1 | Rethinking New Media in the Public Sphere Rethinking New Media in the Public Sphere: Beyond the Freedom Paradox Jon W. Anderson Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Catholic University of America appearing in Knowledge, Authority and Change in Islamic Societies - Studies in Honor of Dale F. Eickelman, Allen Fromherz & Nadav Samin, eds. Leiden: EJ Brill, 2021. ABSTRACT: Treatments of new media in the Middle East seem often to stall on restricted views of communication as message-passing, variable reception by individuals, and averaging them as ‘audience’ or, in political terms, as ‘public’ opinion. Clearly, communication is more than this: it is reciprocal (though not necessarily symmetrical), contextually framed by situations and relationships, structured by features of language from genre to rights to speak, strategic, and in the case of the Internet it is continuously interactive – all of which comparisons to mass media do not render well. This article assembles three ‘middle range’ sociologies that capture typical interactivity of social actors with the Internet and through the Internet: communities of practice, the strength of weak ties, and the creation of ‘textual authority’ bring features of interaction with and interaction through the Internet’s latest iteration as ‘social media’ into better view. 2 | Rethinking New Media in the Public Sphere Introduction. A Paradox of the public sphere is that it implies structure without itself being that structure. For the philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas, it was a regime of communication lodged in macro-structures, of ritualized communication in dynastic and ecclesiastical structures and of formally “rational” communication which conveyed bourgeois ascendency (and, for Habermas, its realization in the technocratic state). Critiques of his formulation dwelt on people that it excluded – notably women and other social classes – and the problematic role it assigned to religion;1 but more significant has been his limited view of communication in constituting a public sphere – meaning shared and in the open, among persons otherwise strangers rather than in known roles. Beyond defending his claims for “rational” communication (i.e., that stands on its own), Habermas came around to respecifying the public sphere as “a network for communicating information and points of view,”2 which still consigns how one emerges to largely historical-descriptive inquiry and a sociology of before-and-after comparison. For the Middle East and Muslim world, the question of how a public sphere emerges has been subordinated to structural views of alternative sites and actors. Identifying new sites and actors was a first step,3 affirmed by much subsequent documentation of contemporary Islamic spaces.4 Dale Eickelman and my New Media in the Muslim World (1999, 2003) presented romance novels, movies, satellite television, Internet portals, new legal journals, religious goods and community organizing as empirical sites where new actors – by comparison to traditional or existing and, by implication, establishment ones – advanced new interpretations in new media that organized and conveyed them. It has subsequently become apparent that new media have a 1 Notably. Craig Calhoun, ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992). Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy., trans. William Rehg from Faktizität und Geltung (1992), Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). p. 360. 3 Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson, eds., New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere Indiana Series in Middle East Studies (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2. ed., 2003). 4 Gary R. Bunt, Virtually Islamic: Computer-Mediated Communication and Cyber Islamic Environments (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000); Islam in the Digital Age: E-Jihad, Online Fatwas and Cyber Islamic Environments (London: Pluto, 2003); Imuslims: Rewiring the House of Islam (London: Hurst, 2009). For case studies, Bettina Gräf, "Sheikh Yūsuf Al-Qaraḍāwī in Cyberspace," Die Welt des Islams, no. 3/4 (2007); Bettina Gräf and Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, eds., Global Mufti: The Phenomenon of Yūsuf Al-Qaraḍāwi (London: Hurst & Co., 2009); Vít Šisler, "Cyber Councellors," Information, Communication & Society 14, no. 8 (2011). 2 3 | Rethinking New Media in the Public Sphere deeper history and more extensive sociology in the Muslim world, from Sufis’ quickly taking up new print technologies in the nineteenth century to Rashid Rida’s discussing Islam in journalistic formats (al-Manar) at the turn of the twentieth century, to later circulations of sermons beyond mosque and madrassa on audio and video cassettes.5 But there is more here than proliferating alternatives or alter-natives. First of all, communication is more than the passing of messages. Communication has context and genre, it registers identities of speakers and hearers, and it is intertextual and encoded. In addition to having more variables than Habermas considered, it is fundamentally interactive and emergent, extending and emerging over time and through interaction with myriad others. This is especially the case with new media, which are not finished products reproducing structural transformation but typically, and empirically, works in progress. Focusing on structural transformation, which opened the subject, ontologizes a utopianism in new media that leaves over data and flattens experience, which is precisely opposite the effects of new media. Beyond the gross fact of a public sphere, which can be problematic, is the prior question of how one emerges as a sphere of communication that comes to be shared and in public. Understanding how a sphere of communication becomes shared and in public is key to undoing the ontological utopianism in construing new media primarily as alternatives. Actors may imagine utopias, and may associate those with particular media and pursue utopias through new media; but these depend on how a sphere of shared meanings emerges and becomes both structured and in public – then as a public -- in the first place. Here, I want to bring these processes better into view by aligning treatments of the Internet in the Middle East as new media with research on the Internet from elsewhere, and with the richer descriptive base that has accumulated. This is particularly the case with the advent of so-called “social” media (aka, Web 2.0) in the Middle East, which have outrun technical and functional concepts that are typically applied to it there too casually as alternatives. The Problem with Internet Media. Thinking about the Internet in the Middle East has overwhelmingly focused on two principal ideas. One, rooted in modernization theory, has viewed networked communications as 5 Carl W. Ernst, "Ideological and Technological Transformations of Contemporary Sufism," in Muslim Networks from Hajj to Hip-Hop, ed. miriam cooke & Bruce B. Lawrence (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Dyala Hamzah, "From ‘Ilm to Sihafa or the Politics of the Public Interest (Maslaha): Muhammad Rashid Rida and His Journal Al-Manar (1898-1935)," in The Making of the Arab Intellectual: Empire, Public Sphere and the Colonial Coordinates of Selfhood, ed. Dyala Hamzah (New York: Routledge, 2013); "Muhammad Rashid Rida Or: The Importance of Being (a) Journalist," in Religion and Its Other: Secular and Sacral Concepts and Practices in Interaction, ed. Heike Bock, Jörg Feuchter, and Michi Knecht (Frankfurt & New York: Campus, 2008). Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ali Mohammadi, Small Media, Big Revolution: Communication, Culture, and the Iranian Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 4 | Rethinking New Media in the Public Sphere revolutionary “technologies of freedom,”6 increasing access to and flows of information. Manuel Castells went on to characterize networked communications as the “material basis” of a “new social morphology” whose diffusion “substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power, and culture.”7 The other idea frames it overwhelmingly as media and operationalizes such structural transformation through comparisons to mass media. Both focus on decentralization of communication and enhancements of agency as key structural transformations fostered by the Internet as a system of (more) open communication and by the Internet as media. But these essentially backwardlooking comparisons to industrial mass society can be deeply problematic, not least for ignoring other features of the Internet (as well as of communication more generally) beyond messagepassing. A prominent example is the way stories and celebrations of digital revolutionaries conveying and amplifying, even helping to organize, uprisings in the Arab Spring (2010-11) were overtaken almost as they occurred by debunking accounts that quickly carried the day. “The revolution will be tweeted,” enthused the web journalist and managing editor of Foreign Policy.8 No, came back the vade mecum of an historian with deep research experience in Egypt,9 it will not. Stories of young bloggers and Facebook revolutionaries10 quickly gave way to second thoughts on how the dynamics of the Internet’s new media fail to prevail against the static inertia of its authoritarian states and societies,11 and think-tank projects were mounted to explain why.12 This is itself a familiar story about new media in the Middle East since television in the 1950s.13 Such indeterminacies partly lie in how analysts and players share views and make the same arguments about media and politics. Players’ adopting analysts’ frames of reference – in effect joining and competing with them – puts analysis in the position of adjudicating players’ applications of the same body of ideas. Conversely, analytical conceptualizations of new media 6 Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies of Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1983). Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Vol. 1, the Rise of the Network Society (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996). p. 500. 8 Blake Hounshell, "The Revolution Will Be Tweeted," Foreign Policy no. 187 (2011). 9 Jon B. Alterman, "The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted," Washington Quarterly 34, no. 4 (2011). 10 Steven Aiello, "The Facebook Revolution: Internet, Social Media, and the Globalization of Conflicts in the Middle East" (MA, Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, 2011). Nadine Chebib and Rabia Minatullah Sohail, "The Reasons Social Media Contributed to 2011 Egyptian Revolution," International Journal of Business Research and Management 2, no. 3 (2011). Gilad Lotan et al., "The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions," International Journal of Communication 5(2011). Jillian C. York, "The Revolutionary Force of Facebook and Twitter," Nieman Reports 65, no. 3 (2011). David M. Faris, "Network Revolts: The "Arab Spring" and Social Media," Politique étrangère 1(2012). 11 Zahera Harb, "Arab Revolutions and the Social Media Effect," Media/Culture 14, no. 2 (2011). Marc Lynch, "After Egypt: The Limits and Promise of Online Challenges to the Authoritarian Arab State," Perspectives on Politics, no. 2 (2011). 12 Sean Aday et al., "Blogs and Bullets Ii: New Media and Conflict after the Arab Spring," in Peaceworks (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2012). A more extended treatment is provided in Mohamed Zayani, Networked Publics and Digital Contention: The Politics of Everyday Life in Tunisia (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 13 Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society in the Middle East (New York: The Free Press, 1958). 7 5 | Rethinking New Media in the Public Sphere (as agency-dispersing and agency-enhancing) become part of local knowledge in a shared search for “impacts” of new media through comparisons with mass media, understood primarily as message-passing and its outcomes. This epistemological problem compounds the ontological one in theorizing about media primarily as message-passing and focusing functionally on outcomes (or want thereof). So, an indeterminacy that creeps into media theory, which is already part of what it purports to explain, meets the over-determination of too few variables in that theory. In anthropology, the epistemological side of this problem has been treated as how to position description where observer and observed use the same terminology, particularly in encounters in contemporary societies that collapse social distance into unmarked transparencies.14 A way out of this conundrum is indicated in Eickelman’s essay on “Mass Higher Education and the Religious Imagination in Contemporary Arab Societies.”15 There, he identified religious imagination in terms of techniques rooted in a two-generation long rise in mass education, and particularly mass higher education, providing a new “intellectual technology” that was applied to thinking about Islam in more objectifying terms that modern education encourages than the hermeneutic techniques of mosque and madrassa. The insight is not that modern education is inherently superior (epistemologically), or inherently secular (ontologically), but that it became more widely spread than the textual literacy of the ‘ulama because mass education reached more people, and success in its type sites encouraged applying it to others, notably religion. His finding was not that modern education led to secularism or diminished interest in religion, the standard interpretation since modernization theory. Quite the contrary: its social effect in that domain showed up and could be traced more immediately in “new ways of knowing and the emerging networks for communication and action produced by mass higher education and contemporary religious activism.”16 This identifies a middle ground between structure and agency that aligns with the view that Habermas came around to, and that Emirbayer and Goodwin endorsed for combining structural with the more contingent data they called “cultural” which bring agency into the analysis.17 Linking “ways of knowing” and “emerging networks for communication and action” helps in grasping that the Internet engages engineering, computer science, telecommunications, and extensive actor-networks that brought those to general publics, to publishing, to imaginaries of “cyberspace,” the arts and creativity. Ways this proceeds are both increasingly pervasive and mostly out of sight for newer users, which is of intense concern to some.18 They are mostly 14 Annelise Riles, The Network inside Out (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). Dale F. Eickelman, "Mass Higher Education and the Religious Imagination in Contemporary Arab Societies," American Ethnologist 19, no. 4 (1992). 16 Ibid. 17 Mustafa Emirbayer and Jeff Goodwin, "Network Analysis, Culture and the Problem of Agency," American Journal of Sociology 99, no. 6 (1994). 18 Milton L. Mueller, Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002); Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance, Information Revolution & Global Politics (Cambridge, MA & London: The MIT Press, 2010). 15 6 | Rethinking New Media in the Public Sphere evanescent as information, transient as performances and variously cast as a “second self,”19 new human spirit,20 or the “new social morphology of our societies.”21 But it is largely as media that the Internet has entered analysis in the Middle East, and then overwhelmingly through comparisons to mass media. In what has become the standard model, the Internet structurally provides a dispersed any-to-any model of communication that functionally provides freer flows and more diverse sources of information. Where mass media are concentrated and one-to-many, the Internet is non-hierarchical, open to anyone, a veritable space of freedom; and that register is enhanced in social media. But how? Testimonies and stories from bloggers, where available,22 typically begin with self-expression and keeping up with friends on-line in a space of their own. For technocrats who introduced it and businessmen who followed them on-line, it was developing services and before that developing the Internet itself.23 These priorities and broader range of activities are elided in comparisons to mass media and in communications theory from the Frankfurt School’s critical focus on production and American sociologists’ on outcomes to Stuart Hall’s semiotics of interpretation. These cast communication primarily as message-passing, and the main problem to be reception, measured as changes in knowledge, attitudes and practices, which has always been problematic. Focusing on message content and reception (registered as behavioral or attitudinal change) overlooks what people are doing even with mass media of broadcasting and publishing.24 A first step away from this limited conception of communication is aligning study of media more closely with its 19 Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984). Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). 21 Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Vol. 1, the Rise of the Network Society. p. 469 22 George Weyman, "Speaking the Unspeakable: Personal Blogs in Egypt," Arab Media & Society, no. 3 (2007), http://www.arabmediasociety.com/topics/index.php?t_article=164&printarticle. David M. Faris, "Revolutions without Revolutionaries? Network Theory, Facebook, and the Egyptian Blogosphere," ibid., no. 4 (2008), http://www.arabmediasociety.com/topics/index.php?t_article=232. Courtney C. Radsch, "Core to Commonplace: The Evolution of Egypt’s Blogosphere," ibid., no. 6, http://www.arabmediasociety.com/?article=692; Samantha M. Shapiro, "Revolution Facebook Style," The New York Times(2009), http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25bloggers-t.html?_r=0. Teresa Pepe, "Autofiction on Screen: SelfRepresentation of an Egyptian "Spinster" in a Literary Blog," Journal of New Media Studies in MENA(2012), http://jnmstudies.com/index.php/current/9-uncategorised/103-autofiction. Amy Aisen Kallander, "From Tunezine to Nhar 3la 3mmar: A Reconsideration of the Role of Bloggers in Tunisia’s Revolution," Arab Media & Society, no. 17 (2013), http://www.arabmediasociety.com/?article=818. Linda Herrera, "Youth and Citizenship in the Digital Age: A View from Egypt," Harvard Educational Review 82, no. 3 (2012). 23 Jon W. Anderson, "Producers and Middle East Internet Technology: Getting Beyond ‘Impacts’," The Middle East Journal 54, no. 3 (2000); "Between Freedom and Coercion: Inside Internet Implantation in the Middle East," in The New Arab Media: Technology, Image and Perception, ed. Majhoob Zweiri and Emma C. Murphy (Reading: Ithaca Press, 2011). 24 Debra Spitulnik, "Mobile Machines and Fluid Audiences: Rethinking Reception through Zambian Radio Culture," in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002); "Thick Context, Deep Epistemology: A Meditation on WideAngle Lenses on Media, Knowledge Production and the Concept of Culture," in Theorizing Media and Practice, ed. Birgit Bräuchler and John Postill (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010). See also Mark Allen Peterson, "'But It Is My Habit to Read the Times': Metaculture and Practice in the Reading of Indian Newspapers," in Theorizing New Media and Practice, ed. Birgit Bräuchler and John Postill (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010). 20 7 | Rethinking New Media in the Public Sphere practices,25 which integrate additional data about how communication can be strategic, improvised, multiply structured, emergent in time, and situated – all of which are treated as externalities of communication conceived as message-passing and its “impacts.” Shifting attention to what actors are doing might introduce more about the speaker into what have been largely hearer-centered theories of communication concerned about getting the message through, and it might work for mass communications to re-center actors in a fuller range of practices. But this still falls short of what people are doing on the Internet and through its various “ways of knowing and emerging networks for communication and action.” Whatever people are doing on, with, or through the Internet – blogging, tweeting, chatting, surfing, hacking, shopping, searching or researching, playing games, writing or reading email, building websites, storing and accessing files, even computing – they are all interacting with and through computer-mediated communication in the forms of programs. With social media, they continue that programming through their “user-contributed content.” Computermediated communication is fundamentally interactive in two senses, or along two dimensions: one of interacting with others through media, which is foregrounded in so-called social media, and another of interacting with those media through manipulation, which includes learning from them about them, applying them to tasks and, in a sense that will be important here, continuing their programming. Common and recurring fears that users might somehow be absorbed – “addicted” is a common metaphor, isolated is another – in a mysterious cyberspace overlook how just the reverse is the case.26 A basic finding about life on-line is that even the most absorbed users do not retreat into cyberspace; they use it to extend their networks on their margins.27 Facebook and Twitter rose to fame in the Arab Spring uprisings and as exemplars of Internet social media that include myriad other programs which turn on user-contributed content from Wikipedia (and Google) to others, such as Friendster, that have fallen by the way. Users 25 Nick Couldry, "Theorizing Media as Practice," in Theorizing Media and Practice, ed. Birgit Bräuchler and John Postill (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010); Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012). 26 N. H. Nie, "Sociability, Interpersonal Relations, and the Internet - Reconciling Conflicting Findings," American Behavioral Scientist 45, no. 3 (2001). Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman, "Long Distance Community in the Network Society: Contact and Support Beyond Netville," ibid. Barry Wellman, "Computer Networks as Social Networks," Science, no. 5537 (2001). 27 Key work by Wellman and colleagues at Toronto – e.g., Hampton and Wellman, "Long Distance Community in the Network Society: Contact and Support Beyond Netville; "Neighboring in Netville: How the Internet Supports Community and Social Capital in a Wired Suburb," City & Community 2, no. 4 (2003); Wellman, "Computer Networks as Social Networks; Barry Wellman and Caroline A. Haythornthwaite, eds., The Internet in Everyday Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). – confirmed and expanded by research from UC-Berkeley’s School of Information. E.g., danah boyd, "Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing Community into Being on Social Network Sites," First Monday, no. 12 (2006); "Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites," in Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, ed. David Buckingham (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008); "Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications," in Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites, ed. Zizi Papacharissi (New York: Routledge, 2010); Mizuko Ito, ed. Hanging out, Messing around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media, The John D. And Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010). 8 | Rethinking New Media in the Public Sphere first engage these and extend their social networks in a process or stages that proceed from lurker to newbie to adept to master and some to celebrity outside the field. They enter this process by learning from each other and peer-mentoring, which proceeds through establishing relations and identity (reputation) with others in the field. The sites and social frames of these activities constitute what Lave and Wegner called “communities of practice,”28 where informal learning proceeds as what they called “legitimate peripheral participation” by contrast to the more didactic routines and regulated attendance of formal teaching. Informal learning includes watching, sharing tips and tricks, and episodic mentoring among actors who come and go. Over time, these forms of participation that they unite as “peripheral” convert lurkers and newbies into adepts. Not to put too fine a point on it, the first form of interaction with and through social media – and, I would argue, with the Internet generally – is learning on it how to use it, which is primarily from others. This fact has typically been elided in thinking about communication as message-passing and, in the Middle East, by focusing on blogging, tweeting and Facebook as political cyber-activism from journalism to mobilizing through social media. Such casual comparisons elide how their practices develop or collapse that development into individual effort. They elide not just how people learn, but