce complex issues
 Modern Propaganda and the Evolution of Its Participatory Model   115

to “binary opposition, simplifying – and misrepresenting – the political space,”

(Moore, 2015, p. 9) and a person’s degree of partisanship is linked to their likelihood
of believing conspiracy theories or fake news (Frankovic, 2016). Governments and
non-state actors alike are spreading disinformation online (Weedon et al., 2017),
including Trump, who spread fake news during the campaign (Maheshwari, 2017).
When such content was shared by known and trusted opinion-leaders on Facebook,
in essence legitimizing it, they tended to influence audience perspectives (Turcotte et
al., 2015). Indeed, stories favouring Trump were shared nearly four times more than
those supporting Clinton (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017).
Memes are often humorous phrases, images or videos that are copied or adapted
with slight variations and then shared online (Blackmore, 2000). During the 2016
election, Facebook groups sprang up dedicated to sharing “dank memes” (Hsu,
2016) and a controversial Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur funded a “meme factory”
to support Trump (Hern, 2016). So-called “meme battalions” created visual content
that “relentlessly drew attention to the tawdriest and most sensational accusations
against Clinton, forcing mainstream media outlets to address topics – like conspiracy
theories about Clinton’s health – that they would otherwise ignore” (Schreckender,
2017).
Memes reduce the public policy debate to shallow sound bites and ridicule
stripped of contextualized understanding of available political choices (McClure,
2016). This contributes to ‘media endarkenment’ reducing complex political issues to
simplified entertainment and misinformation (Lazitski, 2014).
Leaks have long played a role in American political propaganda (Castronovo,
2014). According to the Oxford Dictionary, a leak is the “intentional disclosure of
secret information” (2017). During the 2016 election, Clinton was dogged by several
leaks, which could have been one factor affecting her standing in public opinion polls
(Enten, 2016). These included the hacking of her Chief of Staff John Podesta’s emails
(Frank, 2016), the leaking of comments she made about Bernie Sanders supporters
(Democracy Now, 2016), and the continued FBI investigations around the private
email server Clinton used while serving as Secretary of State (exposed through a
hack), which hampered her campaign (Williams, 2016).
Eliciting an emotional response among a target audience, provoking them
into active participation, is an effective method of target audience engagement.
In particular, this is true if the content is fed through existing channels where an
audience already receives associated information, such as an online echo chamber.

8.1.3 Echo Chambers

Drawing from the insights gained in hyper-targeted content analysis, a propagandist

can identify online echo chambers with specific audiences who can then be targeted
with provocative content to which they are most likely to react. An online echo chamber
116   Participatory Propaganda

is a digital space where content reflecting a specific point of view reverberates,

exposing those within it to only that one prevailing perspective. Digital technologies
enable the quick creation of echo chambers or filter bubbles (Breitenbach, 2017), in
part through algorithms that sort information (Bakshy et al., 2015), but more so by the
choices individuals make about content consumption (Bessi et al., 2016; Grömping,
2014). Once inside an echo chamber, a user is fed content fitting pre-existing views
and preferences, such as political party affiliation (Wall Street Journal, 2016).
Echo chambers identified during the 2016 election were strengthened by a
growing animosity between political camps (Thompson, 2016), as well as a lack of
media trusted by both Republicans and Democrats (Pew, 2016a), and thus information
exchange was hindered across party lines (Mitchell et al., 2016). Moreover “political
echo chambers not only isolate one from opposing views, but also help to create
incubation chambers for blatantly false (but highly salient and politicized) fake news
stories” (Pennycook et al., 2017).
Echo chambers supporting Trump shared fakes news during the election (Dreyfus,
2017; BBC, 2016), with some hyper-partisan, right-wing Facebook communities
feeding followers 38% fake content (Silverman et al., 2016).

