As I have shown, the idea of digital public space and the digital wall can be thought of as functioning much in the same way as their physical counterparts. By extension, they both have the potential to be used as effective tools for socio-political protest. In the case of the Nestlé’s palm oil protests, protesters used Nestlé’s Facebook wall as a digital commons area to effectively question the business practices of a multi-national corporation. In this particular case, the
methods used by protesters reflected the methods that are often employed on physical walls: challenging their targets by reappropriating space that was typically used by the existing power structure to disseminate favorable ideology and instead using it to display counter-hegemonic critiques; communicating with others in the population to raise knowledge of their protest; and displaying their messages on a communication platform that simultaneously provided direct access to potential viewers and one that could not be easily controlled by the power structure being challenged.
There are many similarities between the digital wall and the physical wall. There are, however, are a few differences worth noting. One of the advantages that the digital wall holds over the physical wall as a communication platform is that, because of the borderless, globalized nature of the internet, the messages posted on the digital walls have the potential of reaching a far greater audience than messages on the physical wall alone could hope to reach. Thus, these messages have the potential to garner even greater support from others. The globalized nature of the digital wall, while having the positive attribute of reaching further, does come with its own drawback. While there is the potential for broad support, the support has the potential to not run as deeply as it would in cases where the protest is a regional or local matter (Davis 2010). You might be able to get people to care about your cause halfway across the world, but they aren’t
111 going to have the same conviction as those in the actual, physical protest do. This is not
necessarily a fatal flaw, but merely something to consider.
There are similarities between the construction and use of the digital wall and the
physical wall, specifically ideas of who “owns” the surfaces and what repercussions there are for the transgression of displaying critical messages on them. However, there is another advantage that the physical wall holds over the digital wall. In the case of the digital wall, there is
undoubtedly more safety and more reach when using it as a platform for protest. But, one must remember who owns this digital space. Everything has a physical backing somewhere. Even something as ethereal as the internet, when it comes down to it, is located on some company’s servers somewhere in the physical world. While the dynamics of the interaction between power structures and the general population are definitely changed for the better with the advent of the digital wall and its socio-political uses, one must remember that at the end of the day digital protesters, like their physical counterparts, are still playing in “the master’s house.” That is, these spaces, like their physical counterparts, are still owned by corporations or governments.
Although populations are given much more freedom to interact and challenge those within the digital commons, they are still operating in a world that at the end of the day a
telecommunications company or a government can pull the plug on.
The use of physical walls as a space for protest comes with its own drawbacks of course. If you are caught creating counter-hegemonic messages on the physical walls of public space, you can be arrested or (depending on where you are) worse. However, the upside to this danger is that they have to physically catch those that do this and, furthermore, they cannot take away the physical wall from being accessed by the population without destroying the ideological institution that it is supposed to serve. One is generally thought to be safer in the use of the
112 digital wall. The anonymity of the internet provides more to hide behind than when using the physical wall. But, as noted before, because the physical infrastructure that supports digital public space (server farms, fiber optic lines, etc.) is essentially by power structures much like the ones that various protest groups are attempting to fight, the game is still somewhat in their hands, making protest within digital public space still a dangerous undertaking in some places. While a government might not be able to prevent people from posting and sharing counter-hegemonic messages within digital public space, they can certainly arrest them at will within the physical world based on various “crimes”, thus disrupting their access to digital space. Socio-political protest on the physical wall solves this at the cost of physical danger; with the physical wall, hegemonic forces still own the space, but they can’t “pull the plug” on a physical building without causing damage to their own ideological structures in the process.
As a final thought, I think it is important to address criticisms leveled at the use of social media as a tool for protest. In light of the failed realization of the Green Revolution in Iran, many of those that commented on the events claimed that social media like Twitter or Facebook lacked the gravitas of proven, more “old fashioned” protest tools from the past (Gladwell 2010;
Baumann 2010). These criticisms claim that the ability of those to protest had been established long before the rise of social media and they were quite effective before then. Anyone who thinks that social media is the protest of the future, they argue, is sorely mistaken. What critics like Gladwell and Baumann miss (or outright refuse to see) in their dismissal of the potential of the digital wall for protest is that the utilization of this new digital public space is not meant to replace the old methods, but rather augment them with the addition of new technologies to help enhance their effectiveness.
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