Despite (or perhaps because of) these inequalities, though, we are seeing some spectacular shifts in the flow of information across national borders and, as a consequence, in the relations between the peoples of different countries. As Appadurai notes, “This volatile and exploding traffic in commodities, styles, and information has been matched by the growth of both flows of cultural politics, visible most powerfully in the discourse of human rights, but also in the new languages of radical Christianity and Islam, and the discourse of civil society activists, who wish to promote their own versions of global equity, entitlement, and citizenship” (2010, 5).
Journalists, bloggers, and other cyber-enthusiasts have celebrated the use of sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube by protesters across the Muslim world and their supporters from the West as a decisive sign that grassroots communicators might be able to route around government censors and that citizen journalists might be able to force international concerns onto the agenda of the professional news media. Consider, for example, the role such technologies played in the aftermath of Iran’s hotly contested summer 2009 elections. Between June 7 and June 26, the Web Ecology Project (2009) at Harvard University recorded 2,024,166 tweets about the Iranian election, involving 480,000 people. Meanwhile, CNN’s iReport received more than 1,600 citizen-produced reports from Iran (Carafano 2009), mostly photographs but including videos of the actions in the street, recorded and transmitted via mobile phones. (Our enhanced book features a more involved discussion by Henry Jenkins on how “spreadability” applies to these events in Iran and the 2011 Arab Spring movements as well as the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States.)
Sean Aday et al.’s 2010 report Blogs and Bullets: New Media in Contentious Politics argues that Twitter participation inside Iran was too low to have made much difference on the ground (estimating that as few as 100 people may have produced most of the Twitter traffic out of the country) and that the regime in power likewise used social network tools to monitor the behavior of protesters and often to circulate counterrevolutionary materials. However, the report concludes, “Where Twitter and other new media clearly did matter is how they conveyed information about the protests to the outside world. Traditional media were at a disadvantage in covering events inside Iran because of restrictions placed on journalists, and thus ended up relying on new media for content. Hence, the outside world’s perceptions of the protests were crucially shaped by Twitter (as conveyed through blogs and other means), amateur videos uploaded to YouTube and Facebook, and other sources” (22). In Innis’s terms, what happened challenged two “monopolies of knowledge” which potentially regulated the flow of information from Tehran to the United States: the Iranian government’s desire to contain news of the protest and the mainstream news media’s ability to determine the priority it gave to covering specific events. For Appadurai, the same data might have illustrated continued inequalities in the speed and spread of communication, such that people struggling for power within Iran were forced to rely on influence and attention from the Western world to shape events within their own country.
Clay Shirky has argued that Twitter’s impact in this instance was more affective than informational: “As a medium gets faster, it gets more emotional. We feel faster than we think. […] Twitter makes us empathize. It makes us part of it. Even if it’s just retweeting, you’re aiding the goal that dissidents have always sought: the awareness that the outside world is paying attention is really valuable” (2009). These strong emotions reflected the cumulative effect of an ongoing but always fragile flow of messages from the streets of Tehran. Much as daily digital communication about mundane matters led to people using social network sites feeling stronger personal ties to their friends, the flow of political messages through Twitter helped make them feel more directly implicated by the protest. Global citizens (including a strong diasporic community in North America and western Europe) helped the Iranian protesters evade potential censorship and technical roadblocks, translated their thoughts into English and other Western languages, flagged reliable information from rumors, passed what they had learned onto others, and rallied news outlets to pay closer attention.
Newsrooms are still struggling to figure out what their new roles may be in an environment where the demand for information can be driven by affect and shaped by what happens within online communities, where citizens may make demands on what journalists cover and may cobble together information from a range of resources if traditional news outlets fail to provide desired information. While smooth relations between grassroots and commercial media can be rare, the two can coexist within a more layered media environment, each holding the other accountable for its abuses, each scanning the other for potentially valuable content that might otherwise fall through the cracks.
However, one could argue that these acts of circulation (and discussions of circulation) substituted for actual political action. Jodi Dean contends in an essay on what she calls “communicative capitalism” that the expansion of the public’s capacity to circulate messages has too often been fetishized as an end in itself, often at the expense of real debate or action on the ground that might seek to directly change the struggles taking place:
Today, the circulation of content in the dense, intensive networks of global communications relieves top-level actors (corporate, institutional and governmental) from the obligation to respond. Rather than responding to messages sent by activists and critics, they counter with their own contributions to the circulating flow of communications, hoping that sufficient volume (whether in terms of number of contributions or the spectacular nature of a contribution) will give their contributions dominance or stickiness. […] Under conditions of the intensive and extensive proliferation of media, messages are more likely to get lost as mere contributions to the circulation of content. (2005, 54)
Dean raises an important caveat about how means can become ends in themselves, especially amid the techno-euphoria that has surrounded the expansion of communication capacities. Twitter (as a new company seeking to increase its visibility in the marketplace) benefited from what happened in this case as much or more than the Tehran protestors did. Yet we feel that Dean goes too far in dismissing the meaningfulness of popular acts of circulation. She writes, “Messages are contributions to circulating content—not actions to elicit responses. […] So, a message is no longer primarily a message from a sender to a receiver. Uncoupled from contexts of action and application—as on the Web or in print and broadcast media—the message is simply part of a circulating data stream. Its particular content is irrelevant” (59). For Dean, meaningful participation is a fantasy used to sell products and services rather than a description of contemporary political and economic realities. We disagree. Web 2.0 companies may often seek to sell longstanding cultural practices back to the communities where they originated, but Dean’s argument is every bit as disempowering as corporate versions of “viral media” and ultimately fatalistic in its conclusions. Rather than seeing circulation as the empty exchange of information stripped of context and meaning, we see these acts of circulation as constituting bids for meaning and value.
We feel that it very much matters who sends the message, who receives it, and, most importantly, what messages get sent. Acts of circulation shape both the cultural and political landscape in significant ways, as we will demonstrate throughout this book. What happened with Iran was not revolutionary, in the sense that it led to a regime change, but it was profound, in the sense that it made people around the world more aware of the political dynamics on the ground in Tehran and left many of us feeling closer to a group of people who, for most of our lives, we had been told to hate and fear.
What’s Next
Innis’s distinction between marble and papyrus, storage and mobility, is helpful for considering the ways a more spreadable media culture breaks with the assumptions of both the broadcast paradigm and the “stickiness” model. Both broadcast and stickiness represent different kinds of “monopoly” structures, locking down access and limiting participation. Under the conditions we’ve been describing here, media content that remains fixed in location and static in form fails to generate sufficient public interest and thus drops out of these ongoing conversations. Throughout this chapter, we’ve detailed many examples of spreadability at work, including those from the realm of entertainment