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Framing Bouazizi: ‘White lies’, hybrid network, and collective/connective action in the 2010–11 Tunisian uprising

Merlyna LimArizona State University, USA

AbstractBy delving into the detailed account of the Tunisian uprising, this article offers an explanation that sets the 2010 uprising apart from its precursors. The 2010 uprising was successful because activists successfully managed to bridge geographical and class divides as well as to converge offline and online activisms. Such connection and convergence were made possible, first, through the availability of dramatic visual evidence that turned a local incident into a spectacle. Second, by successful frame alignment with a master narrative that culturally and politically resonated with the entire population. Third, by activating a hybrid network made of the connective structures to facilitate collective action – among Tunisians who shared collective identities and collective frames – and connective action – among individuals who sought more personalized paths to contribute to the movement through digital media.

KeywordsActivism, Arab Spring, Bouazizi, collective action, framing, networks, social media, social movement, Tunisia

On 17 December 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit vendor in Sidi Bouzid, set himself on fire in front of a municipal building. Images and stories of his desperate act spread like wildfire across Tunisia, throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and around the globe, and ignited the 2010–11 Tunisian uprising. Bouazizi was hailed a martyr and became a symbol of the struggle for justice, dignity and freedom throughout the Arab

Corresponding author:Merlyna Lim, Distinguished Scholar of Technology and Public Engagement, Consortium of Science, Policy and Outcomes & School of Social Transformation, Arizona State University, PO Box 875603, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA. Email: [email protected]

478359 JOU14710.1177/1464884913478359JournalismLim2013

Special issue article

922 Journalism 14(7)

world. Many ‘martyrs’ before him, however, failed to inspire action and were forgotten. The death of Abdesslem Trimech, another street vendor in Monastir, for example, was similar to that of Bouazizi (Abdesslem Trimech, 2011). In March 2010, when his fruit stand was confiscated, Trimech went to city hall and was denied a meeting with a mayor. He later returned doused in kerosene and set himself on fire. His was just one of nine self-immolations in the six months leading up to Bouazizi’s death (PEN American, 2012), all of which sparked only small local protests.

One factor that sets 17 December apart is the protests that immediately followed Bouazizi’s self-immolation1 and their role in shaping the narrative of the larger 2010–11 Tunisian uprising. These were by no means the first protests in Tunisia. Local protests over economic grievances in Tunisia’s poorer interior regions, in fact, were a regular occurrence (Achcar, 2012). The media ignored these earlier protests, however, making it relatively easy for Tunisian authority to crush them. The largest uprising before 2010 was in 2008 in the mining area of Gafsa, where people held massive continuous protests for six months but did not manage to garner support elsewhere in Tunisia. Ben Ali’s regime put an end to these protests by deploying the army. But why did Bouazizi’s death and not Gafsa and other earlier protests trigger a national uprising?

Many observers believed that social media was the catalyst that enabled resistance to spread over the region in such a short time (Harb, 2011; Howard and Hussain, 2011; Lotan et al., 2011; Stepanova, 2011). Others argue that social media played only an incidental role in the uprisings (Ehrenberg, 2012; Morozov, 2011), insisting that it was a ‘people’s revolution’ that would have happened with or without social media (York, 2011). It is misleading to frame the Arab revolts exclusively as either a social media revolution or a people’s revolution, as people and social media are not detached from one another (Lim, 2012: 232). Media have historically been part of insurgent movements: for example, books and newspapers in the abolitionist movement; the tel-egraph in the 1917 Bolshevik revolution; the independent radio in the first People Power in the Philippines in 1984; Xerox copies of information first circulated on the web in the 1998 anti-Suharto movement in Indonesia (Lim, 2003, 2008). Today, unsurprisingly, dissidents make use of social media from the Arab Spring to the Indignados in Spain, from the Occupy Wall Street to the Bersih movement in Kuala Lumpur streets. Yet, despite its importance, social media was not the only media tool used in these movements. In Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt, pamphlets, cab drivers, and coffee houses were as important as Facebook in mobilizing the protests (Lim, 2012). In Tunisia, too, other media such as satellite television, mobile phones, and even sneakers played significant roles in facilitating and sustaining the movement. To move beyond the preoccupation with the role of social media in the Tunisian uprising, this study addresses the question: How was media used to propel Bouazizi’s death into a large-scale and successful movement?

To address this question, I conducted a framing analysis of a variety of media prod-ucts related to the uprising, including five documentary films, six television reportages, international news reports from 17 December 2010 to 18 January 2011, blog posts from 56 top Tunisian bloggers from January 2004 to January 2011, and Twitter activity data on #sidibouzid from 17 December 2010 to 14 January 2011. This analysis is augmented by direct interviews with two Tunisian activists. To maintain the validity of this study, I

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triangulated data – verifying with two or more sources – all information that made up an account of the Tunisian uprising to reveal key mechanisms and processes in the dissemi-nation of information. By so doing, I also uncovered some distinct features of media use that set Bouazizi’s immolation and the ensuing protests apart from its precursors.

A great disconnect: Online activism vs. working-class struggles

The 2010–11 Tunisian revolt has at least two historical origins, namely the enduring struggles of working-class and labor activists and the long-established online activism. On the ground, offline protests generally involved blue-collar workers and labor and trade unions, and revolved around unemployment and poverty issues. Meanwhile, digital activism was predominantly urban centered and focused on immaterial issues such as freedom of expression (censorship), democracy, and human rights. These two clusters shared common concerns; both were critical of the issues of corruption and the govern-ment’s use of violence and torture. They were rarely united on mobilizing issues, how-ever, as will be elaborated shortly.

