Political Communities in the Age of the Internet
Chiara de Franco
University of Southern Denmark
cdf@sam.sdu.dk, @chiara_defranco
(Work in progress: Please DO NOT cite without permission)
Abstract
This paper aims at posing the basis for a new conceptualization of the impact of social media in
conflict dynamics. It does so by interrogating how new communication technologies promote forms of
interactions that constitute ‘virtual’ communities and open the space for alternative narratives. It draws
on the theoretical framework developed in De Franco 2012 and explains how the new digital media
system is strengthening an ongoing process altering the traditional separation between public,
restricted, and secret spaces and therefore creating room for communities based on new systems of
information and social inclusion/exclusion.
Examples from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are used to show how the social media allow for the restructuring of existing social groups and the emergence of completely new communities and new
narratives that can deeply affect conflict dynamics.
In so doing, it moves away from casual explanations of media effects but also from the extant literature
on mediatisation (Mazzoleni and Shultz 1999, Hjavard 2004, and Strömbäck 2008), which are too
often limited to content analysis, and explores the linkage between narratives, interaction and
international practices.
After years of neglect, IR as an academic discipline is finally showing some genuine interest
in the role of the media in International Politics. The merit remains clearly in the conventional
reading of the Arab Spring and of the role that the internet had in facilitating, if not
prompting, that specific political phenomenon. It was indeed as a response to the Arab Spring
that two years ago the ISA convention was not only named after the so-called ‘Global
Information Age’ but also clearly packed with panels focusing on International Political
Communication and the role of the Internet more in general. Waking up from a long sleep,
however, IR is running the risk of taking out from media studies those theories that are more
‘convenient’ to support this or that approach or school of thought and not necessarily the
soundest. This is of course the risk scholars run every time they do not develop a fully-
fledged interdisciplinary strategy but just borrow concepts and ideas from other disciplines,
disjoin them from their context, and operate an extreme synthesis taking only what it is
‘needed’.
This paper argues that despite a general agreement that the Internet influences
International Politics, the nature and dynamics of such an influence has still to be clarified.
What is it that supporters and opponents of the Internet revolution argue remains often
unclear: what are they talking about when they talk about the Internet? What kind of power
are they attributing or negating to the Internet? And Why?
The paper has to be read as a first step towards the development of a fully-fledged
research project. It contends that lack of fully-fledged interdisciplinary research is leading IR
scholars to perpetuate and strengthen some of the weaknesses of mainstream media studies
and therefore aims at posing the basis for a new conceptualization of the impact of social
media in conflict dynamics. It builds on Meyrowitz’s (1985) understanding of the social
effects of television and the theoretical framework developed in de Franco (2012) and moves
away from casual explanations of media effects, which are too often limited to content
analysis, but also from the extant literature on mediatization (Mazzoleni and Shultz 1999,
Hjavard 2004, and Strömbäck 2008). It explores the linkage between narratives, interaction
and international practices and explains how the new digital media system is strengthening an
ongoing process altering the traditional separation between public, restricted, and secret
spaces and therefore creating room for communities based on new systems of information and
social inclusion/exclusion. Finally, it claims this can indeed have an impact on conflict
dynamics if these new lines of division (and therefore of aggregation) between communities
differ from the divisions the conflict plays with and if these on line communities produce
narratives about the conflict that compete with the narratives of ‘real’/off line communities.
1. The debate
Mainstream theories and methodological approaches grant easy access to a foreign
discipline. Going beyond them to explore alternative views is always the biggest challenge of
an interdisciplinary project. Mainstream media studies may provide IR scholars with a basic
understanding not only of how old and new media work, but also of how the media should be
studied. However, as for any other discipline – IR included – media studies too is all but
homogeneous and very much evolving on the margins thanks to unorthodox approaches. I
would even go as far as to say that assuming there is an orthodox way to study the media
constructs a very simplistic picture of a very rich discipline. As for any other social ‘science’,
concepts and theories clarifying what the media do in and to our societies are all but neutral.