8.1.4 Manipulating Feed and Search Algorithms

This step relates to positioning and boosting provocative content in front of users
by manipulating important online algorithms. Internet giants, such as Facebook
(Facebook, 2017a, 2017b) and Google (Google, 2017), use algorithms to provide
users with content they think is wanted. Search returns have been found to sway
voter decisions (Epstein & Robertson, 2015) and algorithms enable echo chamber
development (Barret, 2016). Learning and understanding how these platforms
operate both through openly available information and experimentation may allow
a propagandist to ensure their provocative content appears higher and more often in
returns, or in front of a user.
Algorithms had a role in the 2016 elections. Fake news supporting Trump trended
on Facebook through algorithms (Lee, 2016), whereas Google search autocompletes
and returns favoured Trump, spreading false information with a far-right bias (Solon
& Levin, 2016).
Google Search algorithms can be gamed in at least two ways:
Hyperlinking and Seeding of Content: Posting content, such as fake news, on
multiple websites and linking back and forth between sources helps boost content in
Google search returns (Moz, 2107), and if nothing else, can bury opposing information
from appearing in the first pages of returns. Indeed, in one study using hyperlink
network analysis pro-Trump websites were found to be choking out mainstream
media (Albright, 2016b).
 Modern Propaganda and the Evolution of Its Participatory Model   117

Botnets and Automated Posting: Lobby groups (Monbiot, 2011), governments

(Dhami, 2011), and businesses (Kabin, 2013) are among the many who attempt to
create the illusion of grassroots support by using fake social media accounts to
distort the information space for strategic purposes. Posting fake comments and
reviews aims to harness the cognitive bias of “social proof” (Ambled & Bui, 2011),
whereas botnets (and heavily automated posting) can manipulate algorithms. For
example, Twitter bots gamed Google’s algorithm for displaying “real time news” into
promoting disinformation during a 2010 senate election in Massachusetts (Mustafaraj
& Metaxas, 2010).
During the 2016 election, pro-Trump automated Twitter accounts dominated
discussion about the US election 5 to 1 over pro-Clinton messaging, and “strategically
colonized pro-Clinton hashtags,” according to Oxford Internet Institute research
(Kollanyi & Howard, 2016). Bots also accounted for nearly one-fifth of online
discussion about the election (Bessi & Ferrara, 2016), negatively affecting political
discourse by drowning opposing views and elevating Trump-related returns in Google
search ranking.31

8.1.5 Encouraging Followers to Action

Once inside echo chambers, followers can be encouraged through posts and email
distribution lists (Albright, 2016a; Plouffe, 2010) to participate in the spread of
propaganda, including: sharing messages; co-opting or borrowing influencer
accounts to share content (Katalenas, 2016); or encouraging trolling (Cheng et al.,
2017; Buckels et al., 2014) to stifle debate.
To many, Trump is a troll (Silver, 2015; Offman, 2016; Lapowsky & Marshall, 2017),
but he was also supported by a legion of online trolls during the election (Marantz,
2016), spreading disinformation (Kang, 2016; Gallucci, 2016) and attacking Clinton
supporters online (Chmielewski, 2016). Some online communities, such as the United
States Freedom Army (who believes the left is engaging the right in a civil war) offered
its members a monthly directive on actions to take on Twitter, and elsewhere in the
spread of their content and support for Trump (Lotan, 2016).

31  This online domination through automation led researchers to coin a new term for explaining
computer-assisted propaganda techniques – the computational propaganda. See, Woolley, S.C.
& Howard, P.N. eds., 2018. Computational propaganda: political parties, politicians, and political
manipulation on social media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
118   Participatory Propaganda