Sami Ben Gharbia, a Tunisian blogger activist, describes it this way: ‘The role of the internet in the Tunisian revolution and [in] building the spirit of protest and change is the work of at least a decade’ (Randeree, 2011). Digital activism in Tunisia was indeed built upon years of online campaigns against the internet censorship. In 1991, Tunisia became the first country in the Arab world to connect to the internet. The technology became available to the public by 1996 and in the same year the Tunisian Internet Agency or ATI (L’Agence Tunisienne d’Internet) was established. ATI quickly became the chief institu-tion that oversaw the most severe internet censorship in the world, with a long list of blocked websites, including those related to human rights and oppositional parties, poli-tics, and news portals.

Such restrictive censorship, however, did not stop activists from using the internet for political purposes. On the contrary, digital activism was lively, as exemplified by Takriz, a Tunisian cyber think-tank established in 1998, and early prominent activist websites such as the Perspectives Tunisiennes established in 2000 and TuneZine in 2001. Year 2004 saw the emergence of political blogs and the birth of Nawaat.org, an independent collective blog serving as a platform for Tunisian dissident voices and debates. The harsh online environment was the main challenge for online activists, making ‘the fight against censorship online and in the real world’ the main occupation of Tunisian political blog-gers (Kuebler, 2011). Many political blogs were censored, prompting a popular saying ‘you are not a real blogger if your blog is not censored’. The repressive measures also extended offline with the arrest of bloggers and cyber dissidents.

While vibrant, Tunisian online activism had only limited ability to connect with regu-lar Tunisians. As described by veteran digital activist Ben Gharbia (2010), ‘despite its technical and tactical advantages, [Tunisian online activism] has never managed to go offline and reach out to the average masses of Tunisian citizens’. The first attempt to establish the online–offline linkage was a 2010 street-rally against internet censorship involving Facebook groups with thousands of members like Le ‘404 Not Found’ nuit gravement à l’image de Mon Pays, and Aridha li ’ashar alaaf tonisi dhid al- riqaba


al- Eliktroniyya wa al-hajb.2 On the protest day, 22 May, hundreds participated in the rallies held in front of Tunisian embassies in Paris, Bonn, and New York. In the Tunisian capital of Tunis, however, only a few dozen showed up to protest (Ben Gharbia, 2010). This low participation reflected the limit of online activism in a repressive society where there was a highly cultivated culture of fear and the media environment was heavily controlled. Ironically, the rally was mobilized around the issue of internet censorship, which did not resonate with the 70 percent of the population who lacked internet access.

Tunisian digital activists are predominantly affluent, highly educated urbanites. They are more closely connected to global activisms such as Reporters without Borders and WikiLeaks than to local struggles. On 28 November 2010, Nawaat.org launched TuniLeaks – a new website dedicated to republishing and discussing the revelations related to Tunisia – only one hour after WikiLeaks’ release of 17 cables that contained information that undermined the Tunisian authorities (Ben Mhenni, 2010). Whilst vital to political reform, Tunisian digital activists rarely touched on issues of common interest to Tunisians and, as illustrated next in the case of Gafsa, seldom raised issues that reso-nated with working-class activists.

A series of strikes centered around the issue of unemployment took place in the mining area of Gafsa from January to June 2008. The slogan of the Sidi Bouzid protests, ‘Employment is a right, you band of thieves!’, was a direct echo of this revolt, prompting labor activists to credit the Gafsa protest as the genesis of the 2010–11 Tunisian uprising. At the local level, mobilization of the protest was successful. Before the 2010 Sidi Bouzid protests, this mining revolt represented the most important uprising seen in Tunisia since the Bread Riots in 1984. However, it was unable to grow ‘due to the limited support it enjoyed within Tunisian society … [and] the coercive policy of Ben Ali’s regime’ (Gobe, 2011: 1). In addition to violent crackdowns, the government physically blocked any jour-nalists from accessing the region and successfully controlled media reporting of the event. In the mainstream media the protesters were framed as rioters, uneducated thugs, who were hijacked by terrorism and extremism. Activists worked around media control using independent guerilla channels, such as homemade video CDs (VCDs), to broadcast the revolt. They posted these homemade videos on Facebook and a few of the videos eventu-ally made their way to DailyMotion and YouTube with the help of a number of Tunisians abroad. Yet these videos did not become popular, not even among digital activists. The digital activism around the Gafsa revolt was very limited, even in the blogosphere (Figure 1), with only four related postings in April and five in June of 2008. This number is very low especially if compared to the number of postings devoted to the topics of censorship and Ben Ali – 148 and 153 postings, respectively, just in June alone.3

The lack of coverage from digital activists and mainstream media meant the protests did not echo elsewhere. The only western media that recognized the revolt was a leftist online magazine In Defence of Marxism (Riposte, 2008) that has a limited readership. Coverage of Gafsa was absent from Al Jazeera because the channel was banned from Tunisia and thus could not send its journalists to the region (Harb, 2011) and at the time they had not yet integrated citizen-generated images and reporting into their coverage.

In Tunisia, Ben Ali was politically unassailable as long as he controlled the army and the media. In the Gafsa revolt, the role of state media was to offer a counter-narrative to the protesters’ story. In the absence of alternative discourse in international media and

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social media, the state was successful in containing local protests from becoming nation-wide uprisings. The isolation of protest was also helped by social and economic dispari-ties between interior regions (such as Gafsa and Sidi Bouzid) and coastal regions. Economic development has long been concentrated in coastal regions, leaving the inte-rior regions isolated from economic activities, ‘not only by distance but, more signifi-cantly, by a lack of transportation and information networks’ (Brisson and Kontiris, 2012). Such disparities made it difficult to build national solidarity, as local grievances tended to be contained and rarely became diffused nationally. From the story of Gafsa we learn that what prevented a nationwide populist movement from emerging was not a lack of activism. Online and on-the-ground activist movements were vibrant and, yet, discon-nected from one another. Geographical and class divides within society made this dis-connect even greater. Even when the society as a whole shared some grievances, this disconnect, in addition to the state’s repression and control of media, made the transfor-mation of local activism to mass movement extremely difficult.