Each concept provides us with a different understanding not only of the media but of the
social at large. This is important to remember because when we borrow a given concept or
theory from another discipline we also take on board their underpinning ontology and
epistemology, but too often such a process is taken for granted and not really observed in a
reflective way. When IR scholars pick up a given theory to integrate the Internet into existing
‘models’ of foreign policy making or to design new ones, they also buy into a specific
understanding of language, communication and their role in our societies. Inevitably, IR
scholars will end up choosing theories about the media that reinforce their understanding of
international politics. Morozov (2011), for example, has observed that the ‘excitement about
the Internet, particularly the high hopes that are pinned on it in terms of opening up closed
societies’ (p.4) is a direct consequence of a sort of longing for social and political change that
had remained frustrated since the fall of the Berlin wall. He refers, in particular, to the
advocates of democratisations, for whom the Internet is ‘the only ray of light in an otherwise
dark intellectual tunnel of democracy promotion’ (ibid.). Despite the contestable evaluation of
the process of democratization, Morozov’s argument is arguably strong especially when he
discusses in great details why that image of the Internet is not only partial but also naïf and
how the Internet can indeed equally serve the interest of authoritarian regimes and
dictatorships. More in general, acceptance or rejection of the ‘Internet Revolution’ thesis
seems determined by how different scholars understand the role of communication in
international politics vis-à-vis other factors and variables. Anderson (2011), for example, has
refused to consider the Arab Spring as a product of the new media ecology and argued that
explanations for what happened in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya has to be found in the economic
grievances and specific social dynamics of those countries.
The point is, however, that there isn’t just one way to understand the role of the
media or of communication in our societies and that rejecting one thesis – the ‘Internet
Revolution’ thesis for example – does not solve the puzzle but instead leaves it well open. It
is my belief that current approaches on the role of the Internet in international relations are
influenced by a reductionist understanding of ‘media effects’ and by a perpetuation of the
same limits that characterize the literature on the CNN effect.
Two problems, in particular, can be identified that have affected the way the Internet
is understood in IR. First, scholars announcing that an ‘Internet Revolution’ is taking place
base their analysis on a net distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, which is naïf and
misleading. Is the Internet really generating a deep and fundamental change in
communication that requires us to talk about a ‘revolution’ and to use a completely new
framework of analysis? Bolt (2012), for example, thinks so and argues that the ‘explosive
nature of digital (as opposed to analogue) viral dissemination’ (p.210) of images is the only
explanation for the rapid spread of the ‘spirit of the revolution – the contagion’ (ibid.). This
phenomenon, however, is hardly new – as the whole discussion about the CNN effect proves
–, certainly not specific to the internet, which is arguably a less visual environment than the
TV screen (Mossberger et al. 2008), and ultimately pointing at something which is hardly
revolutionary: an acceleration of the so-called Real Time Policy effect. The idea – which is
quite standard in IR at the moment – that the Internet is producing completely new
phenomena should be substantially revisited and the exiting literature on the ‘old’ media
reconsidered. Old and new media should be put in a continuum, not just because we can learn
about the latter on the basis of what we know about the former, but also because the two don’t
live in separate universes but in a single media ecology and do indeed evolve through mutual
influences. Putting old and new media in a continuum and learning from established – but not
necessarily mainstream – knowledge about the old media is to me a necessary step to identify
what’s really special about the internet – if indeed there is anything special about it.
Second, the existing debate about the Internet in international politics suffers from the
same limits that characterized the literature on the CNN effect, which is the hypothesis
arguing for political leaders’ loss of policy control to global television, as if they no longer
made decisions on the basis of interests but were rather driven by emotional public opinion
aroused by television coverage (see, for example, Mandelbaum 1994 and Robinson 2002). As
discussed in de Franco (2012), scholarly works on the CNN effect are centered on the news,
that is to say, the content of the so-called ‘news media’. As a consequence, attention is paid
uniquely to the message and to the conditions of news production, forgetting McLuhan’s
lesson that the medium is the message (McLuhan 1964). Focus on the content has also
generated a peculiar understanding of media power as solely relational and mirroring Dahl’s
classical terms: a successful attempt by party A to get party B to do something he/she would
not otherwise do. This is why most scholars still prefer to use the word ‘influence’ when they
discuss the role of the media in politics and international politics in particular: they
understand the media as not exercising power but something less than it because they contest
the validity of the CNN effect hypothesis and do not recognize the media with the ability to
get political leaders do something that they would not do otherwise.
Even the works on mediatization seem to reproduce the same problem. In fact, as
formulated by Mazzoleni and Schulz (1999), Jansson (2002), Schulz (2004), Hjarvard (2004),
and Strömbäck (2008), mediatization is the ‘process through which core elements of a social
or cultural activity (like work, leisure, play etc.) assume media form’ (Hjarvard, 2004, p. 48).