8.1.6 Using Traditional Media

Media play a critical role in furthering political agendas (Wodak, 2013; Engel &
Wodak, 2009; Engel & Wodak, 2012); after all, “the media are a key element in the
construction of public understanding” (Philo, 2008, p. 539). Rates of a politician’s
media coverage correlate to popular support levels (Vliegenthart et al., 2012) and
Trump was consistently mentioned more on television, online, and social media
(Wanless, 2016). By the start of the primary election campaign in early 2016, Trump
had been enjoying “more nightly news coverage than the entire Democratic field
combined” (Borchers, 2015). Media coverage can be earned in at least three ways:
– Trending Online – generating media coverage simply by occupying top positions
in social media (which can also be distorted by using bots and automated posting).
– Staging a Scandal – populist politicians are particularly adept at gaining media
attention, provoking opposition to attack, then distorting ensuing debate to
position themselves as victims not tolerated by a biased system.
– Commune with the news – media politicians and online communities have a
deeply interconnected relationship, creating a distinct and insulated media
system which uses social media to spread hyper-partisan perspectives.

8.1.7 Assess, Modify and Repeat

Strategic communicators can rely on multiple technological means to monitor, assess

and evaluate the quality and extent of reach acquired in relation to each original
message. The data analysis is used to modify messaging to ensure greater uptake or
fine-tune the approach to specific target audiences.
As these studies demonstrate, many of these techniques when combined could
be used to encourage followers and co-opt audiences into active participation,
becoming propagandists for a cause and thus deliberately working to persuade their
own personal networks too. To evaluate the extent of their application during the US
presidential elections, an original study of Facebook pro-Trump pages was conducted
to assess how audiences might have been engaged in the creation and distribution of
persuasive political messaging.

8.2 Modelling Participatory Propaganda

8.2.1 Methodology and Data

The study included social network and content analyses undertaken on 17 Facebook
pages, using data related to a month-long period leading up to the 2016 election (7
October to 7 November). These pages included three that supported Trump during the
 Modelling Participatory Propaganda   119

election, as well as seven conservative-leaning and seven liberal-leaning media outlets.

The digital tactics outlined in the previous section were used as a frame for investigation.
Social Network Analysis (SNA) has shown to be an effective method to study online
group dynamics, information diffusion processes, and political polarisation in social
media (Gruzd & Roy, 2014; Gruzd & Tsyganova, 2015; Scott, 1988, 2011). Facebook
pages and groups have been analysed to identify echo chambers (Grömping, 2014;
Bakshy et al., 2015; Del Vicario et al., 2016). And content analysis has been used to
assess right-wing populist rhetoric in media (Bos et al., 2010, 2011; Sheets et al., 2016).
Facebook was selected for this research as 79% of American adults who use the
internet also use this social network (Pew, 2016b), making it the most popular and
thus representative social media for studying politics in the US.
The data collection process was executed using Facebook Graph API through
Netvizz (Rieder, 2013), and only publicly available data was used. Network
visualisations were created using the open-source SNA software, Gephi (Bastion et
al., 2009).
The pages analysed are as follows:

Table 8.1: Facebook pages analysed.

Trump Supporters Right-Leaning Media Left-Leaning Media

Citizens for Trump Breitbart CBS News

Eagle Rising The Glenn Beck Program CNN

Wake Up & Reclaim America Fox News MSNBC

Infowars NPR

The Sean Hannity Show The New York Times

The Drudge Report PBS

The Blaze The Washington Post

The three pro-Trump pages were chosen as a sample of those supporting his candidacy,
with one showing its open support through the name (Citizens for Trump), another
having been found spreading fake news (Silverman et al., 2016) supporting Trump
(Eagle Rising), and a third standing out as a node in initial, exploratory network
analysis (Wake Up & Reclaim America).
Drawing from a Pew Research Centre survey on Political Polarization and Media
Habits (Mitchell et al., 2016), seven media outlets trusted consistently by respondents
who self-identified as liberal or conservative were selected. One substitute was made
on the conservative-leaning side, which was Infowars, given the role it played in the
election (Finnegan, 2016). Media pages were used to assess how pro-Trump pages
were engaging with news outlets.
120   Participatory Propaganda

8.2.2 Facebook Page Like Networks

An initial “seed” page liking other pages revealed a directed network of pages linked to
it on Facebook, which was visualised using Gephi. The data in this pull also included
information regarding page categories, follower numbers, and rates of engagement.