how they learn from each other and in what social settings. But not always. In an account of Egyptian bloggers who played roles in the Kefaya and April 6 Youth movements well before the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, Courtney Radsch described the prior emergence of what she called a “blogger elite,” which had grown around experimenting with and networking through blogs and ties among techies ranging from Linux developers to website designers who formed communities of practice through peerlearning, sharing tips and tricks, and informal mentoring.29 From this base, and to it, came activists with backgrounds in Egypt’s long history of labor protests and quasi-parties and others, sharing objections to rising economic inequalities and shrinking opportunities under the Mubarak regime’s marketization policies that benefited only a few. In her arresting phrase, “bloggers became activists and activists became bloggers.” Among the latter, the Muslim Brotherhood built an on-line presence, while an example of the former might be Esraa Abdel Fattah who worked for a DVD publisher and created a Facebook page for the April 6 Youth movement. She had originally joined Facebook to keep up with her friends and then joined groups for fans of Egyptian singers and the national football team as well as others from discussions of the Qur’an to the latest styles. She used the accumulated expertise of this experience to create an April 6 Facebook page with an activist partner, became widely known even among people not using the Internet as the “Facebook girl,” and was arrested. Upon being released from jail and publicly recanting, she was ostracized by political activists who took over the page, changed the password and excluded her from it.30 In other words, a sympathizer brought her technical 28 Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 29 Radsch, "Core to Commonplace: The Evolution of Egypt’s Blogosphere". 30 Shapiro, "Revolution Facebook Style". 9 | Rethinking New Media in the Public Sphere expertise to more politically engaged actors with less of it. For her part, she added another domain to her online activity. This is an example of what sociologists call “weak ties” that sustain one relationship but not many,31 which became apparent when the activists subsequently excluded her from the very Facebook account she had created. By comparison, “strong ties” of close friends-and-family are multi-stranded, such as had come to be the case among Radsch’s blogger elite who had been interacting and collaborating for years on using the Internet from its technological sides to connections with the arts. Two things are worth noting here. First, the initial draw of the Internet is more commonly for personal expression and interacting with friends, including around the technology, than for political expression and activism,32 which more typically come in defense of blogging after police begin arresting bloggers.33 Second, among both techies and non-techies, the first community that forms among bloggers is around blogging as an activity itself.34 In this case, underlying networks of strong-tie nodes linked by weak ties to others coalesced among techies, hackers, bloggers, Linux programmers and open-source software advocates, web-designers, and web-site developers around a “culture of the net” before the Arab Spring, when they provided some of the connective tissue of Radsch’s blogger elites’ and their links to political activists.35 Among them, Augusto Valeriani identified practices of participation, peer-production and “remixing” in overlapping networks forged around “values, behaviors, skills and strategies that define the cultural dimension of the web” and that provided “connective leadership” in the Arab Spring demonstrations.36 The significance of this coalescence, beyond Valeriani’s careful documentation of the network ties, is the reflexive consciousness of a “culture of the web” applicable outside the Web that emerged through interaction on and over these very technologies and built collaborations into trust around expertise and reputations for managing that expertise and those collaborations. Thus, from otherwise lightly organized communities of practice emerge what Christopher Kelty in a study of 31 Mark S. Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties," The American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973). For example, Christine L. Ogan and Kursat Cagiltay, "Confession, Revelation and Storytelling: Patterns of Use on a Popular Turkish Website," New Media & Society 8, no. 5 (2006). Also, Weyman, "Speaking the Unspeakable: Personal Blogs in Egypt". Teresa Pepe (personal communication) makes the same observation about Egyptian bloggers “many Egyptian bloggers actually met online, by reading and linking each other, but then the online community also turned into a real social group that interacts and meets offline. Many young Egyptian, who were intentionally writing about themselves using their real names, used blogs as forms of self-expression but also to join a new social group.” 33 Sune Haugbolle, "From a-Lists to Webtifadas: Developments in the Lebanese Blogosphere 2005-2006," ibid., no. 1, http://www.arabmediasociety.com/?article=40. 34 Tarek Amr, "Three Years Blogging," http://notgr33ndata.blogspot.se/2008/02/three-years-blogging.html; Maha Taki, "Bloggers and the Blogosphere in Lebanon and Syria: Meanings and Activities" (PhD, University of Westminster, 2010). On Lebanese bloggers and their pathways, see Haugbolle, "From a-Lists to Webtifadas: Developments in the Lebanese Blogosphere 2005-2006". And, subsequently, Sarah Jurkiewicz, Blogging in Beirut: An Ethnography of Digital Media Practice (Bielefeld: transcript, 2018). 35 Augusto Valeriani, "Bridges of the Revolution: Linking People, Sharing Information, and Remixing Practices," Sociologica 3(2011). See also John Pollock, "Streetbook: How Egyptian and Tunisian Youth Hacked the Arab Spring," MIT Technology Review (2011), http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/425137/streetbook/. 36 Donatella Della Ratta and Augusto Valeriani, "Remixing the Spring! Connective Leadership and Read-Write Practices in the 2011 Arab Uprisings," CyberOrient: Online Journal of the Virtual Middle East Vol. 6, Issue 1(2012), www.cyberorient.net/article.do?articleid=7763. 32 10 | Rethinking New Media in the Public Sphere open-source software developers called “recursive public spheres.”37 By that, Kelty linked consciousness as a community to working on its means of production – in his case, open-source software – as an explicit alternative to existing regimes – in their case, proprietary-commercial software. The value and pertinence of Kelty’s work goes beyond affirming Valeriani’s “culture of the net” to placing it in a network of specific social relations. Key here is the emergence of self-identification in a community of practice as a community of distinguishing practices, where community emerges out of collaboration that is enacted through that collaboration – more specifically, through practices that unite intellectual technology and the emerging networks of communication and action that convey its practice. Kelty’s recursive public spheres and Valeriani’s networks focused by and on a culture of participation, peer-production, collaboration and remix practices, are strong forms of Lave & Wegner’s communities of practice such as underlay Radsch’s blogger elite. Viewed comparatively, they display an evolution from reference groups (categorical identities shared by people who watch but do not necessarily interact with each other) into communities of practice through interaction (particularly learning and sharing), and on to Kelty’s recursive public spheres that focus consciousness of membership in a group on sharing and actively extending its means of production. What makes Kelty’s the stronger form is that while members of communities of practice come and go and pass from lurker to newbie to adept to master (and some on to celebrities beyond the field), participation in Kelty’s recursive public spheres focuses on sharing the development of its means of production or, in Eickelman’s term, “intellectual technology.” While Kelty is careful to avoid generalizing beyond the case of open software developers, he does aver that the notion could be projected back on the Internet itself, which developed