Even in this case the media content is the starting point to understand the media logic and the
way the latter affects social or cultural activities. Influenced by Baudrillard’s teachings more
than by McLuhan’s, some of the most compelling scholarly works on mediatization have
focused on the message and overlooked the impact of the medium over social behavior and
interaction. As Merrin (2005) describes well, Baudrillard had actually started from McLuhan
but finally arrived to the conclusion that the real message and significance of a medium is not
the technology itself, nor its psychological and social consequences, but the transformation of
the symbolic into the semiotic. Media power is for him visible in the destruction of the
symbolic and in its replacement with a semiotic simulation which functions not only as a
mode of communication but also as a model of social control and domination (ibid., p. 24).
All events are transformed and modeled following their media form till the point of becoming
non- events or pseudo-events, as it is also theorized by Boorstin (1990). Communication is for
Baudrillard a symbolic exchange, a strong active, full, present, dual or collective, human
relationship, founded on or created through rituals, customs, and exchanges whose meaning is
actualized in the moment and which exists as both a mode of communication and
confrontation (ibid., pp. 19–20).
In a very similar fashion, scholarly works on the internet have generally focused on
the content of the World-Wide-Web and welcomed the networked infrastructure of the
Internet that allow for new multi-directional information flows (Benkler 2006). Attention is
being paid on how social media and the ‘blogosphere’ are able to democratize the creation of
political content (Chadwick 2006, Sunstein 2007), amplify the voice of ordinary citizens
(Hindman 2009), involve them in open debates on political affairs (Trippi 2004), and give
them the possibility to test the credibility of official sources (Johnson & Kaye 2004;
Matheson 2004) – even in those cases where regimes run censorship policies involving
filtering the content of the Internet (Benkler 2006).
Such a line of reasoning is indebted to Durkheim’s and Barthes’ definition of
communication but does not recall Goffman’s (1959) theory of symbolic interaction, nor the
medium theory as explained by Meyrowitz (1985) or the way structural semiotics has
understood meaning production as a result of narrative structures (see, e.g., Greimas, 1966–
1970).
In a previous work (de Franco 2012), I have contested the validity of such contentoriented approach and its underpinning understanding of media power and suggested a ‘fourdimensional’ definition of media power should instead be adopted (de Franco 2012). In
particular, I underlined how media power over the structure, and therefore over social
interaction, is a critical dimension which is missing from the literature on the CNN effect and
mediatization. I therefore suggested that the linkage between symbolic interaction and mediamediated interaction should be explored by building on Meyrowitz (1985) for a better
understanding of the role of the media in international practices. The ‘medium theory’ argues
that the form in which people communicate has an impact that goes beyond the choice of
specific messages, because the media are not simply channels for conveying information
between two or more environments, but rather environments in and of themselves. As a
consequence, studying media power implies the analysis not only of media coverage, but also
of the medium itself, of its communicative characteristics, of all practices performed by
various agents that depart from the mere presence of that medium in the society and at the
same time transform it continuously. Innis (1972), for example, sees control over
communication media as a means through which social and political power is held. He,
nonetheless, claims that new media can break old monopolies – just as the printing press
broke the medieval Church’s monopoly over religious information. Innis (1972) adds that the
same content can have different effects in different media since every medium of
communication has its own ‘bias’ either toward lasting a long time or toward traveling easily
across great distances. He suggests that the bias of a culture’s dominant medium affects the
degree of the culture’s stability and conservatism – as well as the culture’s ability to take over
and govern large areas of territory. McLuhan (1964), instead, develops the notion of ‘sensory
balance’ and suggests that the media impose themselves upon all levels of our private and
social lives and that this process creates a sensory environment as invisible to us as water is to
fish. The media, then, become extensions of the human senses and affect the organization of
perception, feeling, and understanding.