8.2.3 Facebook Page Posts

All of the posts made by these pages during the month leading up to the election were
also collected, including information regarding the type of post, engagement rates,
and embedded links.
This data was analysed to answer the following questions:
– Did pro-Trump pages share provocative content such as fake news, memes, and
data leaks?
– Did pro-Trump pages constitute an echo chamber?
– Was content shared on pro-Trump pages posted across multiple websites? And
how was this content reflected in Google search returns?
– Were followers of pro-Trump pages encouraged to action?
– How did pro-Trump pages engage with media outlets?

8.3 Findings

8.3.1 Pro-Trump Pages Shared Different Kinds of Provocative Content, Such as Fake
News, Memes, and Data Leaks

Fake News. The links shared to the three Trump-supporting pages were mostly non-
mainstream media. On average, link posts comprised 53.22% of updates made by the
pro-Trump pages. Eagle Rising shared more links than the other two (83.25% of posts),
with nearly half of those links (45.4%) pointing to the page’s own website eaglerising.
com, which contains coverage speculating on connections between Clinton, terrorists
and Nazis,32 for example, and the Clinton campaign’s alleged use of psychological
warfare (which in turn points back to another site shared by these pages called
ipatriot.com).33
After Breitbart, the most shared domain to Citizens for Trump was gatewaypundit.
com, a blog that has posted many questionable articles on Hillary Clinton, including

32  See: https://eaglerising.com/23441/the-real-link-between-hillary-clinton-terrorists-and-nazis/

33  See: http://eaglerising.com/36390/how-the-clinton-campaign-is-using-psychological-warfare/
Findings   121

that she secretly called for Trump’s assassination,34 had suffered a brain seizure,35
and that she had a gum and immune disorder.36 During the period between 7 October
to 7 November 2016, Citizens for Trump shared 13 Gateway Pundit articles, accounting
for 4.32% of all link posts, including one speculating on Clinton’s health that enjoyed
319 shares on Facebook.37 Wake Up & Reclaim America also shared 14 Gateway Pundit
articles, including a post suggesting Clinton was involved in having Supreme Court
Justice Scalia assassinated.38
Memes. Drawing from a similar study of Breitbart posts (Renner, 2017), memes
were counted by the total number of photo posts made by the pro-Trump pages. Memes
account for a considerable number of posts on community Facebook pages such as
Wake Up & Reclaim America. In analysis of 1,330 posts made by Wake Up & Reclaim
America in the month leading up to the 2016 election, nearly half were image posts.
Nearly two-thirds of those photo posts were shared by the page administrator from
other Facebook user posts, pages or groups, such as Liberal Wackadoodles, indicating
spread through a wider community. Memes were also shared by Eagle Rising (14.79%)
and Citizens for Trump (26.62%).

Figure 8.1: Post type by pro-Trump Facebook pages.

34  See: http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/09/hillary-clinton-dog-whistle-call-assassinating-

trump-press-conference/
35  See: http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/08/expert-analysis-finds-hillary-clintons-recent-
seizures-sign-brain-damage/
36  See: http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/09/dental-expert-hillary-clinton-suffering-serious-
gum-infection-immune-disorder/
37  See: https://www.facebook.com/563896500417731/posts/771473306326715
38  See: https://www.facebook.com/380251501985837/posts/1372925612718416
122   Participatory Propaganda

Data Leaks. Hacks and leaks were certainly discussed online. All of the pro-Trump
pages made mention of “Wikileaks,”39 a non-profit that aims to “open governments,”
which in that period had shared more of the leaked Podesta emails to its website.
Of the three pro-Trump pages, 65 posts mentioned “Wikileaks” during the month
leading up to the 8 November election, accounting on average for 2.75% of all posts
during that period. Both the conservative- and liberal-leaning media outlets analysed
made mention of “Wikileaks” in this timeframe too: the seven right-leaning pages
mentioned “Wikileaks” 131 times, accounting for 2.72% of all posts made on average,
whereas the left-leaning pages referenced it 47 times, or in just 0.46% of all posts.
The pages for InfoWars, Sean Hannity, and Wake Up & Reclaim America referenced
“Wikileaks” on average more than the others, accounting for 44% of all mentions
found.