Social movements aim to replace the dominant belief system that serves to validate the status quo with an alternative belief system that supports political mobilization and collec-tive action (Gamson et al., 1982: 15). Rather than centering solely on economic or materi-ally driven grievances, new movement theory associates actions or movements with belief systems that revolve around a set of values and symbols that are specific to the group (Snow et al., 1986). Symbolic politics, however, is paradoxical in that it extends familiar codes that are rooted in people’s cultures in order to construct alternative identities that lead to change (Tarrow, 1998: 106). The Gafsa uprising was framed by activists as a famil-iar symbolic politics, the struggle of the poor, which did not resonate with middle-class

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Censorship Ben Ali Gafsa

Figure 1. ‘Censorship’, ‘Ben Ali’, and ‘Gafsa’ related blog posts in top 56 Tunisian political blogs (January–June 2008). Source: author.


urban Tunisians. On the other hand, digital activists framed their movement with symbols of anti-censorship and freedom of expression that were dynamic but far from the concerns of regular Tunisians. To take into account the processes through which people construct interests and meaning within a collectivity, it is pertinent to turn to frame alignment (Snow et al., 1986), which refers to processes that align individuals’ frames to shared meanings that are congruent and complementary to personal interests, values, beliefs, goals, and ideology. The term frame, coined by Goffman (1974), refers to schemata people use to organize, perceive, and make sense of their experience in the world (Snow et al., 1986: 464). The next section illustrates that, ‘by rendering events or occurrences meaningful’ (1986: 464), frames helped connect Sidi Bouzid protestors with the rest of Tunisian soci-ety and, consequently, translated local contentious politics into a nationwide uprising.

Framing Bouazizi

Popular understandings of Bouazizi’s self-immolation see it as a trigger of the Tunisian uprising that later inspired the awakening of the Arab world. While recognizing the importance of Bouazizi’s death, I argue that its role in the revolt is very much attached to the framing of narratives around it rather than the death itself. In this section, I explore and analyze how Bouazizi’s story was framed to give his death meaning that had reso-nance locally, nationally, and internationally.

Death, especially a violent death, according to social movement scholar Sidney Tarrow:

… has the power to trigger violent emotions and brings people together with little in common but their grief and their solidarity; […] in repressive systems that ban lawful assembly, funeral processions are often the only occasions on which protests can begin. (1998: 36)

However, as we witnessed in the Trimech case, collective action mobilized around death is usually localized, limited to family and friends (Abdesslem Trimech, 2011). The moment is gone when the funeral is over. To widely mobilize death is to frame it as part of something bigger, beyond the death itself.

The power of images

First, one of the things that set Mohamed Bouazizi apart from the other cases was that his immolation was recorded on video. The afternoon of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immola-tion, Ali Bouazizi (a distant cousin, who will be referred to as Ali throughout), a long-time opposition activist, received a phone call alerting him about the fire. Ali arrived at the governor’s office just in time to see Bouazizi ablaze. He quickly took out his Samsung mobile phone to capture both the burning body and the protest that immediately fol-lowed. As Ali put it, ‘I was the first to gather photos of Mohamed al-Bouazizi and I dis-tributed them to get the issue into the media’ (Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, 2011: 30). Ali understands the power of images. He believes that ‘images are like weapons, they can help topple a regime’ (Images of Revolution, 2012). Later that day, a friend helped Ali edit the recording, which he then posted on his Facebook wall, along with several photographs of that day’s events. Unlike other video-sharing

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websites, Facebook was not blocked in Tunisia. Images of Bouazizi’s burning body were rapidly spread through Facebook. The images were also presented to morally ‘shock’ the public and evoke their emotions. These dramatic images gave the first and lasting visual impression of the story and elevated a local event to a larger spectacle.

Visuals are effective framing devices because they are ‘capable of not only obscuring issues but [also] of overwhelming facts’ (Wischmann, 1987: 70) and they are ‘less intru-sive than words’ (Rodriguez and Dimitrova, 2011: 50). The archetypal images of Bouazizi’s burning body and their rapid diffusion online effectively framed Sidi Bouzid’s contentious politics from the beginning. They proffered ‘an injustice frame’ (Gamson et al., 1982: 123), emboldening a sense of injustice. But as we can see from the case of the Gafsa revolt, images alone do not propel a movement.

Making the burning body political: Ali Bouazizi’s white lies

Beyond the images, Ali also recognized the importance of framing the narrative around the images. As discussed earlier, not every self-immolation is hailed as a great sacrifice for the cause. In fact, the self-immolation of Trimech, who was also portrayed as a town’s fool (Siddiqi, 2011), was acknowledged as a mere desperate act of the uneducated poor. The poor have no capacity to aspire because they lack the voice and recognition (Appadurai, 2004). The death of the poor is typically a non-event that has no political importance. Recognizing the voicelessness of the poor, Ali determined to give Bouazizi’s body a voice, by writing a compelling narrative that resonated with many Tunisians like himself. This narrative includes fabricated facts, what Ali called ‘white lies’.4 First, Ali framed Bouazizi, who in reality never finished high school, as an unemployed university graduate who turned to selling produce to make ends meet (Evening News, 2010). Second, he inserted a ‘slap in the face’ by Fedia Hamdi, an authority who is also a woman, and made it central to the story of Bouazizi’s public humiliation (Evening News, 2010). This slap was ‘one humiliation too many’ (Mohamed Bouazizi, 2012). A slap from a woman to a man is seen as humiliating in many cultures, and is particularly inviolable in Arab cultures, and served to ‘multiply the anger of a traditional and conservative population’ (2012). In reality, nobody knew whether the slap really happened. Hamdi repeatedly said that she never hit Bouazizi. After being incarcerated for nearly four months, Hamdi was brought to trial where she was found innocent of all charges and subsequently released (2012).

