This Grant for Rapid Response Research (RAPID) project will study patterns of learning, design, and repurposing in social computing by networks of activists preparing for the upcoming Tunisian elections. Tunisia's popular uprising for democracy inspired similar movements across North Africa and the Middle East. New norms of interactivity and expectations for information access are being encoded in constitutional drafts, senior public officials are imagining new ways of shaping public bureaucracy around e-government tools, and the public debate about election rules and politics candidates is booming online. Tech-savvy activists and student leaders are designing new tools and repurposing existing tools in ways unintended and unexpected by the original computer scientists and engineers. Local activists are building maps for tracking electoral fraud by means of open-source software developed by the non-profit Ushahidi organization, using microblogging platforms for vibrant forums for debate about election rules, and accessing content from Western news agencies, Al Jazeera, and citizen journalists over social networking applications. Large numbers of people with large numbers of devices on multiple digital platforms are behind these new discursive practices.
The research team was already prepared to undertake this general kind of research in Tunisia and its region, but the specific focus on the Tunisian election takes advantage of a remarkable confluence of political and technological innovations, in two stages. First, the team will expand its ability to track blog and microblog conversations about Tunisian political life, preserving as much geolocation data and link information as possible. Second, it will ethnographically investigate specific transmission acts whereby social computing strategies - understood as large numbers of people using diverse devices - are developed in one civil society group and diffused to others.
The intellectual merit of this proposal is in (1) analyzing rigorous social science data about how social computing is used during sensitive moments of political transformation, and (2) advancing our knowledge of how to relate the evolution of opinion in a vibrant blogosphere to political events on the ground. Even if democratic institutions are slow to form, there is merit in explaining how modern publics conduct constitutional conversations, arrive at preferences in political leadership, and connect online conversations with offline action.
In terms of broad impact, this RAPID project will: 1) generate real-time social science, which entails actively disseminating research findings to journalists, other researchers and foreign policy experts at the US Department of State, and 2) cultivate and mentor a network of US and Tunisian experts in the study of social computing, and 3) expand our understanding of a country that has suddenly become important to the evolution of political institutions and technology applications in the Arab world. This work will help foreign policy makers better understand the relationship between technology diffusion and political processes. In addition students are central to the team, and will gain a unique educational experience from participating.
Tunisia’s popular uprising for democracy inspired similar movements across North Africa and the Middle East. New norms of interactivity and expectations for information access are being encoded in constitutional drafts, senior public officials are imagining new ways of shaping public bureaucracy around e-government tools, and the public debate about election rules and politics candidates is booming online. Using an existing research team, the Project on Information Technology and Political Islam, seeded by prior NSF support, this RAPID project has studied patterns of learning, design, and repurposing in social computing by networks of activists preparing for their first democratic elections. The intellectual merit of this project was in (I) analyzing rigorous social science data about how social computing is used during sensitive moments of political transformation, and (II) advancing our knowledge of how to relate the evolution of opinion in a vibrant blogosphere to political events on the ground. First, social media played a central role in shaping political debates during the campaign season. Our evidence shows that social media was used heavily to conduct political conversations by a key demographic group in the revolution – young, urban, relatively well educated individuals, many of whom were women. These individuals used Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to put pressure on the competing political parties. Second, social computing had several specific political impacts in Tunisia’s first election: pressure to prevent political parties from claiming Bouazizi (the revered figure who helped inspire a popular uprising for political change) for propaganda purposes succeeded; the government’s meager get-out-the-vote campaign was trumped by the civil society groups using social computing to motivate voters (especially youth and women); social computing techniques by civil society leaders allowed them to pressure the leading Islamist party (Enhada) to moderate its message and compete for voters. The principle disciplines include human-computer interaction, sociology, political science and communication. While several of the publications supported by this RAPID grant are still in development, we expect to advance our disciplines by demonstrating how the spread of social computing has a particular impact on gender politics: First and foremost, social computing allows citizens to learn about the status of women and gender relations in other countries. Second, social computing also allows both men and women to debate specific gender issues relevant in their own cultures. What does love mean, in cultures where marriages are arranged? Some of the questions we might think of as small-p political questions have immense cultural implications. Third, the arrival of social computing in many Muslim communities and households has become an occasion for renegotiating and restructuring gender relationships. Finally, social computing supports women-only online communities, which have become sites for political conversation both away from patriarchal leaders and the public gaze of journalists. The intellectual merit of this proposal is in advancing our understanding of how social computing contributes to social movement formation. The broad impact of this project was to 1) generate "real-time" social science, which entailed actively disseminating research findings to journalists, other researchers and foreign policy experts at the US Department of State, and 2) cultivating and mentoring a network of US and Tunisian experts in the study of social computing, and 3) expanding our understanding of a country that has suddenly become important to the evolution of political institutions and technology applications in the Arab world. This work will help foreign policy makers better understand the relationship between technology diffusion and political processes.
