WikiRevolutions: Wikipedia as a Lens for Studying the Real-Time Formation of Collective Memories of Revolutions

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Recently, Paolo Massa and I wrote an article proposing to study Wikipedia as a place were people actively build the collective memory of revolutions, discussing highly different perspectives and points of view. Focusing mainly on the Egyptian revolution, we reported statistics showing the richness of data available on the many language versions of Wikipedia, and pieces of discussions among editors.

The article was published on an interesting special issue dedicated to the Arab Spring, on the International Journal of Communication (edited by Manuel Castells and Larry Gross).

Paolo will also present our research directions at WikiSym 2011 (7th International Conference on Wikis and Open Collaboration, October 3-5, 2011 | Mountain View, California), in the session about “Wikipedia as a Global Phenomenon” (see the full schedule).

From WikiLeaks to Wiki-Revolutions: Internet and the Culture of Freedom

Manuel Castells at the Northwestern university

Communication is the primary human activity, and anything that can transform communication, can also transform social change and social organization.
This is fundamental in the context of power relationships: power throughout history has always been based on the control of informationcommunication.

In the last years we have seen deep transformations regarding the processes of communication, as a consequence of the transformation of technologies, communication, culture.
According to Castells, the key of this transformation is the shift from mass communication (traditional mass media, in the form “one message, one-to-many”, with little interactivity) to mass “self-communication” (Internet, in the form “many messages, from many-to-many”, with high interactivity, multimodal communication, hypertexts, where senders and receivers are the same).
Technology is not decided only by engineers, it is material culture. Internet was designed this way because it was on purpose a technology of freedom (a free network of communication).

In recent years there have been some major challenges in terms of social worlds, based on this technology of free communication.
But this is partly based on the waves of culture (see also his book “The Internet Galaxy” for this):
1. Techno-meritocratic culture
2. Hacker culture (culture of freedom)
3. The virtual communitarian culture (try to use Internet as a foundation for a community)
3. Enterpreneurial culture (the people who bet on these technology of freedom, e.g. Google)
4. Mobile communication youth culture (which transformed the use of the Internet – permanent connectivity is the most important feature of mobile phones: we are always connected)
5. Organizational change & networking (networking became a demand not only for society, but mainly for business – the demand came from society)
6. Culture (it’s all about the interaction between technology – the Internet -, organization – networking – and culture: culture of freedom, emerged by the social movements of the 60s and 70s.)

Many people see the culture of autonomy as a key component of the Internet culture and the productive interaction between the culture and technology, but at the present there are not convincing empirical studies on this. Castells did a study in 2000-2007 in Catalonia on the use of the Internet with 55 thousands interviews, comparing Internet users and non-users. Indexes of autonomy measured individual autonomy of the body (es. how much people followed prescription, how much they called the doctor, …, in medical practice). He applied a factor analysis, which showed the presence of 6 independent factors indicating autonomy:
1. Autonomy of professional development
2. Communicative autonomy
3. Business enterpreunership autonomy
4. Body autonomy
5. Autonomy of socio-political participation
6. Personal autonomy (as affirmation of individual personality)

High levels of autonomous people in a population are always a minority, but usually these are the peple capable of moving societies.
They measured frequency, intensity of use and knowledge of the Internet in two different moments in time.
Results showed that the more people were autonomous, the more they scored high in the use of the Internet; and the more they used the Internet, the more autonomous the became.

Based on this, Castells has been working lately on two different types of use of the Internet in the relation between social actors and the State:
1. Wikileaks
2. Wiki-revolutions

Wikileaks

The important thig is not Wikileaks per se, but the reactions it provokes. Wikileaks provides a safe way to disclose the information people think is depictable. Wikileaks members didn’t solicit information, but just opened the doors, providing very good technology to protect their dropbox and protecting communication. This technology allowed people to safely provide information. Once they had this information, Wikileaks volunteers checked it through an editorial committee and lawyers. They tried to reach out the entire world, making an agreement with the most important newspapers in the world. Note that this is not a Wiki (in the sense of Wikipedia): the editorial committee made decisions on the publication of the information.
Wikileaks diffused research (6 hundred research reports) funded by the US government on Afganistan and Iraq, that were kept hidden by the US government.
Asange stated: “To radically shift regime behaviour we must think clearly and boldly, for if we have learned anything it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not.” Now there is the technology to force the regimes change, and there are instruments to promote transparency.