Framing can only be effective in mobilization if the grievance of the claim is salient in public opinion. Not only does framing have to resonate, it also has to catch people’s attention to make them care about the issue, a process called frame amplification (Snow et al., 1986). Ali Bouazizi skillfully amplified the burning body story by providing a twist to the actual story. By adding these two ingredients – a university graduate and a slap – to the story, Ali rendered Mohamed’s burning body political, affixing to it the political body of a citizen whose rights were denied. Mohamed Bouazizi no longer rep-resented the uneducated poor who struggle to provide food on the table, but represented all young people of Tunisia whose rights and freedom were denied. Bouazizi’s story resonates with ‘the youth who, at that age, could have a better job, and who reach the point where they would rather die than lead such a life’ (29 Days, 2012). By such


framing, Ali effectively convinced the country that the uprising in Sidi Bouzid was a fight for justice, ‘launched with the twin demands of freedom and dignity’ (Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, 2011: 30), distancing it from the notion of ‘bread riots’ that was always associated with protests in impoverished regions. Through Bouazizi, the residents of Sidi Bouzid claimed their rights as citizens.

The Bouazizi story, crafted by a combination of the burning body images and Ali Bouazizi’s mythical twist, had become a master frame that guided interpretation of not only the Sidi Bouzid protests, but also the Tunisian revolt, and the Arab revolts in general. It connected with familiar themes in Tunisian society and as such it exemplified the process of frame bridging (Snow et al., 1986: 467), which involves the linkage of a movement to people who share similar grievances but are structurally disconnected or disengaged.

The distinction between ‘food’ and ‘dignity’ was very important in mobilizing Tunisians, especially the urban middle-class youth in more affluent regions. As men-tioned earlier, in coastal regions where tourists and beaches abound, people were gener-ally disengaged from poverty and the struggles of people in the impoverished areas, as exemplified in the Gafsa case. By framing the Bouazizi story as a death for justice, freedom, and dignity, the movement in Sidi Bouzid had built a bridge to connect with diverse social groups beyond its locale. As noted by Leila Ben Debba, a Tunisian lawyer turned activist leader, ‘It was a revolution where the young people did not rally for food but for a dignified life’ (29 Days, 2012).

Galvanizing the networks, turning contention to social movement

If the world did not hear our protest then it never happened. (Ali Bouazizi in The Death of Fear, 2011)

While framing is important, the protests would have a limited impact if they were not diffused nationally and internationally. It is through the diffusion that a social movement can expand its base to have a denser, diverse, and more centralized network (Tilly and Tarrow, 2006: 116). For contentious politics to transform into a successful social move-ment they need to be adopted by citizens’ groups (Dalton, 1996: 81) and to diffuse socially and demographically across age, gender, and ideology. Thus, framed narratives of local protests need to penetrate media and communication networks to create cycles of contention and reproduce protests.

In the absence of any mainstream media coverage, protesters turned to alternative media to transform protests around the self-immolation of Bouazizi into a movement. By December 2010, Facebook had one million users in Tunisia and thus a higher potential as a mobilizing tool than it did at the time of the Gafsa protests, when there were only 28,000 users (Pollock, 2011). Those one million users, however, were concentrated in Tunis and surrounding areas and made up less than 20 percent of the total population. The number was much lower in interior parts of Tunisia such as Sidi Bouzid. Although around 30 percent (in 2011) of the population had access to dial-up and broadband inter-net, the patterns of usage and penetration reflect the regional disparities. In all the interior provinces there were only 27 public internet access points compared to 232 in the coastal

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provinces (Brisson and Kontiris, 2012). Many villages and towns in the interior regions not only lacked internet access, but also did not have reliable mobile phone coverage (2012). In this context, Facebook alone was not adequate in facilitating mobilization. As illustrated in the following section, the significance of media in facilitating the move-ment in Tunisia was not situated in social media networks, but in a hybrid network where social media, big media (e.g. Al Jazeera), and ‘small media’ (e.g. mobile phones, laptops, memory cards, and sneakers) converged (see media events in Table 1).

The formation of a hybrid network

In Figure 2, we see how within less than 24 hours the Bouazizi story was passed from one node to another, flowing from Sidi Bouzid to other places in Tunisia through various media networks. Here, I add several stories to the picture to illustrate this process.

The flow started at 11:30 am when Mohamed Bouazizi burned himself in front of the municipal building. Within half an hour, those who witnessed it called their families and friends using mobile phones. Bouazizi’s uncle called several people, including an inde-pendent journalist Zouhayr Makhlouf, who immediately prepared to go to Sidi Bouzid to cover the protest (29 Days, 2012). His phone was wiretapped by the government and he was stopped by police in front of his house, beaten, and his camera confiscated. Unable to go to Sid Bouzid, Makhlouf distributed the news through emails and Facebook con-tacts, including reporters at the Al Jazeera office in Qatar (29 Days, 2012).

In the meantime, callers from Sidi Bouzid notified other independent journalists, while activists of SBZone FM Radio, a small local web-based radio founded by Anis Chorabi and four of his friends in 2005, made numerous systematic calls (Fischer, 2011). Chorabi described why they started SBZone: ‘[T]here was absolutely no news about Sidi Bouzid and the region whatsoever. Even when there was a murder in town, nobody would know about it – we lived in constant news black out’ (Fischer, 2011). While mod-est in its operation, the station has an extensive network of correspondents in the region and is well connected to independent journalists in the country. Chorabi said ‘if anything happens in Sidi Bouzid, [we] are the first to know; people call or send [us] text messages’ (Fischer, 2011). SBZone was among the first media channels to disseminate the news by notifying their network, through calls, texts, and online broadcasting.

