Locating Agency in Rhetorics of a “Social Media Revolution”

An unnamed author for Fox News writes in “Twitter Links Iran Protesters to Outside World” that the Iranian government made efforts to block Facebook, YouTube, and BBC Persian, but that they failed to block Twitter. S/he explains that due to this failure, “the simple microblogging service has become Iran's lifeline to the outside, a way for Iranians to tell the world what's happening on the streets of Tehran in real time — and a vital means of communication among themselves” (“Twitter Links”). In this account, Twitter’s link to networks beyond national borders is a matter of survival for Iranians. Like other examples, the author cites Twitter’s choice to delay server maintenance in Iran as a generous service to Iranian protesters. This article attributes powerful agency to Twitter through a description of its technical and social capacities—its affordances such as sharing images and videos, the use of the popular hashtag #IranElection, and the use of proxy servers—thereby trafficking the digital literacy myth and its insistence on the democratic power of digital technologies and their literacies. Other examples from Western media coverage of the protests, however, go much further.

In Mark Ambinder’s Atlantic article, “The Revolution Will Be Twittered,” he remarks, “when histories of the Iranian election are written, Twitter will doubtless be cast as a protagonal technology that enabled the powerless to survive a brutal crackdown and information blackout by the ruling authorities.” While there may have been some Western coverage of the protests against Ahmadinejad without the service, Ambinder explains, Twitter served the protesters by spreading information about on-the-ground circumstances in real time; “In this way, Twitter served as an intelligence service for the Iranian opposition.” Secondly, he argues, the tweets got the West involved, including the #CNNfail movement critiquing CNN’s lack of coverage of the protests. He writes that technology does not determine an election’s outcome, but he speculates that Mousavi had most likely not been persecuted, assassinated, or arrested because of the threat that social media could facilitate backlash. The Ahmadinejad regime, he argues, is disempowered by the Iranian people’s access to “ways of communicating and organizing outside of their control. Mousavi would become an instant martyr. Twitter, Facebook, blogs—and the mainstream—are all colluding to keep hope alive for the Iranian people.” More overtly than in the case of the Fox News article, Ambinder’s rhetoric assigns agency and intent to social media. The final line quoted above, for instance, features Twitter, Facebook, and blogs as the subjects of the sentence, and “colluding” as their verb. To “collude” implies that the media are working together with a particular goal—the goal to “keep hope alive for the Iranian people.” This phrasing suggests that without the affordances of the social media platform, the light of hope for political democracy and social freedom would surely be extinguished. In this case, not only does the digital literacy myth become trafficked into the author’s take on the protests, but the democratic power and agency infused within the technology is cast as greater than that of the people themselves.

In their The New York Times piece, “Social Networks Spread Defiance Online,” Brad Stone and Noam Cohen open by describing Twitter and other social media as an antidote to state media repression, telling of the use of Twitter to spread news and images from the protests. While they refer to the notion of a Twitter Revolution as a cliché, they write that “Twitter is aware of the power of its service,” noting the company’s choice to delay maintenance on the servers that could have interrupted Iranians’ use of the media. Stone and Cohen tell of efforts to bypass government censorship and blocked access through use of proxy servers, such as those set up by Austin Heap of San Francisco, who claimed that about 750 Iranians were using his service at any given moment. Stone and Cohen quote Heap’s sentiment that “cyber activism can be a way to empower people living under less than democratic governments around the world.”

Stone and Cohen’s article is more complex than the others in its analysis. With this extended coverage, however, come more intense attributions of political will and agency to the media itself, as well as to the corporate decisions of the (now publicly traded) company. Sampled above, we see constructions like “Twitter is aware of the power of its service.” The authors take their interpretations of Twitter’s function in the Iranian election protests and restate them as the media’s self-conscious and politically informed interventions into Iranian politics. Such analysis reflects the critiques made by Saskia Sassen that Internet scholars and commentators tend to describe digital platforms “in terms of what they can do and assume that they will do,” then apply those hypothetical affordances to their readings of social events (342). The desire to read those affordances as democratically progressive, and to read technology’s role in social events as actualizing that potential, reflects the ideological traffic and persuasive currency of the digital literacy myth.