By combining McLuhan and Goffman, Meyrowitz (1985) has gone even further and
explained that to understand the impact of the media on social behaviour we must start from
the concept of social ‘situation’. This can be understood as a ‘system of information’, that is
‘a given pattern of access to social information, a given pattern of access to the behavior of
other people’ (Meyrowitz, 1985, p. 37). As ‘information systems’, instead of physical setting
as understood by most of the situationists, a society’s set of social situations can be modified
without building or removing walls and corridors and without changing customs and laws
concerning access to places. The introduction of a widespread medium of communication
‘may restructure a broad range of situations and require new sets of social performances’
(ibid., p. 39). In fact, while the separation of people in different situations produces specific
beliefs, worldviews and behaviors, the merging of those situations and related actors and
audiences will produce new beliefs and behaviors. The media therefore affect social actions
because they rearrange the division between different situations, in terms of both actors and
audiences, and change the notion of appropriate behavior for each situation. When previously
distinct social situations are combined by a new medium, then a behavior that was considered
as appropriate can well become inappropriate and vice versa. ‘Electronic media’, explains
Meyrowitz, ‘have rearranged many social forums so that most people now find themselves in
contact with others in new ways. And unlike the merged situations in face-to-face interaction,
the combined situations of electronic media are relatively lasting and inescapable, and they
therefore have a much greater effect on social behavior’ (ibid., p. 5). The media, in sum,
construct and shape new social arenas by building bridges between the existing ones.
It is worth remembering that the medium theory has been accused of technological
determinism. Morozov (2013), for example, has recently used old anti-McLuhan arguments to
contradict the general view that the Internet is the living proof McLuhan was right when
predicting the raise of the ‘global village’. In reality this critique of the ‘medium theory’ is
based on a reductionist reading of works by scholars like Innis and McLuhan who never
argued for a deterministic power of technology nor have been busy looking for each single
medium exoteric characteristics but just reflected on how each technology favours or
discourages certain social practices and why. The difference between the two operations is
apparent: while technological determinism does not leave room to the transformative
potential of agency, medium theory has never neglected it. This discussion is just too
remindful of the famous debate in IR between agency-led and structure-led theories. Of
course the best description stays in the middle where structures and agents do transform each
other.
2. Own approach
My argument here is that the basic assumption of the ‘medium theory’ is valid also
for the Internet and that therefore a specificity of Internet-mediated interaction can be
identified, but that this does not imply a ‘revolution’ is taking place. Of course a first problem
with the application of ‘medium theory’ to the Internet is linked to the fact that the Internet is
not a single medium but made of a synergic network of different media which creates so
many information environments that a complete list is virtually impossible: on line
newspapers, TVs or radios, the blogosphere, the social networks, on-line telephoning systems,
information/picture/video sharing platforms like you-tube etc…. Not only is not the Internet a
single medium, but it doesn’t use a single technology either. However, there is something we
can identify as a common feature of all the information environments listed above: they have
changed the way human beings interact with each other, even more clearly than, following
Meyrowitz, television did a few seventy years ago. If we go beyond the content available on
the world-wide-web and focus instead on interaction practices that are promoted by the new
media ecology, then we can understand the Internet as a globe-wide system affecting human
interaction with a transformative potential.
My thesis here is that the new digital media ecology is altering the previous
separation between public, restricted, and secret spaces by showing everything to everybody.
More generally, it transforms what was supposed to be accessible to a restricted group of
people into something visible to anybody. The internet plays an important role in such a
process, which anyway predates the Internet and according to Meyrowitz was kicked off by
television. Because of the Internet, people find themselves in contact with others, in new
ways or to a different degree, which can lead to a re-structuring of existing social groups as
well as to the emergence of completely new communities – social and political communities
alike that can compete with traditional communities which are based on traditional systems of
social inclusion/exclusion and pre-digital system of information.
Such a specific understanding of the social effects of the Internet is the rational to
focus on some specific environments within the Internet where transformation of interaction
patterns seems more striking: the social media. In fact, environments like the blogsphere,
Facebook and Twitter seem to create opportunities to reach people we could not have access
to before, or at least to interact with people in completely new ways. The social media seems
to offer the opportunity for a social restructuring where on line encounters substitute face-toface meetings, where people have at the same time more opportunities to construct their own
image and identity and less control on what is visible and to which audiences.
Facebook pages and blogs, in particular, have become the basis for new forms of
aggregation and information sharing that may lead to talk of them as virtual communities.
According to Rheingold (2008), a virtual community is a group of people ‘who may or may
not meet one another face to face, and who exchange words and ideas through the mediation
of computer bulletin boards and networks. Like any other community, it is also a collection of
people who adhere to a certain (loose) social contract, and who share certain (eclectic)
interests’ (Rheingold 2008:3). As Rheingold recalls, the existence of computer-linked
communities was predicted twenty years ago by J-C. R. Licklider: ‘in most fields they will
consist of geographically separated Members, sometimes grouped in small clusters and
sometimes working individually. They will be Communities not of common location, but of
Common interest’ (ibidem).