8.3.2 Pro-Trump Pages Constitute an Echo Chamber – A Like-Minded Community,

which Shared Similar Content

A manual categorization of pages based on names and content reveals that nearly
all (94.1%) of the Citizens for Trump network are right-leaning, pro-Trump pages,
while 82.7% of those within the Eagle Rising network are. In the Wake Up & Reclaim
America network of over 5,000 pages, a sample of 1,000 pages, representing 18.8% of
the total, revealed that 67.8% of these were right-leaning, pro-Trump pages covering
topics reflected in Trump’s campaign rhetoric, such as pro-Christian, anti-Muslim,
pro-military, pro-police, anti-immigration, and pro-life views.
As noted earlier, the three pro-Trump pages shared more alternative media sources
than mainstream links in the month leading up to the 2016 election. Of those links
shared to the pro-Trump pages and pointing to the conservative- and liberal-leaning
pages also analysed, most were from either Fox or Breitbart. The page Eagle Rising
shared none of the 14 media pages analysed, and the 1,143 links posted between 7
October and 7 November 2016 pointed to just 14 websites, including eaglerising.com.

8.3.3 Pro-Trump Pages Posted Across Multiple Websites Affected Google Search
Returns

A Google search of article titles posted on pro-Trump pages sheds some light on how
such networks function. For example, Eagle Rising shared an article from the blog the
blacksphere.net entitled “Hillary Clinton: Calls Blacks Professional Never Do Wells.”
This post garnered 157 shares on Facebook.

39  See: https://wikileaks.org

Findings   123

A Google search using the article’s exact title returned the original post, as
well as several nearly exact reprints on other sites, with some linking back to The
Blacksphere article. A search for The Blacksphere returned 734 results, including posts
from rightwingnews.com, teapartytribune.com, and thegatewaypundit.com. Some of
these links were posted by other users in comment sections and online forums, and
Sharescount40 suggested the URL was shared 12,500 times across social networks. The
article was also picked up by online trend aggregators like Trendolizer,41 indicating
the efforts to spread this content had some impact. The apparent domination of these
sites’ content among first pages of Google returns may create an impression that
Hilary Clinton has a clear bias against African Americans.

8.3.4 Followers of Pro-Trump Pages Were Encouraged to Action

All three pro-Trump pages encouraged their audiences to participate in spreading

content and voting for Trump. As rates of follower shares demonstrated, Citizens for
Trump and Eagle Rising were more successful than Wake Up & Reclaim America, likely
since they asked followers to share and spread messages more often.

Figure 8.2: Average shares on posts by page.

40  See: https://sharescount.com/

41  See: http://bit.ly/2q9RYHs
124   Participatory Propaganda

Depending on one’s own echo chamber, the size of pro-Trump networks might
come as a surprise. To some media pundits, Trump rode to the White House on a wave
of fringe support (Coppins, 2015) – but that would be a mistake, as analysis of the
networks shows.
Each of the networks were visualised using Gephi, presenting a total of 5,416
nodes with 100,208 edges between them. To put that into perspective, similar data
pulls were made on two media page groups. The three pro-Trump pages had 16.3 times
more nodes and 55.86 times more edges than the liberal-leaning media group.
Each network contained a considerable percentage of pages that have self-
categorized on Facebook as “Community,” but also “Public Figure,” “Politician” and
some form of “News/Media” (See Figure 8.3).

Figure 8.3: Facebook page categories selected by pages within pro-Trump page like network.

