The Human Rights Paradox: Universality and Its Discontents

7. The Aporias of New Technologies for Human Rights Activism

Part III New Horizons  Introduction In the arena of human rights politics, we are currently witnessing the confluence of two major developments. On the one hand, global civil society is continuing to expand and thicken across the world, an essential component of which are the webs of social movements and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) increasingly utilizing discourses of human rights or explicitly identifying as human rights based institutions. Hence, advocacy grounded in the denunciation of the specific, local manifestations of injustices and mass violations of universal socioeconomic and civil-political rights, or yet again, in struggles to protect and locally realize universal notions of global justice, has become a defining characteristic of civil societies at the national and transnational scales (Falk 2000; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Kurasawa 2007; LSE 2001).1 On the other hand, the consolidation of the Internet and, more specifically, the emergence and ubiquity of Web 2.0 and mobile technologies—namely, socalled social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube accessed via computers and smartphones—have contributed to redefining how human rights activism is practiced today, above all because of the distinctively and properly social features of social media: their interactivity and dialogical character (which contrasts with the top-down, unidirectional structure of the conventional 177 7 The Aporias of New Technologies for Human Rights Activism fuyuki kurasawa  broadcast paradigm); their user-generated content; their institutional configuration as decentralized and frequently self-organized networks; the instantaneity of the circulation of information among users, due to their digital and even viral nature; and their integration into portable devices, which are themselves employed as tools mediating social interactions (Burgess and Green 2009; Shirky 2008; Surman and Reilly 2003). Similarly, these technologies sustain the paradox of universality and specificity discussed in this book, for events filtered through social media need to be rooted in local circumstances to gain traction globally (specificity of circumstance tending to increase online audience engagement). Yet these events simultaneously require such global engagement in order to be considered newsworthy at the local level; by going viral, a local situation covered through social media becomes validated as significant to its original public.2 The interface of these two tendencies produces what can be termed “representational activism,” forms of visually based practices of bearing witness to human rights violations or struggles, which emphasize the recording, broadcasting via the Internet, and publicizing through social media of material documenting such violations or struggles in the form of still or moving images (photographs, maps, graphics, illustrations, as well as video footage) that circulate in national and global civil societies. For representational activism, such material performs two principal functions. First, in a more formalized sense, it serves as a device of legal prosecution, since it is frequently introduced as evidence against perpetrators in international courts and tribunals, and thus officially sanctioned as admissible by such institutions.3 Second, in an informal manner, this same material can operate as a tool of denunciation in public spheres, helping to mobilize public opinion against certain situations or in support of particular demands through concerted human rights campaigns aimed at moral and political suasion of states, private corporations, and international organizations.4 Beyond the realm of human rights sensu stricto, the effects of social media on political activism have generated much academic and popular debate. For heuristic purposes, we can regroup literature into two salient tendencies that structure the terms of such debate: techno-idealism and its skeptical counterpart . Techno-idealists have put forth three sorts of claims. First, they argue that cyberactivism opens new forms of and avenues for politics, which offer considerable advantages when compared to previous technologies of political communication. According to them, social media enables self-organization, the coordination of action or of a concerted campaign among activists and concerned citizens without the need for large-scale organizational structures or formal institutional mechanisms. Due to the speed at which information 178 F u y u k i K u r a s a w a travels through them, Web 2.0 technologies also permit the rapid mobilization of publics, with almost-instantaneous responses to emerging events or situations , or yet again, quick adaptation to changing circumstances (including a change in tactics). The techno-idealist paradigm asserts that cyberactivism introduces the possibility of more effective, “results-driven” modes of political struggle, for it makes possible targeted campaigns tailored for specific issues and directed toward particular causes, or the targeting of a...