Meanwhile, in Qatar, Al Jazeera had received some notifications about the Sidi Bouzid incident, from Makhlouf and other independent journalists, and immediately paid close attention to it (29 Days, 2012). Because Al Jazeera is officially banned in Tunisia, it could not send any of its own journalists there, but, having launched a citizen journalism portal (http://sharek.aljazeera.net) in November 2008, footage, images, and news from citizens had been making its way to Al Jazeera from areas that otherwise would not be accessible. The incorporation of citizen journalism started in the reportage of the Gaza War in December 2008 when Al Jazeera used Ushaidi to help track events as they unfolded in and around the Gaza Strip. By establishing the practices of networked journalism – ‘journal-ism that sees publics acting as creators, investigators, reactors, (re)makers, and (re)distri-bution of news and where all variety of media, amateurs, and professional, corporate and independent products and interests intersect at a new level’ (Russell, 2011: 1) – the exist-ence of Al Jazeera was particularly important in the repressive media environment.

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nglis

h).

Fi

rst

repo

rt in

Glo

bal V

oic

es A

dvo

cacy

by

A T

unis

ian

Gir

l.

24/1

2/10

El-H

adri

and

Am

mar

i wer

e sh

ot (

and

Am

mar

i kill

ed)

by

polic

e in

Bou

azai

ne. B

ig p

rote

sts

in T

halla

, Kas

seri

ne,

Al-M

ikna

ssi,

and

Reg

ueb.

Swis

s R

TS

rad

io’s

firs

t re

port

age

(in G

erm

an).

R

adio

Net

herl

ands

’ fir

st r

epor

tage

(in

Dut

ch a

nd E

nglis

h).

K

apit

alis

.co

m’s

firs

t re

port

age

(in F

renc

h).

B

BC

’s fi

rst

repo

rtag

e (in

Eng

lish)

.

25/1

2/10

Prot

ests

spr

ead

to K

airo

uan,

Ben

Gua

rdan

e, a

nd S

fax.

Alg

eria

n T

out

Sur

l’Alg

erie

’s fi

rst

repo

rtag

e (in

Fre

nch)

.

Lim 931T

able

1. (

Con

tinue

d)

Dat

eEv

ents

Med

ia e

vent

s

26/1

2/10

Mas

sive

use

of m

obi

le p

hone

s (w

ithou

t in

tern

et c

onne

ctio

n) fo

r vo

ice

and

vide

o re

cord

ing

of p

rote

sts.

Lap

tops

wit

h in

tern

et a

s hu

bs.

27/1

2/21

010

00 a

tten

ded

the

first

sol

idar

ity p

rote

st in

Tun

is. T

he

Tun

isia

n Fe

dera

tion

of L

abor

Uni

ons

(UG

TT

) ra

llied

in

Gaf

sa. 3

00 la

wye

rs r

allie

d in

Tun

is.

Ang

ola

Pre

ss’ f

irst

cov

erag

e (in

Fre

nch)

.

28/1

2/10

Ben

Ali

visi

ted

Boua

zizi

in a

hos

pita

l in

Ben

Aro

us.

The

pic

ture

of t

he P

resi

dent

, sta

ndin

g ne

xt t

o Bo

uazi

zi’s

unr

ecog

niza

ble

body

, bec

ame

vira

l on

Fac

ebo

ok

and

Tw

itte

r. T

he P

resi

dent

’s fi

rst

rem

ark

in n

atio

nal t

elev

isio

n, c

onde

mni

ng t

he p

rote

stor

s.

Le M

onde

’s fi

rst

cove

rage

(in

Fre

nch)

.

The

Gua

rdia

n’s

first

cov

erag

e (in

Eng

lish)

.

Bos

ton

Glo

be’s

firs

t co

vera

ge (

in E

nglis

h).

29/1

2/10

Prot

ests

in T

unis

.N

essm

a T

V’s

(na

tiona

l TV

) fir

st c

over

age.

Pr

otes

ts p

rolif

erat

ed t

o M

onas

tir, S

bikh

a, a

nd C

hebb

a.E

xpre

ss F

M’s

and

Sha

ms

FM

’s (

com

mer

cial

rad

ios)

firs

t co

vera

ge.

E

l Nue

vo E

mp

resa

rio’

s fir

st r

epor

tage

(in

Spa

nish

).

Swis

s N

eue

Zür

cher

Zei

tung

’s fi

rst

repo

rtag

e (in

Ger

man

).

30/1

2/10

An

inju

red

prot

este

r, E

l-Had

ri, d

ied.

31/1

2/10

Prot

ests

bro

ke o

ut in

mos

t re

gion

s. L

awye

rs s

how

ed

solid

arity

in S

ouss

e, M

onas

tir, M

ahdi

a, G

afsa

, Jen

doub

a,

and

Gro

mba

lia. I

nter

net

and

pow

er o

utag

e in

Sid

i Bou

zid

and

neig

hbor

ing

tow

ns.

Vid

eos

of s

ecur

ity fo

rces

’ bru

talit

y w

ere

diss

emin

ated

thr

ough

F

aceb

oo

k, r

epos

ted

on D

aily

Mo

tio

n an

d Y

ouT

ube.

1/1/

11

2/1/

11‘A

nony

mo

us’ l

aunc

hed

Ope

ratio

n T

unis

ia, h

acki

ng T

unis

ian

gove

rnm

ent

web

site

s.

3/1/

11St

uden

ts’ p

rote

st in

Tha

la t

urne

d vi

olen

t.G

over

nmen

t ha

cked

act

ivis

ts’ e

mai

ls a

nd F

aceb

oo

k ac

coun

ts.

4/1/

11T

unis

ian

Bar

Ass

ocia

tion

anno

unce

d a

gene

ral s

trik

e.