In a final example from Time Magazine, Lev Grossman reflects on Twitter’s presence in the protests and its power as an accessible, mobile and immediate service. Describing the technical, and thus political, affordances, Grossman argues that “this makes Twitter practically ideal for a mass protest movement, both very easy for the average citizen to use and very hard for any central authority to control.” Grossman does attend to some of the complications about Twitter’s role in the protests—reflecting that “Twitter isn’t a magic bullet against dictators.” He concludes that while it didn’t cause the protests, Twitter did permit dialogue in the face of dictatorship:

Twitter didn't start the protests in Iran, nor did it make them possible. But there's no question that it has emboldened the protesters, reinforced their conviction that they are not alone and engaged populations outside Iran in an emotional, immediate way that was never possible before. [. . . .] Totalitarian governments rule by brute force, and because they control the consensus worldview of those they rule. Tyranny, in other words, is a monologue. But as long as Twitter is up and running, there's no such thing.

The above passage contains perhaps the most direct instances of Western media’s trend in constructing Twitter as the most powerful political agent in the Iranian election protests, positioning the social media platform as the actor upon Iranians via the constructions that Twitter has “emboldened,” “reinforced,” and “engaged.” Its availability and technical affordances are described in their capacity to thwart totalitarian government tyranny.

Grossman’s statement that “Twitter isn’t a magic bullet against dictators” may be an ironic acknowledgment of his overzealousness in describing Twitter’s role in the protests, but his zeal persists nevertheless. In fact, most of the articles recognized, to some extent, that Twitter was not the cause of the movement, nor was it capable of winning the battle in place of actual protesters—but the moments where the authors point to this fact seem like a brief pause in between descriptions that paint the platform as the champion of Iranian democracy. It seems that, though they knew they shouldn’t, Western-positioned authors wanted to ascribe political agency and democratic good will to social media platforms like Twitter, working its magic on behalf of the Iranian protesters. That such authors articulated the political agency of the digital platform over that of the people in Iran—that the idea of technology serving democracy across the globe was trafficked into the very grammatical constructions of these commentators even if they acknowledged at the same time that such claims were reductive—merely speaks to the pressing power of the digital literacy myth as it hails us. In these Western narratives of a “Social Media Revolution,” Twitter is caricatured as a revolutionary political actor possessing agency that it can and did give to protesters in and outside of Iran in order to challenge authoritarian corruption and preserve the interests of democracy.

Competing Hopes: Debating Social Media and Democracy in the West

Despite the trends in locating agency in the technology—rather than the people—that I’ve illustrated above, there was certainly not a homogenous understanding of social media’s role among Western reactions. There has been, in fact, some debate in the weeks and years following the protests, especially as events like the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movements brought new relevance to the question. In an exchange in Foreign Affairs, for instance, public intellectual heavyweights (and perhaps significantly, two white males) Malcolm Gladwell and Clay Shirky debate the extent to which social media has been crucial to recent social movements. The debate evolves out of the juxtaposition of Gladwell’s 2010 essay, “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” and Shirky’s 2011 piece, “The Political Power of Social Media.” Shirky and Gladwell remain committed to particular iterations of the project of democracy, but their disagreement over the role of and potential for social media in protest movements suggests that there are moments of rift, or cracks, in the digital literacy myth wherein conflicting versions of democracy and ideas about technology compete.

In Gladwell’s article, he argues fervently that “we seem to have forgotten what activism is” (43), and that “social media can’t provide what social change has always required” (42). Gladwell is rightly concerned about over-attribution of activist agency to technology; he angrily recaps moments of overzealous response to the use of Twitter in Iran, and in Moldova before that. Citing Mark Pfeifle’s wish to nominate the social media platform for a Nobel Peace Prize, Gladwell returns to Civil Rights era activism as the defining example of what real activism is: an activity that requires high personal risk on the part of protesters and a network of strong ties to incite participation. Social media, Gladwell argues, “makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo” (49). He argues that rights of consequence in the face of brutal and material oppression will not be won by and for the disenfranchised through slactivist means.