Can virtual communities also be political and challenge off-line political
communities? Political communities have been traditionally understood in constitutional
terms as citizens under a constitutional government. Such a definition has restricted in
practice the application of the ‘political community’ label to internationally recognized nation
states. Such a view is however contested, not only by those who underline how nations are
only ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1991) but also by authors that have underlined how
globalization has transformed nation-state based political communities (Held 1999) because
the link between the demos, citizenship, electoral mechanisms, the nature of consent and the
boundaries of the nation state can no longer be taken for granted.
If we adopt a cosmopolitan approach, then we can accept that the traditional linkage
between a territory a government and a community can be broken by interdependency,
interconnectedness and globaliosation and choose a less restrictive definition of ‘political
community’ as ‘an association of individuals who share an understanding of what is public
and what is private within their polity’ (Kukathas 1996). In this case, those virtual
communities that explicitly identify what matters are of public interest and should be
regarded as a an appropriate subject of attention by political institutions – national or
international – can be treated as political communities. They could even be consider as an
ideal type of ‘post-modern’ political community no longer centered on a state or a territory,
but a common political goal and a self-understanding as a community.
3. Internet and conflict dynamics
A direct implication of what I discussed above is that rather than thinking of the impact of the
Internet over international politics or war reporting in a causal sense and as depending on the
information which is available on line, we might consider its implications in a constitutive
sense. In other words, I suggest a conceptualisation of the Internet – and of the social media
in particular – that revolves around McLuhan’s idea that ‘the medium is the message’ and
underlines how a new media environment may introduce new forms of social interaction that
can have a huge impact on conflict dynamics.
In de Franco (2012), I showed how the media, old and new alike – understood as
complex organizations but also à la McLuhan as environments – mediate the interaction
between the agents of war and politics. Which means that the media happen to operate a
continuous mediation not only in the interaction between the government and the public, but
also between the government and the military, governments and publics of different countries,
governments and non-state actors, national and international governmental bodies. They also
operate a continuous mediation between members of each of these macro-groups.
How does this translate into an improved understanding of the role of the Internet in
conflict situations? To answer this question I would like first to focus on a specific
environment within the Internet – that is the social media – and then to stress that by altering
interaction practices, the social media are allowing their users to reconstitute themselves as
members of virtual/on line communities as opposed to traditional political communities.
The social media generate the potential for members of communities in conflict to
‘share’ experiences and ultimately influence wider narratives relating to the conflict, the
actors of the conflict, their objectives and their plans. New patterns of interaction have indeed
an impact on the stories that individuals will develop about a conflict.
I am now referring to narratives not as strategic tools to direct other people’s
understanding of a conflict, but as cognitive structures that, following A. J. Greimas (1979),
are at the very basis of humans’ meaning production. Building on Greimas’ narrative
semiotics, I see human beings as narrative animals: not only do we understand the world
through the lenses of stories but we also operate in world by enacting a story – or multiple
ones. Stories can be individual or belonging to a community, they result from the encounter
of personal experiences and collective narratives, and they may of course be strategic and
combine ‘cultural structures’ and specific communicative intentions.
That conflicts are often rooted in stories is not just an academic hypothesis but also
the working assumption of several conflict transformation practices on the ground. Very
recently, for example, the same people behind Ushahidi – the well-known crowdsourcing
system for crisis mapping first employed in Kenya in 2007 to collect, analyse and visualise
information relating to violent incidents to help the population on the ground to keep out of
harm’s way and non-governmental and governmental bodies to plan appropriate response –
have launched a new project based on the assumption that conflict transformation may
happen through narrative transformation. Their new system called PeaceTXT, which has been
used in Kenya in the run up to the 2013 political elections, is a ‘text messaging service that
sends out blasts of pro-peace messages to specific areas when trouble is brewing’ (Gettleman
2013). Launched by PopTech in partnership with the Kenyan NGO Sisi ni Amani (We are
Peace), the Kenyan implementation of PeaceTXT uses mobile advertising to market peace
and change people’s behaviors, based on the assumption that conflicts are often grounded in
the stories and narratives that people tell them-selves and in the emotions that these stories
evoke. When asked to explain the rational behind PeaceTXT, the developers said that
‘Narratives shape identity and the social construct of reality—we interpret our lives through
stories. These have the power to transform or infect relationships and communities. So the
idea is here that of propagating peace messages’ (Meier 2013).1
In the following I will illustrate my argument through a specific example which
should be considered as the starting point for a broader research project.