Boua

zizi

die

d.A

l Jaz

eera

dep

loye

d a

mas

sive

num

ber

of s

mar

t-ph

one

s to

the

peo

ple

of S

idi B

ouzi

d.

(Con

tinue

d)


Dat

eEv

ents

Med

ia e

vent

s

5/1/

11Bo

uazi

zi’s

fune

ral i

n Si

di B

ouzi

d to

wn,

att

ende

d by

500

0 m

ourn

ers.

Gov

ernm

ent

sanc

tione

d th

e re

gion

with

ph

ysic

al a

nd in

form

atio

n bl

ocka

ges.

Vid

eos

of t

he fu

nera

l and

sub

sequ

ent

mar

ches

wen

t o

nlin

e an

d w

ere

broa

dcas

t by

Al J

azee

ra.

6/1/

1195

% o

f Tun

isia

’s 8

000

law

yers

wen

t on

str

ike.

El G

ener

al’s

rap

son

g cr

itici

zing

the

Pre

side

nt b

ecam

e vi

ral o

n Y

ouT

ube.

Si

di B

ouzi

d se

cond

ary

and

high

sch

ools

on

stri

ke.

El G

ener

al, a

pol

itica

l rap

per,

was

arr

este

d.

7/1/

11T

hous

ands

of t

each

ers

wen

t on

str

ike.

Gov

ernm

ent

arre

sted

blo

gger

s an

d on

line

activ

ists

.

Po

lice

open

ed fi

re in

Sai

da a

nd R

egue

b.

8/1/

11M

assa

cres

and

pre

ss b

lack

out

in T

hala

, Reg

ueb,

and

K

asse

rine

. Gov

ernm

ent

isol

ated

the

se t

owns

and

bl

ocke

d th

e ro

ads.

Brut

ality

vid

eos

uplo

aded

to

mem

ory

car

ds, p

ut in

sne

aker

s an

d th

row

n ov

er t

he b

orde

r to

Alg

eria

, tra

nspo

rted

to

Tun

is, u

ploa

ded

onl

ine.

9/1/

11It

alia

n T

V R

AI

repo

rted

Tun

is p

olic

e be

at a

rep

orte

r an

d hi

s ca

mer

aman

.

10/1

/11

Firs

t go

vern

men

t’s a

ckno

wle

dgem

ent

in m

edia

tha

t pr

otes

ters

got

kill

ed.

11/1

/11

10/1

/11

New

Yor

k T

imes

’ fir

st r

epor

tage

.

Ben

Ali’

s se

cond

tel

evis

ed a

ddre

ss, p

rom

isin

g jo

b cr

eatio

n, c

alle

d pr

otes

tors

‘ter

rori

sts’

.

11/1

/11

Prot

ests

in t

he s

ubur

bs o

f Tun

is.

12/1

/11

Prot

ests

in c

entr

al T

unis

follo

wed

by

a cu

rfew

.

13/1

/11

A t

op-r

anke

d ar

my

com

man

der

was

fire

d fo

r re

fusi

ng t

o sh

oot

prot

esto

rs. T

he a

rmy

side

d w

ith t

he p

eopl

e.Be

n A

li’s

thir

d te

levi

sed

addr

ess,

pro

mis

ing

chan

ges.

14/1

/11

Ben

Ali

impo

sed

a st

ate

of e

mer

genc

y.La

rge

prot

ests

in T

unis

.Be

n A

li fle

d th

e co

untr

y.

The

Pri

me

Min

iste

r G

hann

ouch

i’s a

ppea

ranc

e on

sta

te T

V, a

nnou

ncin

g th

at h

e w

as a

ssum

ing

the

role

of i

nter

im p

resi

dent

.Fi

rst

repo

rtag

e by

man

y gl

oba

l wes

tern

med

ia.

Tab

le 1

. (C

ontin

ued)

Lim 933

With the Sidi Bouzid incident, reporters at Al Jazeera trawled the internet looking for relevant material and found Ali Bouazizi’s video of the Sidi Bouzid protests posted at 6:47 pm (29 Days, 2012; The Death of Fear, 2011). The video was immediately picked up and aired on Al Jazeera Mubasher with an interview with Ali Bouazizi (Evening News, 2010). Later that evening, an unauthorized copy of the Al Jazeera report emerged on Facebook. Just hours after they happened, the self-immolation of Bouazizi and the protest in Sidi Bouzid were broadcast for the first time to the Arab world. Following the coverage, Al Jazeera stayed connected to citizen journalists on the ground, including Ali Bouazizi and his friend Mehdi Horchani, who both became frequent contributors (29 Days, 2012).

From the day of Bouazizi’s self-immolation, the 2010–11 Tunisian revolt involved multiple forms of media where mobile phones played a significant role in disseminating the news. But, unlike what was reported by western media, mobile phones were mostly not connected to social media. In 2010, more than 95 percent of mobiles did not carry internet service due to the prohibitive cost. Smart-phones accounted for only 2 percent of all mobile sales in Tunisia (Reed, 2012). The mobile enabled ordinary people in Sidi Bouzid to communicate and record what was happening, to connect with individuals and groups who had better access to online and traditional media, and to pass the Sidi Bouzid story to other Tunisians.

We can see from Figure 2 that the diffusion of information on 17 December took place in the hybrid network of mobile phone users (ordinary people, activists, and independent

Figure 2. Flow of information on 17 December 2010. Source: author.


journalists), social media users, local radio, and satellite television. The making of this network reflects the logic of media convergence which embodies not only a technologi-cal process where different types of media forms – old and new – collide, but also a cultural process with blurring lines between production and consumption, between mak-ers and users, between formal and informal memberships, and between active or passive spectators (Deuze, 2006: 19; Jenkins, 2004: 37).