The following year, Clay Shirky’s article in Foreign Affairs questions U.S. government strategy and foreign policy in the Information Age. Shirky advocates for an “environmental approach,” in which U.S. policy would support saturation of social media to build a strong public sphere (5). He argues that an informed and literate citizenry who is connected enough for exchange of ideas is necessary for political freedom (6), and that this environment is best evolved slowly over time. Invoking some of the central tenets of the digital literacy myth, Shirky suggests that in order to appeal to nations with inclinations toward censorship and repression of its citizenry, the U.S. government ought to highlight the possibility for financial growth. Since governments understand that their economies suffer when they restrict access to digital markets, “the U.S. government should work for conditions that increase the conservative dilemma, appealing to states’ self-interest rather than the contentious virtue of freedom, as a way to create or strengthen countries’ public spheres” (9). For Shirky, the digital facilitates the literate citizenry on its way to achieving and preserving democratic freedom by virtue of its ability to connect the people.

This position lays bare some of the economic interests that assure the digital literacy myth’s viability. According to Shirky, the U.S. should encourage other nations to sustain digital networks for their own economic gain—a strategy that he suggests will have the added benefit of nurturing a more democratic public sphere. What Shirky does not explicitly acknowledge here is how the U.S.’s own economic interests are served by widening the global technology consumer base, and therefore his suggestion also serves the economic agenda that circulates with the digital literacy myth. In other words, the social and economic national agenda tied to democratic narratives about digital technologies and their literacies can be articulated as: literacy + digital connection + economic incentives for so-called authoritarian nations = exported democracy + economic benefits for those states (+ U.S. economic gains from the spread of global investment in technology).²

Shirky does acknowledge that just as protesters can use technologies to strengthen their political offenses, so can the state (though, as he alluded to above, states profit economically from commerce that depends on communication technologies, and shutting down those networks can be self-sabotaging). However, Shirky’s conclusions in this article are more closely aligned with Gladwell’s faithful rendition of traditional democratic values than he might notice behind the glare of their technological medium: Gladwell values traditional forms of activism, and Shirky values traditional ideas about a literate citizenry needing access to a free and open public sphere. Raising the question of technology’s relationship to democratic social movements and how we should understand technology to be intervening in the democratic transformations of nations, their debate reflects the evolving trajectory of the digital literacy myth and recalls its roots in the print-based literacy myth that preceded it. Here, the ideological tracks of democracy and literacies and their technologies are at a crossroads brought on by our co-existing national projects of exporting democracy and brokering technologies in order to fulfill neoliberal ambitions and satisfy U.S. economic agendas. Where the original literacy myth projected the economic mobility of the individual and the promise of a more complete national democratic landscape with the rise of literacy, the digital literacy myth in its global context is taken up not only in the domestic sphere, but also with respect to foreign policy, or “21^st century statecraft,” as Hilary Clinton has called it.

What the Shirky-Gladwell debate reveals is that at times the dual ideological commitments of the digital literacy myth lose their cohesion. Carefully paying attention to the debate, to heed Selfe’s advice, helps us further trace the ideological trafficking of the digital literacy myth and its internal tensions. Additionally, the debate neglects the actual bodies of the protesters who are acting (virtually and in embodied ways) at the sites of conflict. The bodies that do get invoked among these articles are those of Americans in the Civil Rights era, where Gladwell is scripting democratic processes as only legitimate and effective when embodied. Hence, American bodies are recognized for their political agency, where actual bodies in Iran, as well as in Moldova, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy movements are erased from this representation about the legitimate use of technology in their protest efforts. Women’s bodies, among others, are lost in the crack of the myth, as the ideologies of digital optimism and democracy are cross-trafficked in conflicting ways.

