Green Wave Briefs No. 1

July 2009

A human look inside the Web Ecology of the 2009 Iran Election Protests

…Because people make change possible The following report briefs on what is multiply known as the “Where is My Vote,” “Sea of Green,” “Green Wave” and the “Neda” movement, are a preliminary analysis of what is perhaps, one the largest, densest and most communicatively prolific distributed smart mobs in human history. The purpose of the analysis provided is to shed light on exactly how and why people not only

distributed, but also acted on, in the words of Howard Rheingold, “first-hand reports, shocking images and videos that got out to the world in near real-time via Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.” As Rheingold accurately suggests, the uniquely constituted and voluminous stream of information sharing and related social action related to Iran’s election aftermath is, an “historical precedent."

Continued on Methods Methods and data sources used to study the communication

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Anonymity of Subjects A statement of research subject rights and observed protocols.

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Green Wave Brief No. 1 Protest by Proxy: Inside an Organic Tactical Response of the Green Wave…

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Green Wave Briefs

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Green Wave Briefs No. I

Anonymity of Subjects

Social scientists are beholden to a code of ethics and what follows copiously upholds the protocols of sociology and anthropology. All of the raw data gathered here is entirely public, and at the time that it was posted in the digiverse, could be captured by anyone with an Internet connection. Nonetheless, anonymity has been accorded to all of the users whose actions and practices are documented here. Some pseudonyms given to users may be recognizable to those who’ve been immersed in the #iranelection conversation online. Further, all of the Twitter, YT, and FaceBook feeds, the personal yet public blog sites, and the open websites that this analysis is based on are available to anyone. Despite this, we believe that without explicit releases and an approved IRB, it would be both unethical and misguided to publish in one place, what would effectively constitute a comprehensive name index of key actors in the Green Wave/ Where is My Vote/ movement.

In order to trace, in a whole systems manner, the communication ecology of the Green Wave, multiple types of information and communication platforms were studied. By type these are:

Primary social sharing sites: Facebook, Twitter, Hi5, Flickr, and YouTube.

Secondary application sources: TweetDeck, TweetGrid, Twazzup, Twhirl, Seeismic Desktop, FriendFeed (aggregator), UberTweet, Tweetie, Twitpic, HootSuite, Visible Tweets, and TwitterFox.

Satellite broadcast news networks: BBC, CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews, Al Jazeera.

Online newspapers and magazines: Washington Post, Huffington Post, The Atlantic, Time, The New York Times, The UK Guardian, Le Monde, and the English edition of Al-Ahram.

News Feeds: AP, Reuters, and SkyGrid.

Independent Media Sites: Tehran Bureau, YekIran, Mashable, AlternativePress, Anonymous Iran, Revolutionary Road.

Cumulatively, between June13th and July 3rd, data was gathered from 217 unique web sites and content analysis was conducted on 57 of them. Approximately 71 hours were spent participating in and following discursive streams – or communications between people – generated in the aftermath of the Iranian elections. Another 43 hours were logged following three different types of individual user feeds found on Twitter and Facebook (people streaming from inside Iran, Iranians streaming outside of Iran, and non-Iranians streaming outside of Iran). Over 3,117 screen shots were captured and provided a source of documentation essential for the reflective content analysis of communication flows that these reports required.

This research covers the globalized communication ecology of the Green Wave. It does not cover the local communication ecology that is playing out within Iran. One exceedingly important distinction between the global and the Iran based local ecologies of the Green Wave is the role of cell phones. While hard data on the number of SMSs the first days, let alone the number of photos and videos taken with cells is hard to come by, it is evident that the front line tool on the ground for mass information management was cellphones. Perhaps in the months ahead people with such data will offer insights into the on the ground technology tools used to support coordinated action.