[Entropy: the more you try to protect your system from the world, the less tansparent you become, the more conspiratory you become, and the less efficient because you have to break down the networks of communications inside your system.]

There is now a diffusion of other kind of organizations similar to Wikileaks: we assist to a “mass insurrection” against everything is secret (even if it is diplomatic gossip, which shouldn’t be secret anyway). This is extraordinary because it attacks the heart of the power, which is the control of information.

Wiki-revolutions

There are three key elements which describe WikiRevolutions:
1. The first is a constant pattern in revolutions: they start always with a moment of outrage, emotional outburst provoked by some dramatic event. E.g. in Tunisia, this event was the suicide, in Sidi Bouzid, of Mohammed Bouazizi, who was a street vendor, constantly humiliated by police. His desperate act was a reaction against humiliation of his personal dignity.
2. The demonstration was immediately organized on FB and on the Internet.
3. No political oppposition parties joined at the beginning.

This is similar to what happened in May ’68: a few thousand people started like that (no organization, no connections), and the whole country started to change. Just later on the unions and the organizations came. The notion was to change the values and people’s minds (while political movements try to change power in the state, social movements try to change values in people’s minds). It had started spontaneously, through personal networks.
Now, Internet networks are instant, fast, and broad. And they are transparent: everything is open, everybody can check, and for this reason there is trust. These network do their work by getting together and creating the physical pressure that attract the media, which report on their self-organization and on the barricates of history: these barricates were created in the virtual space. And it is fundamental this connection between the virtual space and the physical space.

Contagion, diffusion from Tunisia to Egypt

Egyptian revolution started on April 6 2008, in a city at the north of Cairo, with a workers strike (see on Wikipedia; on  Al Jazeera). This generated the April 6 Youth Movement (see on Wikipedia), which started the demonstrations on Facebook in January 2011.
The critical thing is the connection from the social networks to the public space. For the first time in history the government tried to shut down all the Internet in the country, but they couldn’t. A global movement of support started globally, with the goal to defend freedom of people and of the Internet.

Also Google and Twitter took part in the Egyptian revolution. The problem was that Egyptian users of Twitter were “only” around 14000. How to build a network then? A Swedish based hacker global organization, Telecomics, designed a program to find automatically through Google all the fax machines numbers in Egypt: in this way, all the messages coming in through Twitter were sent to fax machines everywhere in Egypt. The Internet allowed to start the network, building the core of global-local communication, organizing a set of multimodal networks. After 5 days Mubarak decided to stop trying to shut off the Internet.

In general, the most important things of the revolutions are:
1. Overcoming fear, which is the basic emotion that drives our life. If you overcome fear (of being tortured and killed, for example), then you can do anything, everything is possible.
2. Togetherness, support, networking, protection by the fact that you’re not alone, that there is support in the whole world. If people in the rest of the country do not care about your protests, then you’ll be killed. But if there is a protection system, then the costs of killing rise.

These revolutions could not have happened without Tweets. Surely, they were not sufficient, but necessary.
So, these Revolutions are WikiRevolutions because they are co-generated, co-managed, co-directed just like wikis, in the sense that they have the capacity, through free networking, to express the culture of autonomy in the sociopolitical change.

North African protests

On 17 December 2010 Mohammed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old fruit vendor in the central town of Sidi Bouzid set himself on fire in front of a local municipal office. On 25 January 2011 Cairo was shocked by a series of protests against the government. In the following days, the protests quickly spread across the countries and finally led to the departure of the Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from the country on 14 January 2011, and to the resignation of the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on 11 February 2011. These happenings since their very beginning received an extensive mediatic attention. However, in addition to this they also triggered an intense activity on the related articles on the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia (see for example the articles “2011 Egyptian revolution” and “Tunisian revolution“).

Traumatic events like these are inherently shocking for the involved comunities and involve different layers of the social and cultural tissue. For these reasons they are deeply connected to the formation of the emergent collective memory and collective identity of these communities. The widespread diffusion of Web 2.0 services and technologies and the massive participation to social networking websites provide researchers with new opportunities to study the progressive formation of collective memories about these events since their very beginning.

In fact, since Wikipedia records every edit made to every pages by every user (registered or anonimous), it is now possible to study these memory building processes as they unfold an on a large scale, without going through laboratoy-based experiments and self-reports (which may be biased, especially when it comes to deeply traumatizing events like these).