Moving beyond the binary question about technology and democracy, to get at the actual impact of social media in connection with a diffuse global public, Sassen writes that what is at stake in the question of technology and social action “is not so much the possibility of such political practices,” as it is the “magnitude, scope and simultaneity: the technologies, the institutions, and the imaginaries that mark the current global digital context inscribe local political practice with new meanings and new potentialities” (370). In this way, Sassen agrees with Shirky’s more subtle point about the spreading of an ambiance of an active global public, one which bridges a given local political event with a global consciousness that is ready to participate in, watch, and discuss local events on a geopolitically distributed level. In this way, even the most critical theorists are driven to ask the question about how technologies shape us just as we shape them, and what opportunities and challenges arise therein. In other words, it is not only neoliberalism’s interests that are served through the trafficking of a digital literacy myth that promises economic progress and an enhanced democracy. The dream of digital technologies and their literacies’ potential to rescue us remains compelling—even for those who describe technology as serving capitalism and its attendant material costs for the lived realities of those who pay for the profits of the few.³ The digital literacy myth permeates narratives of technology even in those whose work is explicitly critical of such ideological traffic.⁴

By networking arguments, however, we can make visible the prevailing and powerful grand narratives about technology, narratives that are informed by U.S. political and economic interests and strategy for an evolving global market. Tracing the ideological traffic of the digital literacy myth confirms that technology’s role and impact in social uprising cannot, as Sassen advocates, be separated from microcontexts. My analysis of the Western media coverage of the 2009 protests above reflects our urge to see the teleological fruit of technology as granting global democracy, while the Shirky/Gladwell debate reveals that even among more skeptical accounts about the use of technology for democratic ends, flattened narratives offer disembodied, decontextualized claims that serve better to reveal ideological traffic than to investigate the actual use of technology in the locations that brought on the debate in the first place. As I continue to develop below, in the microcontext of the Iranian election protests, when we do traffic (and thus preserve) ideologies like the digital literacy myth, we allow cultural scripts and unacknowledged political and economic interests not of our own choosing to speak and act through us.

Since these narratives collect and work in the world, scholars must take notice of their transgressions and reveal the consequences of such trafficking. While the interests of global economic and state powers work through One-Third world readings of such powerful global events, scholars can use an analytic like Dingo’s networking arguments to ameliorate the unintended and invisible effects of such narratives, particularly for the women of the Two-Thirds world. The flattening of political complexities during the Iranian election protests for the sake of trafficking ideas of democratic technologies costs, among other things, richer accounts of women’s agencies in digital and bodily contexts, in solidarity both within and beyond the borders of Iran. To combat such flattened narratives and recover a contextualized representation of specific bodies in the 2009 Iranian election protests, my analysis below works to recognize the complex roles of women and technology in the social movement.

Women in the Iranian Election Protests

Critiquing the discourse on social media in the Iranian election protests in her Time article “The Twitter Devolution,” Golnaz Esfandiari bashes early accounts for their inaccuracy, overzealousness, and lazy reporting. She argues that such narratives have “been a terrible injustice to the Iranians who have made real, not remote or virtual, sacrifices in pursuit of justice (Esfandiari). In fact, Westerners claiming that technology gave agency and power to Iranian activists are asking the wrong question and gathering the wrong answers. In their efforts to maintain and support rhetorics of hope for the democratic promise of technologies and their literacies, Western narratives have eclipsed a much more interesting and more profound, historically rooted and contextually emergent understanding of technology’s role in the election protests.

One, among many, of the kinds of narratives that could have been told in place of those that transfer agency from Iranians to technologies, is that of the unprecedented numbers of women involved in the campaigning, organizing, and protests surrounding the 2009 elections. In fact, the reduced worth of women’s bodies articulated in the Iranian legal system was among the most significant political and social questions at stake in the outcome in this election, and hence one of the most significant causes for the protests. In this section, I draw upon transnational feminism to “place micro-examples within macrocontexts” in order to “consider not only a woman’s local circumstances but also how vectors of power—supranational policies, colonial history, global economic structures, even our practices here in the West—shape women’s lives in disparate places” (Dingo 144). I return dimension to the flattened Western narratives described above through an analysis of Iranian women’s history of activism in recent decades and during the protests, placing examples of #IranElection tweets within their historical context.