Methods

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Green Wave Brief No. 1

In the first hours of demonstration, while people inside of Iran were creating spontaneous and dense protests, the Iranian government launched already emplaced tactical responses. The government, like any nation-state with a treasury, accessed existing procedures for militarized, theocratic, and technologic responses. Within hours of the first post-election announcement protests, swarms of police were sent to manage street demonstrators while behind closed doors officials gathered at tables to make key decisions. The coordination of a response effort among protestors was starkly less robust in terms of their capabilities for centralized spitfire decision-making and subsequent mobilization of assets.

What happened on June 13th, the eruption of publicly voiced dissent, may have been the fruition of something many had long hoped for, but it was nonetheless decidedly unexpected. When the wave of protest reached critical mass nearing nightfall, locales throughout Iran found their streets lit up with burning motorcycles and flares; as the epic sounds of chanting chains washed over rooftops and balconies. That first nite, there was no full-fledged “Where Is My Vote Movement” and there certainly was no official movement headquarters. Though many turned to Mousavi for the party’s official position on the results, the need to respond across party affiliation was evident from the start - as was the diverse constitution

Organic Tactical Offensives & Responses

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of the Iranian crowds that ultimately stood up for civil liberties in their country. Like all spontaneous smart mobs facing down established power structures, participants in the Iran election protests had to identify assets and establish ad-hoc procedures in the moment. The strategies and procedures that emerged to carry out protests and ignite a global movement are Organic Tactical Offensives & Responses. The capacity of smart mobs to generate and execute Organic Tactical Offensives & Responses relies on three key features: a crowd willing to receive and act on information, technology adoptions and adaptations, and individuals able to take on exceptional responsibilities.

The use of web proxies to keep communication flowing is one example of an Organic Tactical Response used by protesters. We will use the Protest by Proxy example to illustrate some features of how the Green Wave smart mob functioned and what its core values are.

Shutting down phone service in certain areas and stepping up Internet filters was a tactic used by the Iranian government from the first afternoon. The move to shut off the voice of Iranians and silence information about events on the ground, far from quieting

dissenters, provoked a well spring of new supporters willing and ready to give their time and skills to advance the cause of Iranian democracy. The “issue” global watchers got familiar with on the afternoon of the 13th was fair and transparent elections. The smart mob’s first global participants were, thus largely attached to the cause of Iranian democracy specific to voting rights. When news spread globally that the Iranian government had begun denying its citizens access to tech’d out communication flows to shut down dissent, the issue of censorship and questions of civil liberties were put into play. Waves of new globally based supporters joined what was variously being called the “Green Wave” and the “Sea of Green” movement, specifically to support Iranians’ access to communication flows. While many members of the crowd that arrived out of concern for civil liberties were sympathetic to the egregious violation of “stolen elections” it was the everyday (rather than event/election based) right to free speech that prompted this contingent of the smart mob into action. The Iranian government’s efforts to quell communication resulted in inspiring legions of technology savvy people to contribute their abilities to countering the government’s actions against transparent democracy. As waves of people with web

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based skill sets joined the cause, technology indebted tactics like the use of web proxies for getting around the Iranian government’s censorship measures were quickly put in place and circulated widely to the Green Wave’s distributed smart mob participants.

Individuals willing to take on extraordinary responsibilities turned their home pages into proxy information stations. The how tos and what to dos on these proxy station pages were utilized by people, who in many instances had never set up a web proxy before. Others who already knew how to set up proxies used the proxy stations as central locations to safely input new proxy addresses by the dozens on a daily basis. While these actions were happening, information links on proxies and the need to get them set up was Tweeted over and over again throughout the days.

Initially, people were urged in the most direct terms to set up proxies and provide the information to Iranians. The simplicity of the statement worked well for dissemination via twitter’s 140 character limits, but the problems with posting proxies publicly became rapidly apparent. New Instructional tweets linked to proxy station pages with directions for securely exchanging proxy addresses were being sent around. Meanwhile older tweets calling urgently for new proxies to be posted were still circulating. This prompted a stream of Directive tweets updating users to not publicly post addresses. When already publicly posted proxies began to be shut down or compromised another batch of tweets began circulating this time directing Iranians not to use publicly posted addresses.