The pro-Trump network was then analysed using Gephi (Figure 8.4). Additional
statistical analysis was conducted, using Modularity, which identifies the various
communities within a network, marked in the data visualization below by colours.
The pro-Trump network wasn’t just bigger in comparison; it was also more closely
integrated between pages with an Average Weighted Degree of 18.502 compared to
that of the conservative-leaning media group at 9.01 or the liberal-leaning at 5.404
(the higher the number, the greater the average number of edges that touch a node in
the network).
Findings   125

Figure 8.4: Three pro-Trump Facebook page like networks.

Pages liking each other demonstrate a possible channel for the spread of information.
To investigate further, Netvizz was used to pull all posts made by each page from 7
October to 7 November 2016. These posts where analysed using Excel to count the
mentions of specific terms (such as Clinton, Trump, and Wikileaks), how many posts
were shared from other accounts, and what web domains were shared to the page, for
example. The same investigative process was then applied to analysing the two media
page groups.
Around one-third of the posts made by Wake Up & Reclaim America (34.1%)
and Citizens for Trump (28.7%) were shares from other Facebook accounts or pages,
indicating community-like behaviour on these two pages.
126   Participatory Propaganda

Figure 8.5: Number of posts shared from other Facebook pages or accounts.

Some pages, such as Occupy Libtards,42 enjoyed repeated shares to Wake Up & Reclaim
America, including The Deplorables.43 This Facebook group has 472,297 Members (as
of 18 April 2017) and takes its name from a comment made by Hillary Clinton during
the election about Trump supporters.
These pro-Trump pages are not operating in isolation. Of note, as bigger nodes
in the pro-Trump Page Like network visualisation are Fox News, Sean Hannity, The
Blaze, and Glenn Beck (see the darker orange community in the upper left of the

42  See: https://www.facebook.com/Occupy-Libtards-5-670970859684203/

43  See: https://www.facebook.com/groups/309472556081534/
Findings   127

network) – not to mention the NRA Institute for Legislative Action and The Heritage
Foundation (Figure 8.6).

Figure 8.6: Zoomed in screenshot of pro-Trump Facebook page like network using Gephi.

Beyond the official political campaign Facebook pages, hundreds if not thousands
of other pages pumped content supporting Trump to sympathetic users of that social
network. Indeed, within the Wake Up & Reclaim America network, 207 page names
contain the word “Trump” – with many more that are pro-Trump that do not, making
them much more difficult to track. Together, these Facebook pages support each other
with reciprocal Page Likes and sharing of posts, while also mobilizing users to not just
spread the message but also support Trump. In so doing, these online communities
are also tapping into bigger organisations, such as media outlets, lobby groups, and
think tanks – hinting at a much more systemic participatory propaganda effort.

8.3.5 Pro-Trump Pages Heavily Engage with Media Outlets

The pro-Trump Pages certainly followed right-leaning media outlets, as can be

identified in the Page Like networks visualised above and featuring Fox News and
Sean Hannity, among others.
128   Participatory Propaganda

The liberal-leaning media group, visualised in Figure 8.7, comprised seven almost
entirely independent communities. The visualisation below uses Gephi’s stronger
gravity function to keep the communities closer together for ease of viewing; however,
they are not linked so closely in reality. What’s more, the Facebook pages tend to be
grouped into ‘ego networks,’ meaning any given media outlet tends to only like pages
related to that network, such as its own TV shows or journalists.

Figure 8.7: Left-leaning media Facebook page like (or “ego”) network.

The conservative-leaning media group is quite different (Figure 8.8). The massive
Infowars community dominates the visualisation, represented here below by the
large yellow section, running into the Alex Jones network in blue, which comes with
Findings   129

it.44 While nodes connect the Infowars monolith to Fox, the key connector page is
Judge Andrew Napolitano. This is interesting in itself, as in past analysis of media
Facebook Page Like networks, Fox stood out from outlets such as the BBC for its
connecting to personalities, both their own journalists as well as US politicians,
suggesting that some media outlets aren’t just covering the news, but engaging
directly with the subjects making the news (Wanless, 2015). This form of engagement
could be considered alarming, if the notion of impartial news is accepted as crucial to
a functioning democracy.

