Protest in the social web: the student movement unibrennt

One example of the social web being an enabler of political protest in Austria is the student movement unibrennt. The grassroots movement started as a collaborative action of civil outrage reacting to bad study conditions at Austrian universities. 400 students of the Academy of Arts in Vienna organized a demonstration that ended in the occupation of the Audimax, the biggest lecture

E-Democracy & E-Participation 137 hall in Vienna. The information out of the Audimax was spread via digital social networks, especially Twitter and Facebook, and soon students of other faculties joined the protest events.

The main lecture halls in several Austrian and, later, German universities were occupied and collaborative communication practices by digital media helped to organise, coordinate and spread information about the events in the lecture halls and protest in the streets. To put this into perspective, one has to be aware that the understanding of political (protest) action in Austria is generally very low: the majority can only imagine participating in petitions; 79% could not imagine occupying a building in 2008 (Friesl et al. 2009, p.211).

In the student protests social relationships online played a crucial role in the spread of information about the events. However, the student protests do not show an equal distribution of active participation within these networks. For example, bloggers, students and journalists are among the most frequent microbloggers in the student protests. Although Twitter users are a minority in Austria, Twitter messages still represent an important sum of public information. 95743 Tweets with “#unibrennt” and “#unsereuni” were posted between 23 October and 31 December 2009 from 9000 accounts. 84.7% of these accounts tweeted less than 10 times within this period of time, 1.4% tweeted more than 100 times (Herwig et al. 2010). These numbers can be explained by the concept of clicktivism, i.e. people feel that they are members of a movement by joining a group or contributing a tweet but it is a core of people that participates most.

However, their impact might go beyond the clicktivism argument. One of the basic success factors of unibrennt can be summarized under “de-lurking”, with lurkers becoming active in the framework of the protest movement. Within unibrennt, both a radically transparent flow of information and low entry barriers for new members, enabling a transformation of roles, can be observed. New members of the collective first participated passively, but they gradually became more active as they became familiar with the norms of the group, that openly passed on information publicly in the community, on the website and in wikis. Other technical tools like live-streams and online demonstration promoted reciprocal exchange and created bonds with those who could not participate on site. Direct feedback could be given via other channels and feedback systems like Twitter walls. The participants engaged into public debate by asking or responding to questions or comments via digital social networks. These communication opportunities added to a high commitment of the participants in the protest.

The tweets with #unibrennt and #unsereuni, Facebook updates and groups, helped to spread information, but also to make students aware of the events and to mobilize them. The most frequently appearing words were “occupied” (orig. besetzt), “today” (orig. heute), “live”, “uni” or

“plenum”. Retweets multiply the effect of information distribution by repeating the same information on a different Twitter account (Herwig et al. 2010). Twitter was basically used to spread information and to mobilise students to take part in protest-related events.. In combination with Facebook-updates personal networks were used to spread information, create solidarity among the students, identify with and actively engage in protest. The Facebook group audimax reached a considerable number of members, 33000 with a total number of 48000 interactions such as wall posts up to December 13 2009. The peak of interactions was on day eight of the protest and then gradually decreased again (Banfield-Mumb 2010).

An interesting factor of the student protests was that the institutionalised mass media only reported about the event after it reached a huge popularity within the social web and could not be ignored anymore (Banfield-Mumb 2010). The news media refer to the student protest with “student protests 2.0” (APA/nachrichten.at 2009), “the revolution is Twittered” (APA/stol.it 2009) and similar slogans. One aim of activists is to seek attention by the news media (Lester & Hutchins 2009) to gain publicity for their cause and influence policy makers. They “have a variety of strategies at hand” (Rucht 2004, p.33) to gain media coverage and mobilize a large number of people. One of

the peaks in Twitter use within the student protests with #unibrennt or #unsereuni was reached during the broadcast of a documentary on the student protests on the Austrian TV-channel ATV out of the occupied lecture hall Audimax (Herwig et al. 2010), i.e. when the discourse about the protest was covered within the public mass media discourse. The news media also criticised the movement with terms such as “flashmob party” and “voodoo-ideology” (Fleischhacker 2009) highlighting lack of program, which was a frequent point of critique towards the student protests.

The critical success factors of the movement can be summarized as follows: The socio-political background of the protest movement is a significant mixture of low political interest, the questioning of democracy as a value and criticism of the political system (Friesl et al. 2009). In particular, the latter provided a fertile ground for the overall criticism of the university’s system we find within the student protests. The usage of web 2.0 tools and online deliberation tools was crucial in the protest. As Papacharissi (2010) suggests all civic actions in contemporary democracies emanate from the locus of a private sphere. She refers to private activities with a public scope like online news-reading, lurking in political conversations or following opinion-leaders’ blogs or tweets. The publicly-oriented activities of the unibrennt movement were also enabled within the locus of a digitally equipped private sphere. The following five aspects contributed to successful mobilisation in the Austrian student protest with the help of web 2.0 tools: low obligation of a voluntary issue-community; the immediate option of connection and disconnection; transparency of internal and external communication; perfect match of the label unibrennt and the logics of social media combined with appropriation of communication channels anchored in everyday life of university students (Maireder & Schwarzenegger 2010). The anti-hierarchical organization structure of the movement in general also supported mobilisation in the social web.