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By the end of the first week of protests, the smart mob’s Organic Tactical Response measures had put into place a streamlined system employing twitter, twitter applications, individual homepages, web proxy software, and multi-sited servers.

These pieces were used in concert to consistently alert people globally about the need for proxies and to directly link Iranian users to the supporter generated proxies. The functional structure of the Protest by Proxy tactic has broad and somewhat stunning implications. Here we’ll look at briefly at specific aspects of

how the tactic was carried out and consider some of the behaviours and shared values that make Organic Tactical Responses possible in dynamic globally distributed smart mobs.

Re-circuiting Content Expectations

Tactical ownership of publicly available messages circulating in a distributed smart mob are indicative of a cogent “sticky” mob with high functionality and therefore an expansive capacity for action. In a vibrant actionable smart mob’s communication ecology, what you need to know and what you ought to be doing bear frequent repeating.

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In traditional mass media the information attached to repetition (the kind of content that gets repeated) is normatively applied to the sensational, the dramatic, and the provocative. In a smart mob’s organic (user generated) media stream, sensationalisms and provocations need constant refreshing. The items that get repeated over sustained periods in a smart mob’s mediatised sphere (or discursive web), are often the most matter of fact, even at times mundane, items of information.

In the first days after the publicly captured globally witnessed death by shooting of Neda Soltan on June 20th, the event, with its horrific and sensationally inhumane moments, was distributed massively and intensively in traditional and web 8.0 media spheres around

the world. During those days in which information on Neda proliferated, another stream of older content continued circulating in the Green Wave. This other stream was the tactic based flow of content related to setting up and distributing proxies for use by people in Iran. Less than a week out from the terrible moment of Neda Soltan’s death, mainstream global media had largely moved on from the story. While in the still prolific media web of Iran’s election aftermath and its expansive distributed smart mob, references to Neda have not disappeared they have lessened and they’ve altered character. To a degree those prolific “Horrible/Terrible/Shocking” links to the raw event of her death so voluminous in the beginning, have been superseded by quieter

statements of homage in the form of photoware slideshows, edited QuickTime movies and auto play power points which rely not on sensationalism so much as the humble life of a woman juxtaposed against the unjust and undeniably unnecessary murder that ended her life. Though Neda has by no means been forgotten, she has been replaced in the Green Wave’s headline news feed.

As of this writing, headline news within the Green Wave is focused on updates relating the conditions in various prisons, the reality of prisoner executions, and the unknowable for now, implications of clerical maneuverings and power plays said to be occurring at meetings in Qom. Amidst these headline updates the stream of content on Proxy by Protest has steadily continued.

On July 6, 2009, mainstream media audiences around the world were collectively sighing, grumbling and outright complaining about the repetitive nature of Michael Jackson “news updates” still gobbling up airtime a week after the King of Pop’s unexpected death. At the same time on July 6, 2009, the Green Wave’s audience members were going on approximately three weeks of regularly seeing “Pls RT: Proxies needed,” “ppl in Iran NEED Tor info 2 access internet safely,” and “Donate bandwidth. #iranelection PLS RT.” It is

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definitely true that people who use the #iranelection hashtag in manners deemed inappropriate are roundly criticized by conversants and there is also a great deal of public debate on the kinds of information and response avenues that should be paid attention to. But there has never once been a publicly posted response comment or tweet, to the effect of “enough with proxies already? Can I get some new news?” This is because, in a smart mob news is not judged based solely on its sensationalism or its date; news is judged based on its capacity to further the purposes of the collective.

We might think of the repeatable information items that stream through the discursive web of a distributed smart mob as a kind of omnipresent ticker like the ones found in Times square or on the bottom television screens.

In the regularly scheduled programming world of mainstream media, the ticker serves as the instant update space while the main screen is the space of repeats. In the organically and therefore often spontaneously coalescing sphere of the smart mob there is no regularly scheduled programming – which is to say the primary news space is taken up by “instant updates.” Rather than the latest news, the “ticker” content provides mobbers with repeated news specifically intended to act as a consistent source of actionable information.