Figure 8.8: Right-leaning media page like networks.

44  Since then, Facebook has banned Alex Jones and Infowars blog from its pages.
130   Participatory Propaganda

When these two media groups are combined with the pro-Trump network (Figure
8.9), the liberal-leaning outlets become islands unto themselves almost entirely
disconnected (the blue communities at the bottom left), while the conservative-
leaning media are absorbed into the overall community, and as noted above, in some
cases becoming influential nodes.

Figure 8.9: All Facebook page like networks combined.

In short, the conservative-leaning media network is more of an ecosystem that

stretches beyond news outlet borders, blending into each other and pages beyond
just media and journalists, into communities.
 Conclusion: Participatory Propaganda in Liberal Democracies   131

8.3.6 Pro-Trump Pages in a Participatory Propaganda Model

While the analysis presented above is based on a very limited number of pages,
the degree of engagement and inter-connectivity, both inside the network and
with supportive media, demonstrate the existence of a systematic and coordinated
attempt to influence the US voters to support the Trump campaign. All but two of the
critical tactics identified in the participatory propaganda model were used by Trump
supporters to achieve this goal, including sharing provocative content (fake news,
memes, and data leaks), feeding such content into an echo chamber, reposting the
same content, encouraging followers to do the same, and connecting with media and
larger organisations supportive of Trump. The only two critical elements missing were
hyper-targeted audience analysis (Step 1) and monitoring and evaluation (Step 7), as
these activities are typically conducted through in-house research during a campaign
and are not traceable through open sources. However, Cambridge Analytica has
openly claimed to have used such tactics for the Trump campaign (Nix, 2016).

8.4 Conclusion: Participatory Propaganda in Liberal Democracies

As this chapter demonstrates, the organized deployment of various emerging

technological and manipulative techniques in a digital era creates conditions for
the emergence of an interactive form of engagement online where followers (target
audience) are drawn into participating in the creation and spread of persuasive
messaging. The example of the Trump 2016 presidential election campaign was
used to demonstrate how these new tactics were deployed in combination with
traditional media coverage to draw a considerable online following. This follower
engagement constitutes a qualitatively more enhanced form of propaganda that is
much more ‘invasive’ in nature – not to mention potentially very dangerous for liberal
democracies, especially if cases of foreign interference in the electoral processes, such
as the alleged Russian influence on the 2016 US election results, continue to mount.
As internet penetration rates in democratic countries surpasses 80%,45 with
many others in tow, nearly half of those populations finished high school before the
web was even invented.46 As of 2015, 21% of American survey respondents indicated
they were online “almost constantly” (Perrin, 2015), and by the end of the first quarter

45  For more data, see 2016 CIRA report for Canada, the 2016 Office for National Statistics report for
UK, and the 2017 Pew Research Center report for the USA.
46  Similar models of participatory propaganda have been identified through subsequent research on
the 2017 U.K. general election (https://lageneralista.com/anti-establishment-blues-2017-u-k-election/)
and Canadian political Facebook pages (https://lageneralista.com/polarising-politics-in-canada-a-
facebook-study/).
132   Participatory Propaganda