similarly as an alternative to an existing regime of communications in cobbling together its intellectual technology and an intense focus on its means of production.38 That development proceeded from assembling component technologies from multi-user, multi-tasking, networked computing to assembling the cultural surround of finance, regulation and support for the Internet project,39 then extending it from the engineers who created it for their own work and around their collaborative work habits and values to scientists, other academics, the professionals they trained, and the publics those professionals served. How the Internet is interactive. Arguably, the Internet has been interactive from its beginnings, and in three foundational ways. In addition to learning on and through it, the Internet was built to be interactive – specifically, it was built as a collaborative project for other collaboration --and then extended by 37 Christopher Kelty, "Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics," Cultural Anthropology 20, no. 4 (2005); Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 38 For a tracking of that focus, see Robert Braden et al., "Rfc 2555 - 30 Years of Rfcs," ed. Network Working Group (The Internet Society (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2555), April 1999). The process is recounted in a more summary fashion in Barry M. Leiner et al., "A Brief History of the Internet," SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 39, no. 5 (2009). 39 Jeffrey A. Hart, Robert R. Reed, and François Bar, "The Building of the Internet: Implications for the Future of Broadband Networks," Telecommunications Policy 16, no. 8 (1992). Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999). 11 | Rethinking New Media in the Public Sphere programming ever more user behavior into its “stack.”40 It has never been a single technology but always a congeries of technologies, starting with time-sharing, interactive (instead of batch) processing, and networked computing. Its original design incorporated these technologies and added others from signals processing to new software. The creators’ initial purpose was to establish a single, open platform for interaction with distant (and disparate) machines, to which the first addition, email, added interaction between their operators (in the first instance, about the machines). The original concept extended the underlying design of all modern computers as general-purpose machines that could be programmed to do anything to a universal network of (potentially) all machines. This underlying design and its early extensions in newsgroups and listservs for collaboration are largely unknown and irrelevant to users who were introduced to the Internet in its later iteration as the World Wide Web, originally an application for linking research material that morphed into a publication medium through its first native application, the portal. What are today called “social media” were retrospectively conceived as extending the limited interactivity of Web portals to social transactions.41 Among the first but not the first to become famous as specifically social media in this sense were weblogs or blogs, which took the diary form online and made it interactive by adding facilities for reader comments and distribution by links to other blogs and sources of information. Prior to blogs were precursors of Facebook, starting with dating sites that, with Friendster, came to be identified as “social networking,”42 and subsequently Twitter, initially cast as “miniblogging.” While lumped together and with an array of similar programs characterized by “usercontributed content,”43 such as Wikipedia, there are significant differences in how they accumulate and distribute information interactively. Blogs are organized as serial entries (“posts”) that may or may not be accessible to any Internet user but universally include facility for linking to other blogs (as well as to other sources of information) and so may take the form of extended conversations, which typically start with groups of friends. Twitter is both more telegraphic in format and distributed by subscription to topics and “following” those who “tag” them, taking the form of a multi-user game of recognition management.44 Facebook takes an intermediate form of shorter entries accessible to subscribers (‘friends”) who may comment on or simply signal recognition (“likes”) of postings on each other’s sites (“wall”) on which their actions and interactions with others are registered. Each feature user-contributed content, which they share with the interactive production of Wikipedia, and distribution through userconstructed networks (blogroll connections of blogs, friends on Facebook, followers on Twitter) 40 Its engineers conceived and built the Internet as a stack of programs that give those programs access to lower level functions. The base software, TCP/IP, is itself such a stack: it “delivers” telecommunications signals to programming that organizes and sends messages. On those functions are stacked programs for remote login and file transfer that in turn become platforms for adding others. The practical concept becomes reflexive ideology in Web 2.0 developers’ using the World Wide Web as their platform and devising additional ones as platforms to which to attach others that encode “higher” levels of user behavior by weaving those into a web of “social networking” (see Sarah Lacy, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0 (New York: Gotham Books, 2008). 41 Tim O'Reilly, "What Is Web 2.0 - Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software," http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html. 42 boyd, "Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites; danah boyd and Nicole B. Ellison, "Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship," Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (2007). 43 O'Reilly, "What Is Web 2.0 - Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software". 44 Virginia Heffernan, "The Game of Twitter," The New York Times(2011), http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/the-game-of-twitter/. 12 | Rethinking New Media in the Public Sphere that distinguish them from the broadcast distribution of mass and print media. Reception, here, is not just a matter of being in a stream of messages but positive interaction that leads to others with and then through these programs that runs from signaling through more extensive exchanges to collaboration. All based technologically on content-management software back to the Web on which they are “stacked.”. Taking Facebook as the central example and a point of comparison, research has consistently shown that users, and particularly youth, almost never go “on Facebook” alone but almost always with friends and typically to join friends,45 and then selectively extend those nodes through weaker ties to friends of friends or through some elective affinity.46 The result is high interaction, strong-tie cores with weak-tie links to others through individual members, such as the tech-adepts described by Radsch and Valeriani might have with friends in other networks. Likewise with blogs: few attract many readers, and most attract none or vanishingly few on their own.47 Instead, they acquire readers, or at least connections, through links (via blogrolls and RSS feeds) to and from others; so each blog is a node in a network of links, some with densely overlaid (strong) ties marking regular interaction, others of single (weaker) links marking occasional interaction or mere recognition. In either case, weak ties become stronger through regular exchanges that expand a relationship to more people in a node and by connecting to additional subjects. Twitter users likewise choose to follow topics or individual posters and to post to them, which theoretically could take the form of a massive conversation but is more immediately like a strategic game of attracting attention among imagined followers.48 Each differently prioritizes interactions, which users may repurpose or extend. Some examples are the activists that Radsch describes who turned Facebook’s posting personal “news” about “friends” into a bulletin board for political mobilization, the bloggers Valeriani describes who turned ties with digital freedom and human rights organizations into activism,49 or the way in which Twitter along with its visual counterpart, YouTube, was repurposed to pass news to wider audiences that were in the habit of seeking information on them instead of longer-form mass-media platforms.50 This network structure of weak-tie links and strong-tie nodes is robust sociology first developed in studies of job-seeking,51 which found that close friends and family provided less 45 boyd, "Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing Community into Being on Social Network Sites; "Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites; "White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with Myspace and Facebook," in Race after the Internet, ed. Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow‐White (New York: Routledge, 2011). 46 Such elective affinities are what Facebook collects and targets for advertising tailored to its users. For a popular account, see Ben Mezrich, Accidental Billionaires, the Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal (New York: Doubleday, 2009). 47 Clay Shirky, "Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality," in Reformatting Politics: Information Technology and Global Civil Society, ed. Jodi Dean, Jon W. Anderson, and Geert Lovink (New York: Routledge, 2006). 48 For example, Heffernan, "The Game of Twitter". 49 Pollock, "Streetbook: How Egyptian and Tunisian Youth Hacked the Arab Spring". Sheryl Gay Stolberg, "Shy U.S. Intellectual Created Playbook Used in a Revolution," The New York Times, 16 February 2011. 50 An interesting comparison of the communicative properties of blogs’ prominence in articulating senses of grievance to Twitter’s shorter-form for getting out information about demonstrations is in Felix Tusa, "How Social Media Can Shape a Protest Movement: The Cases of Egypt in 2011 and Iran in 2009," Arab Media & Society, no. 17 (2013), http://www.arabmediasociety.com/articles/downloads/20130221104809_Ben_Moussa_Mohamed.pdf. 51 Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties; "The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited," Sociological Theory 1(1983). 13 | Rethinking New Media in the Public Sphere help in finding employment because they essentially shared the same and limited information, while friends of friends and more distant acquaintances, interacting only occasionally and sharing little, had different information.52 Put differently, strong-tie networks are characterized by high informational redundancy – the same thing over and over, as in families – by comparison to weak-tie networks that link bits of information not already shared to dense and more comprehensive strong-tie relations. The significance of this structure is how it distributes information – more affirmation than information in networks of strong ties, with new information entering via weak ties to others. The communicative profile in strong-tie networks comes to resemble ritual that affirms solidarity – it forms rather than informs – while what passes through weak ties is, literally, news. This distinction helps to identify the development of interaction in communities of practice as expansions of single-stranded weak ties into multi-stranded stronger ones. If their stronger forms are recursive public spheres, then the weaker forms are merely reference groups of “people like us” but who do not know or interact with each other to affirm that. Informationally, the significance of weak ties is that people learn something new through them and by shifting from passive to active learning – or, in the digital vernacular, from lurkers to newbies. In a community of practice, it is not the community they first learn about but what the community knows, which they learn through informal peer-learning, mentoring, sharing tips and tricks that may develop into more extended collaborations, which expand weak ties into stronger ones, eventually of a recursive public sphere. Thus, Radsch’s and Valeriani’s data indicate actors who belong to multiple nodes with disparate weak-tie links between them through which new information, skills and learning flow that turned bloggers into activists and activists into bloggers. Valeriani makes the further point that the habitus of such outreach was developed – learned, and improvisationally, rather than formally taught – in tech adepts’ communities of practice that assembled heterogeneous skills and knowledge into collective identities. Such communities may assemble cores of adepts whose continuous and focused interactions forge bonds of familiarity and trust in the form of reputations as well as their shared expertise. Such would be Radsch’s blogger elites, to whom activists loosely connected to them turned for their particular knowledge. Such a community of practice emerges in practice as a hierarchy of insiders, peripherals, passers-by and outsiders who bring weak ties to other nodes that pass which additional information. The currencies of these informal settings are participation, expertise, and cultivating reputation for it, then claims to “universal” values that transcend more specific local values of ontological communities or represent themselves as an underlying “culture of the net.”53 Interactive media provide sites or platforms of this habitus for interacting with media (as objects) and for interacting through media (as subjects). What began in each case as sociologically rather primitive instantiations (engineers’ design parameters for automating information distribution) are broadened by adding higher-level interactions and through continuous learning. What makes them interactive in the first instance is learning programmed 52 They also found, and more controversially, this to be an advantage of the middle class, with more extensive networks of weak ties, while networks among working class people tended more toward strong-tie nodes. 53 Jodi Dean, Jon W. Anderson, and Geert Lovink, "The Post-Democratic Governmentality of Networked Societies," in Reformatting Politics: Information Technology and Global Civil Society, ed. Jodi Dean, Jon W. Anderson, and Geert Lovink (New York: Routledge, 2006). 14 | Rethinking New Media in the Public Sphere routines and facilities, to which sociologist Barry Wellman applied the concept of “affordances” from the field of human-machine interaction for action possibilities designed into machines in preference to stronger conceptions of determination.54 A commonplace of software design is that users typically employ less than the designed capacities of a program and often for purposes not designed into them, such as activist uses of Facebook and YouTube for political mobilization.55 From the Internet’s beginnings, programmers have encoded progressively higher levels of interaction by turning applications, such as the World Wide Web invented for linking information “on the run”56 into platforms for programs engaging additional user-contributed content. Interaction that begins with the machine and moves to its operators continues through their user-contributed content, which is not just about users’ social relations but, in the form of social media, increasingly more of the substance of higher order interaction through machines. The Social Life of Information. If interactions with and through media begin both with learning techniques and in networks formed with them, how does this work? Engineers tend to project outcomes (connection, collaboration, information-seeking) as design features and political analysts to concentrate more on externalities. To square these circles and capture the sort of activity that Radsch characterized as bloggers becoming activists and activists becoming bloggers or Valeriani found in the extensions of heterogenous networks, Lawrence Lessig borrowed the concept of “remix” from music.57 Apart from a post-modern nod to creativity, the concept goes no further than modernist metaphors such as diffusion of innovations (from one place, site or activity to another), favored in political communications studies,58 to link information flows to interactions that convey them. Viewing communication interactively shifts the problem from what messages add to recipients to what is added to move messages through weak tie links into nodes of strong ties where they come to carry additional information. This process is known in linguistic anthropology as “entextualization.” In one of its type sites, Joel Kuipers described it as the establishment of “textual authority,”59 by which he meant that highly situated, deeply contextualized, personal information is progressively recast into more general, more shared, abstract or categorical terms. Examples could include medical diagnosis, or police detective work that assemble bits of disparate information into meaningful units; his site was a process of divination in which a specific individual complaint is successively 54 Barry Wellman, "The Not So Global Village of Netville," in The Internet in Everyday Live, ed. Barry Wellman and Caroline Haythornthwaite (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). 