4. Illustrations
A specific phenomenon has come to my attention as possible illustration of how the Internet
may work to restructure existing communities in conflict zones and support alternative
narratives about the conflict. This case portrays the Internet as a positive factor that may lead
to de-escalation of a conflict, but I am in no way implying that the Internet cannot serve
conflict escalation dynamics. On the contrary, I believe an Internet-led restructuring of
communities divided by conflict may equally lead to conflict transformation or further
confrontation and that ultimately the Internet may equally serve conflict escalation or deescalation.
In 2011 Israeli graphic designer Ronny Edry uploaded a poster to Facebook depicting
Edry with his daughter holding the Israeli flag alongside the words ‘Iranians, we will never
bomb your country, we [heart] you’ (thepeacefactory.org/israel-loves-iran/). Attached to the
poster there was a brief letter by Edry addressing Iranians people:
1
An example of messages sent during 2013 elections in Kenya is available at http://qz.com/59428/thesetext-messages-could-be-the-difference-between-war-and-peace-in-kenya/. Accessed March 2014.
‘To the Iranian people. To all the fathers, mothers, children, brothers and
sisters. For there to be a war between us, first we must be afraid of each other, we must
hate. I’m not afraid of you, I don’t hate you. I don t even know you. No Iranian ever
did me no harm. I never even met an Iranian… Just one in Paris in a museum. Nice
dude. I see sometime here, on the TV, an Iranian. He is talking about war. I’m sure he
does not represent all the people of Iran. If you see someone on your TV talking about
bombing you, be sure he does not represent all of us. I’m not an official representative
of my country. I’m a father and a teacher. I know the streets of my town, I talk with my
neighbors, my family, my students, my friends and in the name of all these people, we
love you. We mean you no harm. On the contrary, we want to meet, have some coffee
and talk about sports. To all those who feel the same, share this message and help it
reach the Iranian people’ (ibidem).
According to Edry’s account, within hours tens of Israelis posted their own pictures with the
same message and within twenty-four hours messages from Iran started pouring in, some as
private messages, some as friends requests. Some did use their identities, others contacted
Edry with their identities concealed. As Edry’s post had received more than 7,000 likes he
created the Israel-Loves-Iran Facebook page and blog together with his wife Michal Tamir
and ‘Pushpin Mehina’, a small preparatory school for graphic design students. At this point
Edry asked the Iranians who had contacted him to post photos of themselves as a reply to his
original message and to all the other posters he and his wife had produced in the meantime.
His Iranian contacts accepted to send him pictures but requested him to post them himself on
his Facebook page as they felt they were running the risk of going to jail ‘over such a thing’
(Yaron 2012). Within hours faceless posters of Iranians sharing messages of love towards
Israeli were posted onto the ‘Israel Loves Iran’ Facebook page and blog. An Iranian Facebook
user even posted a direct message on the ‘Israel Loves Iran’ page:
‘We also love you. Your words are reaching us despite the censorship. The Iranian
people, apart from the regime, do not hold a grudge nor animosity against anyone,
especially not the Israelis […] The hatred was invented by the propaganda of the
regime, which will die soon […] The ayatollah will die soon. Ahmadinejad will
disappear. He is nothing more than an opportunist, and more than anything – an idiot.
Everyone hates him. We love you, love, peace. And thanks for your message’
(thepeacefactory.org/israel-loves-iran/).
In a conversation with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Edry explained that he hoped his initiative
would reach the Iranian citizens, but admitted that he never believed it would gain so much
momentum. ‘On my Facebook page I have left-wing friends who always speak of these
things; they all agree with me. Every so often a right-winger answers me saying what we’re
on about is rubbish, but I've never spoken to an Iranian […] So I thought, “Why not try to
reach the other side; to bypass the generals and see if they [Iranians] really hate me?”’ (Yron
2012).