in 2016, the average American was consuming 10:39 hours (Nielsen, 2016) of media
across devices each day. Unlike radio and television before it, the internet has people
constantly connected to information. Americans are at the vanguard of these changes
– and as such are among the most vulnerable populations to information warfare, be
it in the form of participatory propaganda, social engineering or cyber-attacks.
With such levels of exposure to a constant barrage of information, the ability of
any one individual to discern its veracity and relevance in a broader context of daily
life is constantly challenged. Furthermore, the effects of continuous online exposure
on individual mental health or general perceptions of the world are still too poorly
understood, and as such, are not yet part of mainstream knowledge or incorporated
into national education curriculums at the level required to cope. The negative and
long-lasting repercussions of such limited understanding are perhaps nowhere as
serious as in national politics.
In 2014, the World Economic Forum listed “the spread of misinformation online”
as one of the top ten trends facing the world (WEF, 2014). By 2016, Reporters Without
Borders declared that we “have reached the age of post-truth, propaganda, and
suppression of freedoms – especially in democracies” (2017). As demonstrated,
modern propagandists have a considerable arsenal of methods at their disposal to
manipulate populations, influence their opinions or engage them in active propagation
of the desired content that go well beyond the creation and distribution of ‘fake news’
alone. Unfortunately, the tools and methods discussed in this article can be used
by savvy propagandists everywhere, regardless of their political clout or country of
provenance. What perhaps stands out most in this participatory propaganda model
is its perpetuation. Through the use of online communities, such participatory
propaganda campaigns run as long as the cause driving it matters to its members – or
rather, those administrating such groups are able to produce content that engages
and provokes followers. Finding ways to identify and measure engagement within
these networks to understand the driving rationale, as opposed to blocking them,
should be a priority for those studying liberal democracies.

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138   List of Figures

List of Figures
Figure 4.1: Density of clusters according to neighborhood — 46
Figure 5.1: Akhil Gogoi Meme — 62
Figure 6.1: Video still from the Israeli Defense Forces’ video, “With Her Eyes She Defends Israel’s
Borders,” 2019 — 68
Figure 6.2: Video still from the Israeli Defense Forces’ video, “With Her Eyes She Defends Israel’s
Borders,” 2019 — 68
Figure 6.3: B’Tselem volunteer Thawra ‘Eid zooms in on Israeli settler children who are attacking her
Palestinian village of Burin by throwing stones with slingshots, May 20, 2015, © B’Tselem — 77
Figure 6.4: B’Tselem volunteer Wydian Zaben films Israeli settlers torching the fields around her
Palestinian village of Burin, Aug 15, 2015, © B’Tselem — 78
Figure 6.5: “The Po’alot (female workers) in the agricultural settlement Ayanot,” Jan 2, 1940. Source:
Schwartz Tel Aviv. From the The Jewish National Fund (JNF) Photographic Archive — 79
Figure 6.6: Deir Yassin (also transliterated as Dayr Yasin), Associated Press, April 1948 — 81
Figure 7.1: Tweet 1 — 92
Figure 7.2: Tweet 2 — 92
Figure 7.3: Tweet 3 — 93
Figure 7.4: Tweet 4 — 93
Figure 7.5: Tweet 5 — 94
Figure 7.6: @mentions containing attempts to discredit — 98
Figure 7.7: @mentions containing attempts to intimidate — 99
Figure 7.8: @mentions containing attempts to shame — 101
Figure 8.1: Post type by pro-Trump Facebook pages — 121
Figure 8.2: Average shares on posts by page — 123
Figure 8.3: Facebook page categories selected by pages within pro-Trump page like network — 124
Figure 8.4: Three pro-Trump Facebook page like networks — 125
Figure 8.5: Number of posts shared from other Facebook pages or accounts — 126
Figure 8.6: Zoomed in screenshot of pro-Trump Facebook page like network using Gephi — 127
Figure 8.7: Left-leaning media Facebook page like (or “ego”) network — 128
Figure 8.8: Right-leaning media page like networks — 129
Figure 8.9: All Facebook page like networks combined — 130
 List of Tables   139

List of Tables
Table 4.1: Overview of the eight largest clusters obtained from community detection on relations
among Instagram users in Kristiansand — 41
Table 7.1: @mentions containing attempts to discredit — 98
Table 7.2: @mentions containing attempts to intimidate — 100
Table 7.3: @mentions containing attempts to shame — 101
Table 7.4: Percent of @mentions invoking race (of legislator) — 102
Table 7.5: Percent of @mentions invoking gender (of legislator) — 103
Table 7.6: Percent of @mentions containing body commentary — 103
Table 7.7: Summary of hypothesis test results — 104
Table 8.1: Facebook pages analysed — 119