[ICTs-and-Society] statement of alternative informatics about gezi park and social media

[Seda Guerses]

hey matze,

thank you for your comments and critique, which i have happily passed on to the alternatif bilisim people.
alt_bil is a collective and the initiative inhabits people of a variety of positions and values, hence while the statement is that of the association and may at times sound liberal, i would expect that the palette of positions are not all represented. for example, ali riza keles, another member of altbil, shortly after the start of the mass events gave a critical account of social media use and the re-creation of privilege in reporting of the protests/invisibility of those actions that fall out of the social media lens, especially in other cities or in poor neighborhoods of istanbul.
http://www.emekdunyasi.net/ed/teknoloji/21489-direnis-sosyal-medyanin-icerigini-degistirdi
that is for some more background on alternatif bilisim. 

since you raise interesting points, maybe i can also add my personal opinion. and i apologize for the long mail but i couldn't get it together shorter.

it is true that at #occupygezi white collar people (employed or riding on social capital) have played a focal role in the initial protests. however, i do not share a possible reduction of the waves of protests to "red riding hood wearing a pretty summer dress being surprised by the big bad cop for the first time in her life" to capture its totality. i agree that fashionable imagery that has ensued smells of advertisement-network spirit (an interesting turn of events in itself, as many ad-network employees moved from designer shops to the streets to protest shopping malls), but i also don't think that it is the proof of a true leftist/radical/revolutionary movement to only work with bad design/non-consumable imagery/symbolicism, whatever that may be. and, if you want to implicate a global population, than those very memes of the "liberal social media" may turn out to be interesting to gather empathy,support and solidarity for the movement. when national oppression can be countered with international solidarity, why not pick up a language to convey the message internationally. there were a lot of symbolicism in turkish/kurdish/armenian, which was very difficult to translate and rather sophisticated, but these were so stuffed with insider references, they never got captured internationally. that is also ok.

further, in today's turkey, old revolutionary slogans simply do not capture the problems that are currently being articulated especially since the turkish left has historically been captured by the nationalists, the kurdish left is rightfully distrustful of any turkish initiative, the armenian left feel just as vulnerable as the kurds, and the muslim left is only slowly constructing a new alliance. hence, the breaking with old forms and slogans, however amenable they may be to consumptive iconicism, has actually played an important role in the plurality currently present in the protests (which of course differs in structure from neighborhood to neighborhood in the continuing neighborhood forums).

for example, while it is nice to hear people chanting together "shoulder on shoulder against fascism", whether erdogan is a fascist is questionable. he has been democratically elected (again, whatever democracy means, but he was elected) and yet he has carved out exactly the same democratic rights which his political party had established in the first half of the naughties. in the process, his language, and that of his close colleagues, has turned more and more totalitarian. given this complexity, what does it mean to chant "we are against fascism" other than to use a displaced slogan just because it exists in revolutionary memory and that includes and excludes. so the protesters carve it out, rephrase the slogan into something funny (in this case, "put your leg on your shoulder against fascism"). one could say these subverted paroles unite the people but in the process empty them from their political content, on the other hand one could argue that they invite the new coalitions that have now come to be, to create their own language. if it is the latter, i suspect it is going to take some time before we recognize that new language. 

so, yes gezi has its roots in the middle class, but this does not hold for the hes movement (against the massive damn constructions on the black sea), for the kurds, for the armenians, for the alevis, or the anti-capitalist muslims. these groups have been in protest before gezi and have also joined (some of them partially) the gezi protests. this participation carries the symptoms of any new alliance between the mainstream masses who are politicized for the first time in years, and those whose political voices have been oppressed for longer periods. this means the latter are sometimes in conflict situations, sometimes in a minority position, sometimes threatened. nevertheless, as taner akcam wrote recently, it is possible to claim that gezi is a movement that has its roots in the killing of the armenian journalist hrant dink and has the potential to continue to bring together disparate parts of society against the neo-liberal order of erdogan and a desire for the establishment of fundamental rights and justice (notice, he is still using the old language). 
http://www.taraf.com.tr/taner-akcam/makale-hrant-lice-ve-gezi-yeni-bir-yarin.htm

and, i completely agree with you that the press is a problem. internationally, most of the accounts of the protests in press (and not all! and, here i would like to give credit to those outlets that took the courage to report different positions), especially in europe, have not been able to capture those aspects of the protests that is critical of the existing global order and that does not fit into the european mainstream lens of muslims and seculars struggling for power. for some reason, be it an alliance with erdogan's neo-liberal polices, orientalism, or dogmatic ideas about what the left should stand for (i.e., secularism/rationality), it has been painfully difficult to find any interesting analysis of the events. 