55 Marcin Lewinski and Dima Mohammed, "Deliberate Design or Unintended Consequences: The Argumentative Uses of Facebook During the Arab Spring," Journal of Public Deliberation 8, no. 1 (2012). 56 Tim Berners-Lee and Mark Fischetti, Weaving the Web: The Past, Present and Future of the World Wide Web (London: Orion Business, 1999). 57 Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). 58 A recent example is Philip E. N. Howard, The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam, Oxford Studies in Digital Politics (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 59 Joel Kuipers, Power in Performance: The Creation of Textual Authority in Weyewa Ritual Speech. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). 15 | Rethinking New Media in the Public Sphere recast into a diagnosis, a passage from having to know the context to knowing the code. Its “textual authority” confers what boyd & Ellison identified as the permanence and transparency of information on social network sites where users construct profiles, build their networks, and record comments on each other’s that float free and independent from their original settings.60 What Kuipers points to is not re-interpretation (change of meaning), but change of register from highly contextualized, locally and temporally contingent information to more portable, abstract categories that contain general values and evoke what is at stake. In a specifically media context, Swidler refers to such categories as “anchors” of significance in authoritative representations and enactments.61 Something like the entextualization process that Kuipers located in a step-wise ritual process – its resolution of ambiguities, multiple local meanings and especially conflicts – can be seen also in the refinement of myriad individual grievances that connect diverse single incidents into an authoritative text, master frame, or anchor such as emerged in the Arab Spring demonstrations between December 2010 and February 2011. Between the April 6 movement in support of a workers’ strike in 2008, the Kefaya movement four years earlier, and 2010, accumulating grievances over unemployment, the combination of crony capitalism and shrinking economic prospects, police brutality particularly against bloggers who exposed it, and ire over the prospect of a Mubarak-fils succession filtered through the Egyptian blogosphere and coalesced in a smaller group of authoritative texts that united many single incidents and personal experiences. One was the Facebook page, “We are all Khaled Said,” created in June 2010 to commemorate a blogger who, after posting a video of police misbehavior, was dragged by them from an Internet café and beaten to death. Graphic images were posted and reposted on Facebook pages, YouTube, and blogs that literally put his battered face on what was wrong in Egypt.62 The Facebook page was created by a co-founder of Wikileaks Arabic, Abdel Rahman Mansour, who had brought skills developed as an online reporter for Al-Jazeera and on the website of the popular television preacher, Amr Khaled, and by Wael Ghonim, a Google marketing executive with whom Abdel Rahman worked on the Facebook page for opposition presidential candidate Mohammed El-Baradai.63 Mansour also created another Facebook page, Thawrat Shaab Misr (Egyptian People’s Revolution), in early 2011 to turn a national holiday commemorating the police into more generalized protest against them that, through street demonstrations, coalesced heterogenous activism into a broad, inclusive demand for the end of the regime. Mansour, a media activist since his student days and former adherent of the Muslim Brotherhood, marks these connections explicitly as transitions in his account quoted by Linda Herrera: 60 boyd and Ellison, "Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship." Anne Swidler, "What Anchors Cultural Practices," in The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, ed. Theodore R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr-Cetina, and Elke von Savigny (London & New York: Routledge, 2001). 62 Merlyna Lim, "Life Is Local in the Imagined Global Community: Islam and Politics in the Indonesian Blogosphere," Journal of Media and Religion, 11, no. 3 (2012). 63 Linda Herrera, "Meet Abdelrahman Mansour Who Made 25 January a Date to Remember," Jadaliyya(2013), http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/9772/meet-abdelrahman-mansour-who-made-25-january-a-dat. 61 16 | Rethinking New Media in the Public Sphere I wanted to be part of a broader movement, something bigger than the Brotherhood. I wanted to continue working but not necessarily by belonging to one party or a single organization.64 His example aligns the sociology of network flows with the sociolinguistics of entextualization that connect separate experiences into one: the flows are not or not only of messages from one network to another but of individual bits into shared texts (“memes” in some media theory) that give those individual experiences a shared anchor. This is what Hirschkind detects in the Arab Spring as “a new political language that cuts across the institutional barriers that had until then polarized Egypt’s political terrain,” and developed specifically in the Egyptian blogosphere as “a political language free from the problematic of secularism and fundamentalism that had governed so much of political discourse in the Middle East,” 65 essentially restating Mansour’s point and drawing out its un-spoken implications. Other elements in this particular conjunction in the blogosphere include collaborations that grew among Egyptian and Tunisian bloggers between the fall of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt,66 online and other consultations with the anti-Milosovic Optor youth movement in Serbia, studying social media use in the 2009 Iranian Green Revolution,67 as well as training in non-violent protest tactics allegedly adapted from an American activist,68 which had spread online and as a pamphlet subsequently reproduced in The Atlantic.69 This is far beyond Lessig’s “remix.” Its underlying pattern is passing little local stories (what’s happening to me, now, here) into bigger general ones (what’s happening to us, our time, the world) that acquire the authority of shared meanings to anchor individual experiences in values that unites what is at stake. What seems to happen is entextualization passing through network dynamics where specific, individual experiences (I can’t get a job, afford to get married; a blogger was beaten by the police; the President wants to install his son as successor) congeal in nodes of strong ties that focus on those ties (the police are beating bloggers; the government is un-Islamic; the regime is un-democratic; the economy is failing to generate employment) and feed through weak links between them into a master text that could be shared between them and more widely, as in the slogan, ash-Shab yurid isqat an-Nizam (“The People Demand the End of the Regime!”), that condensed the grievances of demonstrators in Tahrir Square (and in other countries). 64 Ibid. Charles Hirschkind, "From the Blogosphere to the Street: The Role of Social Media in the Egyptian Uprising," ibid., no. 9 February 2011 (2011), http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/599/from-the-blogosphere-to-thestreet_the-role-of-soc. 66 Pollock, "Streetbook: How Egyptian and Tunisian Youth Hacked the Arab Spring"; David D. Kirkpatrick and David E. Sanger, "A Tunisian-Egyptian Link That Shook Arab History," The New York Times(2011), http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/world/middleeast/14egypt-tunisia-protests.html?pagewanted=all. 67 Maryam Ishani, "The Hopeful Network: Meet the Young Cyberactivists Who've Been Planning Egypt's Uprising for Years," Foreign Policy(2011), http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/07/the_hopeful_network?page=full&wp_login_redirect=0. 