In the following months, the ‘Israel loves Iran’ Facebook page has slowly become
what I would like to call ‘a virtual community’. Members of the page have slowly contributed
to its content which looks less and less ‘directed’ by Edry and his team. Some of the photos
posted on the page on the initiative of members have gone viral, like the one of a man and a
woman kissing each other while holding their passports up to the camera: an Israeli passport
and an Iranian passport respectively (Elgot 2012). In the ten months since the Facebook page
was created, it received over 100,000 Facebook Likes and spawned a parallel movement
headed by an Iranian graphic designer, Majid Nowrouzi, unsurprisingly called Iran Loves
Israel, with almost 30,000 likes.
The campaign then moved into a completely different phase, after a summit in
Munich where Israelis and Iranians met each other to develop a joint plan. A non profit, non
political organization was created in October 2012 and named ‘The Peace Factory’ and given
the explicit goal of breaking down ‘the “iron curtain” between the people’
(thepeacefactory.org/about/) in the Middle East and ‘making connection between people,
opening new communication line, making people get to know each other, re-humanize people
from “the other side”. Iranians, Palestinians, Israelis, Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese, Turkish,
Jordanians and more’ (ibidem). The project moves from two very strong assumptions: that
‘war happens when there’s no communication with the “other side”’ (ibidem) and that ‘once
you see your enemy as a human being similar to yourself, being expressing his love and
understand he doesn’t hate you as years of propaganda succeed to make you believe, you can
never go back to blind hate, then you can start to know each other and you will be ready for
peace’ (ibidem).
Initially focused on mass media campaigns to ‘advertise “Peace in the Middle East”’
(ibidem), including a campaign putting images of Israelis and Iranians on the sides of buses in
Tel Aviv, The Peace Factory has slowly become a fully-fledged social movement and seen
many Israeli and Iranian citizens meeting on line often simply to take a picture to promote
peace. Two are the main initiative that are based on the possibility of make people ‘meeting’
on Facebook: the ‘Friend me 4 Peace’ project and the ‘Coffee with you’ project. The
description of ‘Friend me for Peace’ reads as follows:
‘When you “friend” someone, you “friend” his friends, his all world. You became part
of a big circle, part of an idea: PEACE […] in one click you change how you see the
world. In one click, you change the world. Peace in the Middle East… simple as one
click. All you need is one new friend on fb. One friend, it’s all it takes to change your
mind, to make you see the world in a different way. Most of us have friends just from
“our side”. Imagine having an Israeli friend, a Palestinian friend, an Iranian, a
Syrian….anyone from “the other side”. Just one, on your fb list you don’t even have to
talk to them. Looking at their birthday pictures, reading their status…makes you realize
that you are just the same. You realize that you like the same basket ball team, same
movie, you do the same job, you both hate your boss… then maybe you start talking,
maybe you really become friends. All you need is that small connection to start the
change, to make peace’ (http://thepeacefactory.org/coffee-with-you/).
To participate in the project, people of any nationality have only to go on the Israel-loves-Iran
Facebook page and post ‘friend me’ and their country. The Peace Factory team find their
profile picture and profession and design a post with it so that the members of the page may
add them as a friend.
The ‘Coffee with you’ project is a sort of follow up of the previous initiative as
people who became friend through the ‘Israel loves Iran’ are encouraged to meet on line – or
in person – and simply have a talk over a cup of coffee. In the Peace Factory web site a
picture is shown of Edry’s coffee meeting with Nowrouzi, as a way to set an example. The
web-site also reports the experience of some of the people who met on line, which are used as
‘testimonials’. Most of them report about the impact that having friends from across the ‘iron
curtain’ has on their lives, more than about any pacifist activity triggered by new friendships.
Shrin, for example, writes she feels lo longer ‘an abandoned Iranian trapped in my country
forever’ (ibidem) and Tatiana reports of ‘how familiar the conversation [with her new friends]
goes’ (ibidem). When expressing their view on the initiative as a pacifist movement, the
testimonials basically reword the main idea that ‘the only way to break down prejudices is to
talk each other and to tell the whole world how amazing people from “the other side” are’
(ibidem) and that ‘if a thing can change Middle-East I think, that would be this movement!’.
From an analytical point of view the ‘Israel loves Iran’ initiative as well as The Peace
Factory are based on quite naïf assumption that an increase in communication determines an
increase of understanding between the parties in a conflict but also on the idea that
restructuring of social separation due to nationality and geography may be conducive to the
creation of new narratives about the conflict that may challenge the official ones – if the
movement spreads enough. In a way, the Peace Factory is a practice based on an
understanding of the social effects of the media that quite literally mirrors Meyrowitz’s
thinking.