finally, #occupygezi have been protesting regularly in front of mass media institutions. but more importantly, there are numerous independent press initiatives and a general tendency to say, "if you can't control the media, you should become the media". the relationship of these independent media channels with social media is conflicted. it allows people to reach masses rapidly, and yet, dependency on social media companies for journalistic freedom and quality is at best a game of roulette. this became painfully evident in the case of "otekilerin postasi", an independent media initiative that was removed by Facebook on sunday, replaced again today, only at the cost of having lost all their past reportings of the last three years (whether they will be replaced is still not known). nevertheless, these channels do not have viable alternatives. using tor in combination with crabgrass or n-1 or other non-commercial tools, while very attractive, does not happen from one day to the other and requires a basis of trust which is currently in the process of being developed. even if so, they will at best be useful as tactical tools to organize but not to reach the masses. 

i hope this maybe clarifies why i still think it is important to at least take a moment to look at what local initiatives like alternatif bilisim are saying and to enter in dialogue with them and, for that matter, with #occupygezi.
i hope the invitation is received well.
s.

ps. and just to make my point that my account is only one of many:

1) here is a text coming from izmir, where they talk about the importance of sticking to the slogan "shoulder on shoulder against fascism", saying that this is not only a slogan against government fascism, but also fascism in the minds. this just goes to say that there are many voices part of gezi and they are in the process of negotiating a new language of resistance and activism. 
(in turkish, but you may get some sense of it using translation applications)
https://word.office.live.com/wv/WordView.aspx?FBsrc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fdownload%2Ffile_preview.php%3Fid%3D146976598830680%26time%3D1373280105%26metadata&access_token=641777150%3AAVKSKwWP-OBxeokbbZHhbuLnSpCwaZTe3yiEcFiWP4EuAw&title=Provokasyona+Dair+Açıklama+-+5.7.2013.docx

2) and, here is a text from another academic in berlin, who also has a different opinion. especially the last two paragraphs of the text do a good job of summarizing where the protests come from and where they may be going:
http://kafila.org/2013/07/05/the-unbearable-lightness-of-drowning-in-your-own-myth-tamer-soyler/#more-19165


On Jul 8, 2013, at 11:16 AM, Matze Schmidt <matze.schmidt at n0name.de> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> and thank you for the text.
> 
> But as far as I can see there a no news aspects in it. The 'wrong' media
> vs. street-topic (street = real, media = not real) is an old hat ever
> since the french revolution or the televised (!) revolution in Romania
> 1989 and was never an indicator for radical change in the modern era.
> Crediting the social media (btw'n'briefly spoken any media are social
> but not socialised) with some power--by itself ?--credits them more as
> 'bottom-up media' and humans are short-circuited here. But there is
> still a distance in the use and the structure.
> 
> One has to ask: Which humans and where? Of course the metropolitan ones
> with smartness at their hands.
> 
> I can not see an over all helplesness in the traditional or big media
> (TV, Press). And if so this has to be specified in levels of ideology.
> Analysing the situation of the official/state-media as a "turning the
> private media to the communicator of the provocative language used by
> the government officials" is--I am sorry--banal. Every power in charge
> will use the media as their megaphone and stop powerful networked media
> (based on the almost classical trias text, photos and moving pictures).
> But the linking social "media:democratic" deludes. What about the
> linking "social media:liberalism"?
> 
> The BBC was very early in May giving the stereotype of young urban
> unemployed at Gezi who can speak english fluently and want free speech.
> This stereotype turned soon into a appropriate picture of the scene. The
> rest of the happenings from fraternizations of former fiends to gas and
> dead in the strees have been reported by RT.News to
> http://gezipark.nadir.org/. So this british TV/Online-Sender was not at
> all helpless and not non-social and the social media where not alone.
> They were very close. Twitter was full of professionals and the sheme of
> "bottum-up = social media, top-down = traditional media" was about to
> erode.
> 
> To the contrary, Facebook and Twitter show structurally and contenwise
> weakness as the movement (esp. in Istanbul) seems to be locked in the
> merry-go-round of same _open topics_ like "stop the present government,
> stop police, right to the city of instanbul" and _hidden topics_ of
> participation in the new middle class society and life. This all on the
> basis of networks these young never control but use as users. Twitter
> can be shut down overnight, the recend NSA-scandal is just the another
> name for state-driven information--not as surveillance but as structural
> field.
> 
> The first task in revolutions is always "conquer the media as
> machinery" and spread your (the) truth to produce a mass against the
> monopoly on the use of force; this 'revoluton' here proceeds the other
> way round. Capitalistic standards love those icons (the young lady  in a
> red summer dress pepper sprayed, a soft "Liberté guidant le peuple) that
> helps to distract.
> 
> Matze Schmidt
> 
> Sunday, July 7, 2013, 4:20:35 PM, you wrote:
>> the text below is their statement about censorship, mass media, and
>> social media from a couple of weeks ago,
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> EN:
>> http://yenimedya.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/the-power-of-social-media-the-helplesness-of-traditional-media-and-direngeziparki-direnankara-direnizmir-an-analysis-of-the-alternative-informatics-association/
> 
>