Digital Activism and the Global Middle Class

Generation Hashtag

Lukas Schlogl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000603026
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Studi sulla comunicazione

This book examines the causes of a growing wave of digital activism across developing countries, arguing that it is driven by social change, rather than technological advancement alone. Beginning with an investigation into the modernization of 'middle-income countries' and its ramifications for political culture, the book examines large-scale social media protest during political controversies in Indonesia.

The book connects empirical evidence to classic theories of value change and political behaviour. It departs from a narrow 'digital divide' framing whereby Internet access produces Internet activism. It introduces the concepts of 'digital self-expression' and of 'middle-class struggles' to capture the value-stratified nature of political engagement in the online sphere. Drawing on a blend of 'big-data' text analyses, representative opinion research, and socioeconomic household analyses, a rich picture of the determinants of digital activism emerges.

This truly cross-disciplinary book will appeal particularly to students and scholars in Political Science, Sociology, International Development, and Communication, but also to anyone eager to learn about political activism, social transformation, and new media from a global perspective.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003188681-1

Digital Activism: A Sober Reappraisal

In the early morning hours of 26 September 2014, a young Indonesian freelance journalist finally got tired of a longwinded political drama that had been unfolding in the Indonesian parliament for hours on end. Having watched the live TV broadcast of a plenary debate from the comfort of her living room, and being, as she put it, “disappointed” with the result, she sent off a strongly worded tweet in critique of the president. The tweet carried a hashtag, which she had just seen used on Facebook and which boiled down to the message: shame on you, Mr President! It was the first tweet of many to follow carrying the same hashtag.¹

Within hours, a virtual storm of shame had started to brew. As the hashtag stayed viral for days, getting hundreds of thousands of mentions, it propelled into Twitter’s ‘global trends’ and got picked up by international news media. Before long, the storm met its addressee: Indonesia’s president—himself an avid Twitter user with millions of followers—who was residing in Washington for an international summit. While artists painted the hashtag onto the busy streets of Indonesia’s capital city, Jakarta, and an online petition started to gain traction, the president at the other end of the world found himself compelled to declare publicly that he, too, was “disappointed” with the result of the late-night parliamentary session. What ensued in the following days and months provides a fascinating lesson in the power of digital activism in the world’s third largest democracy.

This book is about people like the Indonesian freelance journalist, who helped to kick off an online movement against legislation, that would have dialled back Indonesia’s democratic progress. It is about an emerging ‘Generation Hashtag’ in the Global South.

Digital activism is a phenomenon of rising political importance. With the advent of social media and online communication platforms, Internet-mediated engagement has taken a centre stage in the way publics articulate views on controversial political issues. Digital modes of political engagement have thus come into increasingly sharper focus of social scientists. Scholarly discourse on social media engagement initially used to be optimistic, even utopian, revolving around the promise of low-threshold political participation and direct democracy, equitable access to free speech and information, and more engaged, politicized publics (see e.g. Donk et al., 2004; Shirky, 2008; Castells, 2012). It has, however, taken a darker turn in recent years. The trap of self-referential ‘filter bubbles’ and ‘echo chambers’, the runaway spread of ‘fake news’ and ‘hate speech’, the opaque exercise of power via ‘social bots’ and algorithms, endemic ‘status seeking’, and the non-committal nature of ‘clicktivism’ are but a few of the rising concerns that contemporary research has foregrounded (see e.g. Gurri, 2018; Schradie, 2019; Rogers and Niederer, 2020; Schick, 2020; Bail, 2021). The Twitter persona of former US president Donald Trump with his notorious social media frenzies, culminating in a ban from the platform, gave the final push in a gradual progression towards disillusionment. Today, the honeymoon period of Western social science with digital media technology is over.

Both the initially enthusiastic outlooks and the more recent pessimistic turn have been, one could argue, confounded by Western historical experiences unfolding alongside the development of social media practices (for a history of social media see Sujon, 2021). Initial Internet enthusiasm thrived in a broader climate of tech evangelism, the dot-com era, and mushrooming visions of a ‘flat world’ and a liberal ‘end of history’ on the one hand as well as visions of radical democracy, ‘accelerationism’, and left-wing technological utopianism on the other hand. The rise of populism and extremism in the twenty-first century, a deepening fragmentation of societies, a climate of polarized public opinion and an erosion of social trust, Brexit, and similar unsettling political developments disturbing triumphalist political narratives have cast a dark shadow that covers also digital communication technology.

But, how well do current scholarly assessments, tainted by these experiences, fit the global picture of digital activism? How fair a picture are we painting of the potentials and challenges of social media politics? And what do we really know about the drivers and consequences of digital activism in a global perspective—beyond the often-repeated mantra of a ‘digital divide’ or the better-tread terrain of Chinese Internet censorship?

Digital activism in the Global South last caught significant attention when the (then so-called) Arab Spring swept through the Middle East in 2010. When, throughout the subsequent years, Brazil, Chile, and Turkey, among other countries, saw waves of large-scale public protest organized via online networks, social scientists began to draw connections between these events and to look beyond the West (e.g. Howard, 2010; Gerbaudo, 2012; Pătruţ and Pătruţ, 2014). Two interpretations prevailed. Some considered these phenomena to be ‘social media’ revolutions triggered by the spread of digital communication technology and its intrinsic potential for mass mobilization (Castells, 2012; Howard and Hussain, 2013; Margetts et al., 2016). Others speculated that the events were uprisings of a ‘new middle class’, the result of a global socio-economic transformation (Diwan, 2013; Fukuyama, 2013; Kurlantzick, 2013).