Is the movement’s Facebook page a virtual community? Can a Facebook page
become a community at all? May it challenge traditional/off line communities and the
information systems they perpetuate? May they challenge traditional/off line communities?
These are difficult questions to answer which would require some research in the field – and
this is indeed what I intend to do in the near future. However, I may attempt an analysis here
based on information available on line which is evaluated against the definition of political
community as sketched above.
First, all the above-mentioned Facebook pages call themselves ‘communities’.
Second, they have a very precise and shared set of values, but also a quite explicit political
goal: depriving governments that chose war as a means to solve conflict of their democratic
legitimacy, or at least to make them accountable for that choice. Third, in the case of the two
oldest and best established communities ‘Israel loves Iran’ and ‘Israel loves Palestine’,
activities on line are complemented by activities on the ground which are often organised in
partnership with other movements or NGOs. The common goal of on-line and off-line
activities seems to be the mobilization of a critical mass of people which may attract the
attention of political institutions on the matter of war.
Can these virtual communities compete with traditional/off line ones? Of course this
may depend on the spread of the communities and their ability to reach and share alternative
narratives about a given conflict with a critical mass of people. With regard to this point, it is
worth noting that the size of the abovementioned communities is at the moment not
particularly impressive, in relation to the vast population of Iran (over 75 million) or even the
small population of Israel (just over 7 million). Moreover, growth of the ‘Israel loves Iran’
and ‘Iran loves Israel’ communities has been slow after the first year, with the latter now
counting about 33.000 ‘likes’ and the former about 121.000 ‘likes’. However, activities on the
two pages have intensified and a number of similar communities have been created, from
‘Israel loves Palestine’ (about 16.000 likes) and ‘Palestine loves Israel’ (about 15.000 likes)
to the very recent ‘Russia loves Ukraine’ (which now counts about 550 likes) and ‘Ukraine
loves Russia’ (counting about 600 likes), which suggests a sort of macro-community exists of
people rejecting war as a means to solve some specific inter-nation states conflicts and willing
to bring the ‘senselessness’ of war to the attention of relevant political istitutions – in this case
governments in Israel and Iran and more in general in the Middle East.
Reach of the communities of course depends on different factors: how diffused is
internet in those countries and how protected media pluralism and freedom. My hypothesis is
also that success of virtual communities to compete with traditional ones depends on the
extent to which they operate off line, which in turn depends again on how pluralistic and
democratic the societies in which a given virtual community operates is. As compared to the
Israeli pages, for example, ‘Iran loves Israel’ seems more centred on sharing information than
on creating opportunities for off line meetings and activities. Considering how concerns
relating to censorship and social control in Iran have been expressed by Iranians since the
initiative has been launched, it is quite obvious to imagine that it is indeed Iran’s political
context that creates clear limitations to what a virtual community may achieve, especially in
the short term.
My tentative hypothesis is therefore that while things may look different if we adopt a
long-term research strategy, in the short term virtual communities may contribute very little to
conflict de-escalation if they operate in a political context where they cannot compete directly
and off-line with traditional communities. On the contrary, if they choose to translate their
political goals into practices that can also reach people off line, then they may contribute to
conflict de-escalation. How substantial such a contribution might be should be the object of a
fully-fledged research project.
Conclusions
This paper aimed at posing the basis for a new conceptualization of the impact of social
media in conflict dynamics. It did so by interrogating how the Internet promotes forms of
social interactions that constitute ‘virtual’ communities and may open the space for
alternative narratives about a conflict. Such an understanding of the social effects of the
Internet – and social media in particular – points at the constitutive potential of interaction on
the Internet and through the Internet. The paper has to be read as a first step towards the
development of a fully-fledged research project which will try to answer difficult questions
about the agents responsible for the way various groups are constructing their identity and
presence in the virtual space, through what patterns of inclusion/exclusion they are shaping
communities and interactions and if this is leading to conflict escalation or de-escalation of
existing conflicts. This paper has focused on the example of an Israeli/Iranian movements
which aims at using new communication technologies to foster peace, but events in Syria
show very well how the virtual space can be used to highlight violations of human rights, but
also to escalate violent conflict. We as academic should recognise we are responsible for
advancing our understanding of the ‘risks’ that are associated with this kind use of the virtual
space and identify some ‘good practices’.
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