68 Scott Shane, "Spotlight Again Falls on Web Tools and Change," The New York Times, 29 January 2011; Sheryl Gay Stolberg, "Shy U.S. Intellectual Created Playbook Used in a Revolution," ibid., 16 February. 69 Alexis Madrigal, "The Egyption Activists' Action Plan: Translated," The Atlantic(2011), http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/01/egyptian-activists-action-plan-translated/70388/. 65 17 | Rethinking New Media in the Public Sphere For the middle parts of this process, Ethan Zuckerman applied the term “bridge bloggers” to actors who actively forge such connections,70 who cast their messages in the terms, for instance, of human rights or net-freedom campaigns, or obversely are sought out for moving local experiences into more global categories because they have ties in both.71 In this sense, entextualization may be strategic, actively pursued in a field of contending interpretative performances, as well as a cumulative process of restatement, such as in the intervals between the Kefaya and April 6 movements and those of the Arab Spring. So, we have three analytically distinguishable kinds or sites of entextualization: the ritual process that is Kuipers’ type site, a cumulative process over an extended period of increasing interaction, and a strategic version that is reflexive. These analytical types describe a hierarchy of interactivity that instantiate a public sphere (and stratify participation in it) from the relatively passive (reference groups, lurkers), through the tentative and transient (communities of practice, newbies) to the recursive (extextualization in the hands of master spokespersons) that link the socialization of users to design functions of programs on the one hand and to socializations of their uses into more comprehensive registers on the other. Such progressions underlie incorporation of user-behavior into computer programs, which users further extend with their own programming. That process has been implicit in the Internet from its beginning and has become ever more explicit with new social media. Usercontributed information is not new: all information on the Internet is user-contributed, by design, since its engineers created it for their work. Web portals arrayed it as networks; and social media make the incorporation of user-contributed content both explicit and reflexive in applications that model users’ interactions and invite them to extend the process with more interactions.72 Viewed as process and not as outcome, the sequence begins with learning about and through interactive media and proceeds by extending its uses through what sociologically amount to elective affinities. Sites of these processes are communities of practice, in which information is consolidated into shared understandings. Information in this sense does not diffuse, it coalesces through networks of weak-tie links in strong-tie nodes by entextualizations, which give it denser and more general registers of value that, in network terms, are shared knowledge of individual nodes, by comparison to information that is passed between them. Intermediate conclusions: How do new media expand the public sphere? The formula of new interpretations by new interpreters in new media forging or at least fostering an emerging public sphere was adequate when Internet media and studies of new media in the Middle East and Muslim world were themselves new but increasingly shows its age. It has not kept up with a growing empirical record, not least of sites, nor have comparisons to older mass 70 Ethan Zuckerman, "Meet the Bridgebloggers," Public Choice, no. 1/2 (2008). Zuckerman’s examples were early celebrity bloggers (Hosein Derakshan, Salman Pax), whom he treated as indigenous analysts, but sharing a language and location on-line with those who seek them out – indeed, could seek them out. 72 This is Google’s business model – see Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011) – and a contemporary version of the idea that automating lower level tasks frees operators for higher level ones, whose touchstone expression for computer designers has been the 1945 Atlantic Monthly essay by Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think," http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/. 71 18 | Rethinking New Media in the Public Sphere media overcome their fundamental limitation to viewing communication as outcomes (“impacts”) of the passing of messages. Most fatally, such comparisons engage limited aspects of the Internet, as media, nearly always as political media, and a message-centric view of communication that produces indeterminate results the closer one gets to real social actions. Filling in the outlines of new interpretations, new interpreters, and new media has documented an emerging public sphere but left how it emerges under-developed in theorizing communication primarily as message-passing and the Internet primarily as media. That becomes harder with social media, which foreground an interactivity that was always in the Internet and which social media make plain by shortening the cycles and expanding the scope of interactions through it. Interaction starts with learning and extends through communities of practice that share knowledge through networks of weak ties which pass information and consolidate knowledge in nodes of strong ties that refine it into shared, public understandings. It entails more middle range phenomena such as are highlighted here. First are communities of practice where knowledge is shared through layers of participation by actors who come and go but, unlike reference groups, interact with each other. Theirs is at least partial, part-time or “peripheral” participation, which may scale up to more intensive and reflexive participation central to the purpose of a group such as Kelty found among Linux geeks and may be the case with some blogger networks that become intensely focused on blogging itself. Second are networks of weak ties through which information (knowledge) passes to nodes of strong ties where it is refined into shared understanding. Third is the sociolinguistic process of “entextualization” whereby highly specific and deeply contextualized information is recast into more context-independent or abstracted understandings that can circulate unaided. This entextualization may unfold as a ritual process, or cumulatively over time through increasing interaction, or as a reflexive strategy of turning individual experience and knowledge into social experience and knowledge that is shareable, has general value, expresses identity as a group, and consolidates in symbols. If new interpretations by new interpreters using new media identified the structural transformation of an emerging public sphere in the Middle East and Muslim world, communities of practice, networks of weak ties linking nodes of strong ties, and entextualization provide a clearer picture – and less “interested” account – of how this emergence continues through interaction on and incorporation into the Internet, which projects reference group phenomena into the public sphere. This has two benefits denied to views of the Internet as media and limited to message-passing and agency-enhancement. Both agency and messages are transformed, in a sense of becoming more public but also more reflexively coherent, through normal practices (sharing, abstraction, reflexivity) by which communities of practice grow and entextualization proceeds. Second, bringing these into focus takes advantage of a much enlarged and more diversified descriptive base to look past initial assessments, which were framed primarily as exceptions, to a more normal sociology comparable to what research elsewhere is showing about how the Internet actually shapes the emergence of a public sphere. A remaining question is whether and where the magic of media to extend characteristic forms of interaction in in small groups and networks conveys intimacies and immediacies that similarly scale up. 19 | Rethinking New Media in the Public Sphere References Cited. Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999. Aday, Sean, Henry Farrell, Marc Lynch, John Sides, and Deen Freelon. 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