That women were involved in the protests is less novel than the ways in which they united and built coalitions to make demands for their rights. In the three months leading up to the election, over 40 organizations and 700 individuals came together to form the group Convergence of Women, demanding that candidates consent to and implement the UN’s Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women⁵ (CEDAW), and that they reform those aspects of the constitution and legal system under which women are unequal to men. A portrayal of the rich ways women used their available means to shape political outcomes breathes much greater life into the 2009 protests and helps us understand that the use of technology at the time was a likely next step given the ways that women and men were building upon already established social networks of all kinds to realize their political agency. Additionally, the presence of women’s bodies in the protests and online reflects the fact that embodiment as a form of political agency is not limited to physical or national borders.

A Tempered Account of Social Media in the Election Protests

Internet access and use is situated within a complex political and social history of post-revolutionary Iran, whose combination of democratic and Islamist governmental structure has struggled to balance interests as a developing nation working to maintain profits from oil exports while gaining footing in the global economy and preserving an authentic Islamic cultural character independent against Western/colonial impingement. In Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran, Anabelle Sreberny and Gholam Khiabany describe the conflicting social and economic factors shaping Iran’s relationship with the web, showing that “private capital is challenging the monopoly of the state as government policies slowly adapt to the marketization and privatization of the communication sector, while the broader national and international contexts make for an intriguing mix of internet and media developments” (3). Noting the generally repressed political environment during the expansion of the Internet in Iran, they explain that “the state remains significant as the primary actor in engineering political legitimacy and the definer of the ‘national’ character and culture” (86). State control in this case, they argue, can be explained not by general Islamic principles, “but rather as the evolution of different periods of the post-revolutionary polity” (87). And yet through the policing of public and political organizing by the state, the Iranian government (particularly under Ahmadinejad) may have actually pushed people toward disembodied political expression via the Internet. As Sreberny and Khiabany put it, “by keeping people indoors, with little to do but fiddle with computers, the regime helped to induce a generation of digital adepts, the consequences of which it was to rue in the summer of 2009” (116). In other words, the conservative and progressive blocks in the political mood of post-revolutionary Iran, combined with its economic interests in joining and profiting from the global market, has resulted in a complicated scene for activism where it must hide in plain sight along already established social routes while also taking to the online global public of the Blogosphere and Twitterverse.

While the Western narratives I discuss above carry the ideological traffic of the digital literacy myth by declaring that Twitter gave Iranians a voice, in fact, the idea that Twitter formed the protests, that this was a “Twitter revolution,” or even that Iranians from within Iran were tweeting much at all during the protests has been heavily disputed. Sreberny and Khiabany write that “so much of the tweeting, as is increasingly the case with much media content, is a repost or commentary on previously published material. Twitter functioned mainly as a huge echo chamber of solidarity messages from global voices that simply slowed the general speed of traffic” (175). Years later, it seems that far less tweeting than initially described was actually occurring from within Iran at all. Rather, the Iranian diaspora, Green Movement sympathizers, and certainly Westerners, who read the protesters’ actions as a sign of affirmation for their own views on democracy, used Twitter to circulate what information they could and to join in the cause symbolically and from afar.

Within the #IranElection conversation, individual tweeters became nodal points for the movement, facilitating the geographical spread of its public reach. Recognizing and tapping into the buzz about Twitter’s role in the protests, The Web Ecology Project tracked over two million #IranElection tweets between June 7^th and June 27^th (the release date of their report) to trace what they describe as “the Twitter web ecology” (1). The study found that almost 60% of those tweeting during their sample period contributed only once to the conversation, that over 65% of the tweets came from the top 10% most avid participants, and that 25% of the tweets were retweets of someone else’s content (1). User @Dominiquerdr, for instance, posted 2,817 tweets about Iran between June 7^th and June 29^th (6). While she was the top tweeter in the conversation during that time, her own content was only retweeted 314 times in those 18 days, revealing her relative lack of influence among the Twitter web ecology participants (7).