Although the role of the social web in the unibrennt movement was significant in communicating a cause rapidly throughout the whole German speaking university landscape, it can rather be considered as a “SmartMob” (Rheingold 2002) than a sustainable social movement that lead to social change. The important role the social web played especially for information, coordination, mobilisation and communication is not in doubt but as Banfield-Mumb (2010) concludes in his empirical analysis of the student protests, it is hard to see any positive influence on the education system in general. Additionally, decisions were made on-site, in the occupied Audimax lecture hall, which limited the role of online participants in commenting and showing solidarity. To sum up, the movement failed in communicating the results of working groups and the protest in general to decision-makers and in influencing a change in the university structure. Nevertheless, unibrennt managed to provoke an extensive media echo and to establish a brand and organisational infrastructure that has not been observed to this extent before. The proof that young people could put a topic on the political agenda for a long time has shaped the notion of politics significantly for many people.

3. Conclusion

Both, the student protest and the JIKS study show that the spaces to express political identities in digital personal networks, to exchange information and to enhance (counter-)discourse exist. In the following we summarise the findings of this paper related to the concepts discussed and try to give recommendations for political engagement of young people:

Young slactivists and clicktivists: Young people create their identities online and the political is part of their symbolic life worlds they use to form their identity within their personal networks. The dominance of commercial players on the web and thus in young people’s life worlds makes it difficult for critical perspectives to be articulated. So called lurkers, slactivists (Mozorov 2009), clicktivists (White 2010), or sofa activists may not engage into civil disobedience to achieve their goals, they do increase the quantity of people who support a political cause. In particular, the

E-Democracy & E-Participation 139 unibrennt action shows that young people engage in single-issue oriented campaigns. This engagement can support alternative political perspectives in entering the public discourse and show solidarity with a cause or conflict.

Networks, identity and political engagement: Despite the frustration of young people with institutionalised politics, they engage in politics within their life worlds, i.e. by writing in blogs, joining groups or posting comments. Mobilisation for a political cause and political engagement in general includes forms of political participation and collaboration online. Although many euphoric expectations on the political influence of the Internet have not been met, interaction and participation are essential forms of communicating online, also in political issues. However, governments and political parties do not yet adjust to these developments, often trying to tightly control political communication. To engage in discussion with young people in their online worlds, politicians moreover need to take into account the language of young people, their needs and their life worlds — not only in online networks but in general.

Lurking politics: Young people’s activities and life worlds online as a form of expression of political identity can be a precondition for political engagement. The question that remains is how this potential can be transferred into the political arena and how young people can use this potential for influencing social change and, more generally, for bottom-up civic engagement. This means increased grassroots action by young people on the one side and engagement of institutionalised politics on the other side. Although the cases presented display a significant amount of self-centricity (i.e. improving student conditions or discussing rights for young people as identity politics), bottom-up initiatives and grassroots movement are a precondition for democratic actions. As the JIKS study and the unibrennt-action show, the preconditions for employing these technologies for political engagement are there. However, they are still only seen in the context of entertainment and commerce by political institutions.

From subactivism to political engagement: The question is not only how to develop strategies to make digital activism work, but also how to build a bridge between the “subactivism”-level (as described by Bakardjieva 2009) and the institutional layer. Institutionalised politics do not take the huge quantity of clicks, tweets, group-members and in the case of the student protests, people protesting in the streets, seriously. These activities can be seen as traces of political opinion that can only have an impact if they are taken seriously by politicians and other political institutions and organisations. Despite mobilisation of a huge number of university students in Austria and Germany, the unibrennt action resulted in mere noise and did not lead to any significant changes.

Thus, the “subactivism”-level has to be taken seriously by decision-makers to transform this noise into indicators of what young people expect from their representatives.

Educated engagement: One of the biggest challenges of political education is to make use of existing discussions in order to enhance critical reflection in large-scale online activities. Initiative on the institutional and political side to use new technologies to facilitate civic engagement of young people is missing. Social media and collaborative tools are gradually integrated in educational frameworks and school curricula, but media education is not part of the national curricula at the moment. The suggestions of the Future Learning Initiative of 2008 (BMUKK 2008) about integration of digital media into teaching are a first step into the right direction but nation-wide and official implementation is needed.

Civic equity online: Social media can increase civic activity online and politics need to take these new political life worlds seriously since media use is mostly associated with greater involvement in civic activities and higher levels of political awareness (Pasek et al. 2006). Examining an alternative conceptualisation of media literacy is important for the educational system and political players to adjust to changes of expression of political identity of young people in contemporary politics. The successful employment of the social web within the student protests is also related to

the high social and cultural capital of their participants. The results of the JIKS study show that differences in both, political engagement but also digital-media-use prevail along the dominant criteria of socio-demographic differences such as gender and educational level. Additionally, the domination by male participants and lack of female role models in politics is still problematic. Both, on an educational and political level these problems have to be taken seriously to ensure political engagement throughout different groups of young people.

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