From here, the hybrid network continued growing and expanding to facilitate the dif-fusion of contention beyond Sidi Bouzid. In the Gafsa scenario, the authority was suc-cessful in containing not only the protests but also the news about the protests. The Sidi Bouzid case took a different scenario. As we can see from Table 1, the protests were still contained in Sidi Bouzid but within five days of Bouazizi’s immolation the news had traveled far (see Figure 3) and been told and retold by television reporters, news writers in the Arab and western worlds, bloggers, and among regular Tunisians. Images and videos of Sidi Bouzid were uploaded on YouTube, shared and re-shared on Facebook, tweeted and re-tweeted on Twitter.

At this point, an alternative channel of information had been created and it would have been impossible to shut this hybrid network down. Beyond the fifth day, the network just grew larger and denser. In the event that one media channel was blocked, information could and would find its way through other available channels. Because the hybrid network is multi-tiered, information flows through the path of least resistance. It is redundant and resil-ient, ensuring that no information could be blocked, even where there is a technological blackout. Unlike in Egypt, where the Mubarak regime cut off virtually all internet access to contain the protests, in Tunisia there was never a complete shutdown of the internet. Nevertheless, some places in Tunisia experienced internet and power outage, such as Sidi Bouzid and neighboring towns from 31 December to 2 January (see Table 1). During this dark period, the people of Sidi Bouzid reportedly used mobile phones to relay news to fami-lies and friends in other places. Mobile phones were used not only to record images and vid-eos and to send texts, but also to broadcast. Mobile phones were used as one-way radios where the listener could hear in real time what was going on. Young people carried a cell phone in one hand and a rock in the other (Ryan, 2011). Some of these texts and sound-bytes arrived at activists’ mobile phones and laptops to be converted to electronic files and uploaded online (Abdallah, 2011). This way, the citizen-generated newsbytes found their way to the homes of middle-class Tunisians in the more affluent regions such as Sousse and Tunis.

Other evidence of the resilience of the hybrid network comes from places that had no reliable internet connection – Thala and Kasserine. When massive protests broke out in these two border towns near Algeria, police blocked the roads, isolated the towns and squashed the protests with brutal massacres (Ryan, 2011). And yet, the police could not prevent the information from going out. People took videos with their mobile phones and pocket cameras documenting police brutality and passed them to activists who trans-ferred them to memory cards. Activists put memory cards inside sneakers and threw the sneakers over the border to Algeria. From here, these cards were transported to Tunis to be uploaded online by activists in the capital and some eventually got to Al Jazeera’s news desks (Ammar, 2011). The massacres in out-of-the-way towns, which in 2008 would have remained a local account, shocked Tunisians across the country and laid ‘the seeds for the uprising to become a genuinely nationwide phenomenon’ (Rifai, 2011).

Lim 935

Fig

ure

3. F

low

of i

nfor

mat

ion

in T

unis

ian

revo

lt fr

om 1

7 to

21

Dec

embe

r 20

10. S

ourc

e: a

utho

r.


The master frame

Because the main source of information was citizen journalists, the mainstream media narrative owed a heavy debt to these accounts. In other words, the news frames of these media closely resembled or even reproduced those created by Ali Bouazizi. News circu-lated in the first five days was framed in reference to Ali’s aired interview with Al Jazeera, where he presented Bouazizi as ‘an unemployed university graduate who could only find a job as a street vendor’ and was humiliated with a slap from a woman (Evening News, 2010). This framing was employed in virtually every Bouazizi story circulated nationally and globally. The first blog posting written on the protests was posted by Ben Mhenni (2010), describing Bouazizi as ‘a graduate of Mahdia University’. The frame prevailed for weeks as both national and international news accounts described him as a college graduate, shaping how the story was portrayed internationally.

Indeed, Ali Bouazizi’s ‘white lies’ became the master frame. In reporting protests, framing is powerful in that it greatly influences public perception, including spectators, protestors, and even the opponents. Further, dominant frames determine information that is counted as ‘true’ or part of the ‘truth’, while contradictory or different information is discounted. Here, Ali Bouazizi’s master frame was the dominant frame of domestic and global news of the Tunisian uprising. To be the dominant frame, the master frame must prevail over other frames, including those of the authorities. Using televised addresses, President Ben Ali tried to contest the frame by naming the protests ‘riots’ and calling the protestors ‘extremists’ and ‘terrorists’. The master frame, however, won over a frame contest (Ryan, 1991) with Ben Ali’s frame, and successfully fostered a sense of injustice and identity that united ‘us’, all Tunisians, against ‘them’, the regime of Ben Ali.

Connective structures: Collective and connective action

The diffusion of information within Tunisia had a direct influence on the proliferation of protests. As information traveled from one place to another, Sidi Bouzid’s struggle for jus-tice, freedom, and dignity journeyed with it, connecting not only one mobile phone to another, but also an individual to various networks of individuals and to a network of net-works. These hybrid human-communication-information networks were made of the con-nective structures that linked Sidi Bouzid, the capital, first, with neighboring towns in the region and other towns in the interior regions who had shared economic and social griev-ances, and second, with richer towns in the coastal regions where urban middle-class Tunisian and digital activists live. Here, the connective structures do not reflect formal hier-archical organization – what Zald and McCarthy define as a formal organization that ‘identi-fies its goals with the preferences of a social movement or a countermovement and attempts to implement those goals’ (1987: 20) – but an assemblage of loosely interconnected infor-mal and formal structures with no sense of hierarchy. Standardized communication found in formal organizations was inadequate, thus mobilization relied mainly on participatory resources and connective structures provided by various association and information net-works operating as free space where the state’s control could be manipulated.