From its very inception, the smart mob is aware of itself as a spread out organism with many parts. Whether the distance is between persons in a city or people between nations, the mob collective recognizes a. its fundamental feature of potential disconnection and b. its essential function of engendering connectivity.

Groups organized around business, government, and education, have in common participant pools whose members have agreed to a form of social contract. That peculiar contract, supposes a kind of connectivity and consequently the fundamental feature of how such groups understand themselves is thus as “already” connected. The function of these kinds of groups is in part, to manage the outcome of an already established or taken for granted connectedness (which yet comes with a set of tacit and explicit agreements on rules of behaviour as well as clear, sometimes magnum opus like explanations of expected modes of action to be taken over a long duration by the socially contracted participants). By contrast, a distributed smart mob like the Green Wave, comes into being through an urgent or flash point decision to forge connections that don’t already exist

The participant pool signs up with an awareness that rather than being taken for granted, proliferating connectivity between participants, is a core part of the collectivitys’ fundamental function. In other words the production that a distributed smart mob is concerned with is not limited as it is in existing institutional forms to material production. This mass consciousness capable of generating action on local and global levels, assumes that part of its reason for existence and consequently one of its primary production modes, is the initiation, expansion and reproducibility of people based connections.

Given that a successful, globally distributed, and dense smart mob will necessarily have new participants constantly joining, it is clear why it’s essential that a healthy portion of the communication stream offers up repetitive information. The purpose of the tickering stream

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is not to draw in new participants (in the way that traditional media uses sensationalized repeats of Updates to lure viewers and spike their ratings)– that’s what the primary and instantaneous updates are for.

The ticker, or repeat stream is a vital part of the distributed smart mob’s communication ecology. It serves to inform people on how to participate and provides people with immediate ways to do just that – participate via action. The key here is that spectatorship is not this audience’s modus operandi –Vive Ut Vivus, however is.

Directives: “Do Not RT or Use Proxies posted on Twitter.” This directive began circulating in mid-June and as of early July is still in daily circulation on #iranelection micro blogs feeding in real time. The directive informational never gets stale, because new participants are entering the discussion everyday and because older information on publicly posting proxies is still floating around. Repeated throughout any given day (so far) in the #iranelection’s content stream, the directive “Do Not Use” reinforces the rules of engagement. It publicly clarifies for all existing and incoming participants how to take effective action by defining what not to do. What needs to be done – generating proxies – is refined into a procedure with operating rules. People are directed in part, by being given clear constraints on action: Don’t just set up a proxy and throw it into virtual domains with no anonymity and all too much traceability.

Leftover and Long-term warnings are

indicative of what is in many respects a mildly unfathomable genius evident in the operating structure of a healthy smart mob’s communication ecology. In everyday life, most of the warnings that we need in order to function have been told to us many times, but they are not necessarily repeated multiple times a day everyday. “Do not Run this Red Light,” for example, might appear on the landscape in the form of a warning about fines posted on a government sponsored sign. But no one’s sending around sms’s to their social network with repetitive directives like “Do Not Run Red Lights. Pls RT.” If we compare the growth of consciousness of a smart mob for a moment to the development of consciousness in an individual, the use of daily repetitive warning information should be normatively identified with early to mid learning stages. As toddlers, children, adolescents, and young adults are enculturated or “learned” in the demands and dangers of their particular society, they go through age specific periods of receiving warning directives: “Don’t put that in your mouth,” “Don’t touch that, it’s {hot/dangerous/breakable/off-limits}.”

In the smart mob’s development, the content of repetitive directions is not age specific, but context specific. The Green Wave’s equivalent to “That’s fire! Don’t touch,” which was and is “Do not post proxies publicly it’s dangerous” is indicative of how a healthy distributed smart mob acts on an awareness that a portion of its participant pool is necessarily always in the early stages of membership and therefore new to learning the rules of engagement.