During the protests and in many months following, expatriate and Canadian-Iranian @Dominiquerdr listed Tehran as her location, and yet, she located herself transnationally through her linguistic choices. This tweeter wrote in French, English, and Farsi, linking to articles and websites in all three languages, sometimes using several languages in one tweet. Around the time of the protests, @Dominiquerdr had over 3,700 followers, and had tweeted over 200,000 times. Given the number, and drawing on observable data such as the Twitter users’ names, locations, and languages used, we can see that this single tweeter helped to orchestrate a network that crossed languages, national boundaries, and oceans. While @Dominiquerdr was not physically present in Iran during the protests, she was able to connect to the political body of Iranians and the Iranian diaspora via her work in curating ideas and information through her tweets, reflecting that women both within and outside of Iran drew upon available networks to exercise their political agency during the protests. Considering that each of her 3,700 followers had their own networks as well, we can see how huge the potential circulation is, and why it is tempting when describing Twitter as a political public sphere to attribute agency to the platform itself.

@Dominiquerdr’s work during the protests and in service of the movement following that summer and autumn further reflects how individual users can apply different tactics afforded by the Twitter interface, which allow the ideological and on-the-ground coordinating of a movement within publics that produce and circulate 140-character texts. A single tweet can reference multiple authors or circulators, report immediate events, link to media containing news, facts, unsanctioned stories of the people, instructions for future gatherings, and much more. Drawing on Twitter’s ability to share links to photos, videos, and articles, users organized and maintained active and growing networks, sharing information and circulating ideological materials that attested to the movement’s strength and endurance. Among the most tweeted in the days following the 2009 election (in English, Farsi, and French) were links to media about Neda Agha-Soltan, a young woman who was shot by a sniper during a demonstration. Her name meaning “voice” in Farsi, Neda quickly became a symbol of the Green Movement. Viewers in Iran and around the world have been able to watch this woman’s death on YouTube as her body begins to fail in the wake of a bullet wound, her voice coach and frantic strangers by her side. Neda’s death was taken up and circulated in part because of the political symbolism Iranian protesters were able to graft onto her body. Participants and sympathizers of the Green Movement constructed images that transformed the death of Neda’s body into a symbol of hope or fear for the body of Iran, as I explore in the following examples.⁶

In this image, (Fig. 1) Neda appears in black and white, an orb of white glowing behind her head, perhaps indicating her innocence. The caption: “We are all Neda” moves beyond solidarity to homogeneity and consubstantiality. The creator and circulators of the image portray that in the eyes of the militarized Ahmadinejad regime, any Iranian body is subject to death for speaking out or standing up for their freedom.

Figure 2 bears a black and white rendering of Neda’s face covered in blood. This still from the video footage of her death was used in many such images, as protesters sought to capture the light leaving her eyes. The blood patterns on her face obscure her own vision and our vision of her, signaling perhaps the censorship of Iranian (women’s) bodies under the tyranny of Ahmadinejad and his basij (the morality police). The background reflects the representative color of the Green Movement, and the text “Where Is My Vote” was a common slogan used to challenge the legitimacy of the election. Neda’s image featured with the slogan rhetorically presents the value of a body as a voice in a democracy. Here, they seem to shout, both have been extinguished.

In perhaps the most overt example (Fig. 3), Neda’s image has been overlayed with the Iranian flag. Her clothing has been replaced with the green, white, and red of the flag like a second skin. The symbol of Iran, featured in the middle of the flag, covers the center of her face, almost like a target. Blood splatters appear in the foreground, layered above her body and the flag. The red of the blood nearly blends with the red of the flag. At once, this image seems to suggest that Neda’s body is one with the body of the Iranian people, and that the current Iranian state had targeted that body.

As the final image indicates (Fig. 4), Neda’s bloodied body was taken up as a symbol not just virtually, but in on-the-ground protests as well. For the Green Movement, to visualize and make present Neda’s dying body at the sites of protest was a strategy to keep alive the voice and the vote that were symbolically and actually extinguished with her death.