These connective structures became a platform to generate collective action among those who shared collective identity and acted upon it by reproducing the protests. These

Lim 937

are exemplified by the first Tunisians who mobilized in localities near Sidi Bouzid (unem-ployed graduates, teachers, unlicensed vendors, and students), by rural poor in the interior regions who shared Sidi Bouzid’s grievances, and by labor activists and unions who iden-tified with workers and the working class (see Table 1 for corresponding protests). A sense of collective identity was also shared by lawyers committed to fighting for justice, by urban middle class in Tunis, and by digital activists who aspired to freedom and dignity. Beyond that, the connective structures also helped generate connective action that allows individuals who are familiar with everyday practices of social networking to contribute to concerted action through more personalized paths (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012: 752). In this connective logic, ‘taking public action or contributing to a common good becomes an act of personal expression or recognition or self-validation achieved by sharing ideas and actions in trusted relationships’ (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012: 752–753). As represented in the support and work of bloggers, Facebook users, and Twitter users in disseminating and sharing information on or about Sidi Bouzid and/or the Tunisian uprising, the exchanges in this connective action do not require identity or ideological alignment to make participation in the movement more flexible. In the Tunisian uprising connective action, common identifications materialized in the forms of memes, or cultural items transmitted though repetition. On Twitter, #SidiBouzid and #Tunisia moved easily across large and diverse Twitter populations. On Facebook, a raised fist was easily recognizable as a symbol of support and solidarity for the protestors.

Most participants in the connective action were a world away from Tunisia. They did not physically join the protests, but they helped globalize the movement and drew inter-national support to protect and sustain the uprising. Through their participation in social media, global audiences could listen to the voice of Tunisians rather than the state’s point of view and help to intensify the significance of the uprising on the world stage.

Conclusions

In this article I have explored the distinct features that set Bouazizi’s immolation and the 2010–11 Tunisian uprising apart from its precursors and contributed to the success of the movement. Unlike earlier uprisings, the social actors of the Sidi Bouzid uprising, in par-ticular, and of the Tunisian revolt not only connected through familiar repertoires of contention such as strikes and protests, but also by successfully tapping into large and dense networks. The Tunisian activists were able to bridge geographical and class divides, break state monopoly of information dissemination, and, in turn, consolidate local contentions into a successful nationwide movement.

This was possible through the employment of three key mechanisms, outlined through-out this article. First, the availability of the archetypal image that had iconic value – Bouazizi’s burning body – elevated the non-event of the poor to the public spectacle. By being captured on camera, Bouazizi’s self-immolation set itself apart from previous acts. Second, frame alignment with a master frame that culturally and politically resonated with the entire society successfully fostered a sense of injustice and identity that united the peo-ple of Tunisia. This master frame revolved around Ali Bouazizi’s ‘white lies’ that rendered Muhamed’s burning body political and turned him into a revolutionary symbol of the fight for justice, freedom, and dignity. Third, the activation of a hybrid network that reflects the


cultural and technological logic of media convergence to facilitate connective structures that became a platform to generate collective action among Tunisians who shared collec-tive identities and collective frames, and connective action among individuals who sought more personalized paths to contribute to the movement through digital media.

As mentioned earlier, President Ben Ali was politically powerful as long as he con-trolled the army and the media. In other words, he was impregnable if a forceful security force backed him up, if the media were under state control, and if the world was not watching. But, as we witnessed, on 14 January 2011, these conditions no longer held. A dramatic visualization of a tragedy, a ‘right’ framing, and massive connectivity and col-lectivity within a hybrid network, together contributed to this change of conditions. The death of Bouazizi brought down a dictator, not by the death itself, but in particular by ‘white lies’ that made his story universal. For some Tunisians, those might be the most beautiful lies to believe in.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank anonymous reviewers, James O’Halloran, and, especially, Adrienne Russell, for their valuable input and assistance.

Funding

Partial funding for shared facilities used in this research was provided by grants from the National Science Foundation’s Social-Computational Systems (SoCS) Program (Award Number: IIS-1110649) and the US Office of Naval Research (award number: N000141010091). Part of this article was completed while I was a fellow-in-residence at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden, the Netherlands.

Notes

1. Ali Bouazizi died on 4 January 2011.2. Le ‘404 Not Found’ nuit gravement à l’image de Mon Pays (French), literally means ‘The

“404 Not Found” seriously damages the image of My Country’. Referencing the error mes-sage that frequently appears on screen when a site is blocked, this Facebook group, http://www.facebook.com/freefrom404, founded in 2010 by Tunisian activists, is a form of protest against internet censorship. By May 2010, the group had over 8,000 members. Aridha li ‘ashar alaaf tonisi dhid al- riqaba al- Eliktroniyya wa al-hajb (Arabic) literally means ‘a petition of ten thousand Tunisians against electronic control and filtering’, and is the name of an Arabic-language version of the Facebook group, http://www.facebook.com/Tunisie.libre.1714, where activists attempted to gather 10,000 signatures against the internet censor-ship in Tunisia. The group had already gathered over 11,700 members in May 2010.

3. There is a big overlap between these two groups as discussions on ‘censorship’ almost always included discussions on ‘Ben Ali’.

4. The term ‘white lie’ is used here in contrast to a common usage referring to a fabricated story that is harmless and inconsequential. Here, the lies advanced by Ali Bouazizi were strategic and extremely consequential for the movement. I choose to use the term ‘white lie’ to keep the original term used by Ali Bouazizi (at the ‘Images of Revolution’ panel, International Journalism Festival, in Perugia, Italy, 29 April 2012) and to provide an explanation for its use having to do with the ‘common good’ that white lies are meant to achieve.

http://www.facebook.com/Tunisie.libre.1714

Lim 939

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Author biography

Merlyna Lim is Distinguished Scholar of Technology and Public Engagement with a joint appoint-ment in the School of Social Transformation (Justice and Social Inquiry) and the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA.

http://jilliancyork.com/2011/01/14/not-twitter-not-wikileaks-a-human-revolution/

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