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In the Green Wave’s discursive web, the use of warnings repeated over extended durations exemplifies a communication ecology in which there is an ongoing need in the dispersed crowd, to a. prevent and/or handle misinformation about actions and strategic tactics and b. attend the introductory education of new comers on discouraged and/or dangerous modes of action. These survival requirements are deftly managed through decentralized, but repetitive information flows.

Instructions are another kind of omnipresent ‘tickering’ information in the Green Wave’s communication ecology. Instructional information is again a type of content that is by no means sensational and is by all means mundane in the way that all “how to” and “what to do” lists have an aura of mundaneity. As in Directionals like warnings, instructional repeat items are a consequence of the distributed smart mob’s inherent understanding of itself as an organism that must constantly forge new points of social connectivity in order to survive and thrive. To give a better sense of how this is critically different from institutional contexts, imagine a school in which a teacher has to assume that everyday some members of her class will leave and new participants will arrive. Some students will have been there from the

beginning and return everyday while others will float in and out of the classroom at will whenever their interest is re-piqued. In her methods of instruction, the teacher of this randomly populated classroom has to give every student space and time to participate in the group’s productions, which in the classroom are intellectual. We might also apply this example of an almost hobo like pool of participants to the functioning of a factory. How would such an enterprise ever manage to produce anything in any consistent manner? Yet in the context of a distributed smart mob, it is precisely the intense influx of a shifting participant pool that signals their viability.

Returning to the case of proxies, instructional links on “how to” set them up and how to securely give people access to the addresses are now a common part of everyday content in the Green Wave’s web ecology. Though the purpose of these repeatedly distributed Instructions remains unchanged, the specific protocols have evolved. Changes in the protocols for generating and providing proxies in the short first three weeks of Iran’s election aftermath, pose one of the clearest possible examples of the degree to which smart mobs are necessarily sentient organisms not just capable of learning, but capable of rapid adaptive learning.

At the macro level we might ask; What are the implications for the future role of distributed smart mobs in geo-political power struggles if the hyper evolution of their organic consciousness when activated specifically for direct political action, has shown itself capable of spontaneously and craftily developing communicative habits and tactical protocols with a speed and aptitude that easily surpasses the bureaucratic constraints imposed on the tactical adaptivity of militarized states?

On the micro or individual level, we might ask more immediately; Do the habits that mobbers employ to maintain participation in the organic wired mass transcend the organism’s life cycle? In a distributed smart mob whose membership reaches the millions as the Green Wave’s has so far, what are the individuals’ spillover effects? What are the kinds of everyday alterations in consciousness and in ‘habitual’ practices incurred by the experience of acting and learning in a collective whose production of “everyday” community is an invigorated engagement with decentralized, adaptive, hyper-flexible, and targeted action?

Does the man in Iowa or the woman in New Zealand, who just last week learned how to set up a proxy server or gifted space

on their blog site to news updates on the Iran election aftermath, simply slip back after a few week or months to taking in streams of mainstream media each day that are not linked to calls or instructional means for taking any form of action? History would seem to suggest that the answer is yes. People called into extraordinary action and therefore thrown into the heady disequilibrium of acquiring new practices, tend to reintegrate themselves into the emplaced norms of practice when the event (war, disaster, etc.) is over. Still, there is a difference in that the tools and implements used in today’s extraordinary events are no longer limited to extraordinary status themselves. The catalyst for change (or differentially realized outcomes), as it always is when it comes to human evolution, is marked by the nature of the tools we are using.

The primary tools of the distributed smart mob are embedded in everyday life in a way that they have never been for any form of crowd before in human history. What then are the broader socio-cultural transformations afoot when millions of people have a spontaneous encounter in which exerting various amounts of interest and energy on micro levels produces, before our very eyes, macro-global effects?

11 Green Wave Briefs No. I

Implications of Organic Tactical Offensives & Responses

Green Wave Briefs are researched & prepared by Dr. Bahíyyih Maroon. Each brief is covered by a Creative Commons License. Works may be cited and copied with appropriate reference to authorship.

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Green Wave Briefs No. 1