Since that time, and despite the ill-fated aftershocks of the Arab Spring in the region, digital activism has established itself as a lasting and powerful mode of mass political expression in a wide range of countries of the Global South—from Asia to Africa to Latin America (e.g. Mutsvairo, 2016; Wei, 2016; Bruns et al., 2017; Dwyer and Molony, 2019; Weidmann and Rød, 2019). According to data provided by the International Telecommunication Union (2018), 2.6 billion Internet users lived in developing countries in 2017, amounting to more than 70% of global Internet users. Though only about half of all households in developing countries had Internet access at home, “the surge of (cheaper) smartphones has meant that access to ICTs is within reach for many in developing countries for whom it was not before” (ibid., p. 27). Digital activism via Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms has become a commonplace phenomenon in non-Western countries, now and again stirring up rigid political systems. This book considers new evidence from political hashtag campaigns with the goal of deepening the debate about the drivers and political implications of digital activism in the non-Western world.

To understand digital activism in the Global South, the book calls for bringing together analytical approaches centred on political values and political agency. Political socialization, opinion formation, and political grievances, it will be argued, can be studied in connection with online behaviour to understand why we are seeing the rise of digital activism, who engages in it, and what political claims are expressed through these media. Why are these questions important? The evidence presented in this book holds lessons for understanding the disruptive political impacts of novel forms of activism in democratizing middle-income countries (i.e. countries with a yearly per capita income around USD 1,000–12,000). It shows what sort of political modernization is to be expected from the surge of such online movements––and what may be their limits. Further, it also holds lessons for a deeper understanding of what factors drive Internet-mediated political engagement and the likely future of such engagement globally.

Platform design, algorithmic curation, and technological incentives have gained prominence in the contemporary study of digital activism (see e.g. the influential contribution of Margetts et al., 2016). A strong emphasis on technological incentives in parts of the literature has tended to lead us away from the central factor of human social agency and into an impasse of either technological over-optimism or over-pessimism. This book tries to steer clear of this impasse by turning to the fundamental social and socioeconomic drivers of online political engagement and adopting a global lens. Departing from a simplistic ‘digital divide’ narrative, we will argue that middle-class led elite-challenging political practices are the main reason for the growing appetite for digital self-expression in middle-income developing countries.

The focus of this book is on cases of large-scale social media protest around major political controversies in one of the world’s most populous countries, which is home to more than 100 million Internet users: Indonesia. A proposed reversal of direct-democratic electoral franchise and a highly controversial reform of governmental fuel subsidies will serve as test cases to study the new activist repertoires and the social base of online collective action. These cases defined the political debate in Indonesia’s recent political history and triggered online protests with millions of comments and interactions. The book provides estimates of the scale, distribution, and nature of these understudied online movements and puts them into a context of representative public opinion. A set of surveys of the respective digitally activist populations will be presented, showing a significant overrepresentation of young, educated, male, middle-class citizens in online collective action, irrespective of the issue. We will show that the standard socio-economic model of political participation, defended most recently by Schlozman, Verba and Brady (2012), remains a powerful explanatory model of digital political engagement in a middle-income democracy—and that the reason for this is not a lack of Internet access. It will be shown that the kinds of socioeconomic groups that are likely to engage in online protest today had not existed to the same extent in countries like Indonesia until fairly recently, and that they are salient across various forms of unconventional political action, whether online or offline.

And we go a step further. To explain variations in the socio-economic characteristics of online activists in different issue contexts, the theory of post-materialism, put forward by Ronald Inglehart and colleagues, is revisited. Ideological divides within the digitally activist middle classes will be traced back to fault lines of economic security and precariousness. Based on novel survey data, it will be argued that the participants in digital activism in Indonesia share interesting commonalities with the participants in so-called ‘new social movements’ which emerged in post-industrializing Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. Consequently, theories about political values and agency, which predate the Internet era, help explain the socio-economic composition and rise of digital activism in middle-income countries today. The book advances the thesis that the burgeoning of collective action in Indonesian social media is thus fundamentally the result of rapid economic modernization and an ensuing socio-structural transformation, rather than primarily an expansion of technological possibilities.

The Argument of This Book

The thesis advanced in this book is that new, digital forms of political collective action, which are disrupting the politics of the Global South, are the result of a socio-structural transformation. Based on new primary data, we will see that a politically engaged ‘Generation Hashtag’ shares commonalities with the social base of the new politics of 1968. Just like young, and at that time predominantly male, middle-class citizens spearheaded student ‘revolutions’ at that time, led by an ethos of direct democracy, a similar demographic is today at the front of the elite-challenging mass behaviours in post-authoritarian middle-income countries such as Indonesia. The growing scholarship advocating a strong technological determinism this book counters with empirical evidence suggesting continuity with extant social theory rather than a radical departure from it.

This does, however, not mean that we are seeing ‘politics as usual’ in the Global South—quite the contrary. A radical deepening of participatory political mass culture with increased demands for accountable governance is unfolding from Asia to Latin America. This political culture has been rendered possible both by transformative socio-economic change and by the improvements in legal and political institutions that many developing countries have seen during the last decades—for instance, Indonesia’s ‘Reformasi’ period of democratization. The relevant discontinuity is thus social, not so much technological, change. In their seminal paper ‘The logic of connective action’, Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg (2012, p. 743) speculated that there has been

a shift in social and political orientations among younger generations in the nations that we now term the post-industrial democracies (Inglehart 1997). These individualized orientations result in engagement with politics as an expression of personal hopes, lifestyles, and grievances. When enabled by various kinds of communication technologies, the resulting [digitally networked...