In these ways, Neda’s death was taken up and re-presented as the death of the Iranian democratic body. As feminist and Iranian scholar Nayereh Tohidi explains:

Neda’s characteristics are representative of some of the demographic, gender, and class orientations of the current civil rights movement in Iran. Her young age (27 years old) reminds us of the 70 percent of Iran’s population below age 30 who are faced with increasing rates of unemployment, socio-political repression, and humiliation should Ahmadinejad’s repressive and militaristic policies continue for another four years. (8)

The protesters, Green Movement supporters and Iranian diaspora saw Neda’s body as the embodiment of their desire for freedom from political repression, and they used that body digitally for their purposes. They consistently circulated articles about her life and the family she left behind, links to the video of her death, and her iconized image on Twitter. In the recent years leading up to and following circulation of Neda’s body and blood and final breaths on the Internet, Iran was seeing an “increasing number of women who are beaten, injured, killed, or arrested as political prisoners since the June 12 upheavals” (Tohidi 7). In reality, the circulation of Neda’s death did reflect the growing frequency of state violence against the bodies of women who use their political voices in Iran. What this more tempered consideration of tweets surrounding the protests reveals is that Twitter can be understood as a space where texts can articulate and be articulated by a global public—too diffuse to be snuffed out, yet too rhizomatous to guarantee success in any given purpose. And, when considering Twitter’s aptness for political purposes, we cannot extract the platform’s usefulness from its historical context; in fact, when we do so we miss the most significant indicators of its impact.

Conclusion

In the case of the 2009 Iranian election protests, stories covering “the Twitter revolution” eclipsed more significant and accurate accounts of technologies and how activists employed them. Trafficking the digital literacy myth, those accounts obscured more reflective analyses of the most significant political networks, many of which had been built from the ground up by women in recent years and without which no political movement would have had footing for demonstrations of such scale. In debating to what extent the role of social media can be used in service of democratic movements, for instance, Gladwell and Shirky’s exchange eclipses the fact that images of Neda’s body—dying and bloodied in the midst of a revolutionary protest—came to reflect the very political body of Iran, particularly through its circulation across social media networks and geopolitical borders.

Nor did such accounts recognize the ways in which Iranian women worked with strategies of embodiment and disembodied activism to heal and make whole legal devaluations of women’s bodies in the legal architecture of the nation. Flattened narratives about the democratic promise of Twitter for Iran similarly made opaque the complex history of feminist activism in Iran, and the difficult position a global network such as Twitter casts for a locally rooted movement. Describing the One Million Signatures Campaign’s conflicting goals with regard to networking with transnational feminist groups, for instance, Khorasani expressed significant anxiety about joining with transnational movements, recognizing the need to balance local knowledge and experience with global power and influence (78). Cooptation is merely one risk of opening a movement up to global networks of solidarity. In these ways and more, Western narratives of the Iranian election protests that touted Twitter’s democratic results for the women and men of Iran failed us all.

In Territory, Authority, Rights, Sassen contends with “easy generalizations” about economic globalization, particularly the notion that the state is in decline due to a distinct set of global forces that act upon the declining nation-state with predetermined consequences of neoliberalism, opening of markets, and the fall of the welfare state. Rather, Sassen argues that we must conceive of the effects of globalization in terms of variation, since global forces “confront considerable national specificity” (227). Fear of decline in economic and innovative status might be one motivating factor explaining the current saturation of the digital literacy myth, with its promise for the economic progress of the One-Third world and in compatibility with specifically Western versions of democratic progress.

When we network the economic and political interests contained within the digital literacy myth with reductive Western accounts of a “Twitter Revolution” that obscures any historical context for technology or activism in Iran—and one which overlooks significant stories about the role of women, women’s bodies and technology in protest—we can tie such narratives to fear about the decline of the U.S. in the future global economy, a fear that motivates and sustains the digital literacy myth. The deeper our fear, perhaps, the louder our hope. The result of this ideological trafficking, as I have shown, is the rhetorical erasure of the political agency and embodied realities of actual human agents in the democratic processes the Western commentators describe. Realities of women’s activism, in a geopolitical region that the West is often quick to point out as particularly oppressive to women, are disembodied and erased in narratives that traffic ideologies of technology and democracy in service of Western interests. Those interested in challenging the material and political consequences of rhetorics of hope for technology should continue to network arguments about its use toward democracy across borders in order to challenge and prevent similar ideologically motivated erasures.