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Democracy in the age of viral reality: a media epidemiography of Spain’s indignados movement

Submitted February 2012 to special issue

“Media Ethnography and Public Sphere Engagement”, eds Debra Vidali and Thomas Tufte, Ethnography journal

Dr John Postill

Sheffield Hallam University j.postill@shu.ac.uk

Abstract

The present article draws from fieldwork on the indignados movement in Barcelona (Spain) to propose a new approach to the study of social unrest and protest movements in the digital era: ‘media epidemiography’. This composite of the terms ‘epidemiology’ and ‘ethnography’ is used as a heuristic to address a key research challenge, namely the swiftly evolving techno-political terrain in which popular struggles unfold today. I argue that viral media have played a key role in Spain’s indignados movement, with the microblogging site Twitter as the central site of viral propagation. Protesters have used Twitter – along with other viral platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and blogs – to great effect and in a range of different ways, including as a means of setting the tone and agenda of the 15 May marches, spreading slogans and organisational practices, and offering alternative accounts of the movement from those provided by the mainstream media. I also suggest that these developments may signal the coming of an era in which political reality is strongly shaped by viral contents ‘shared’ by media professionals and amateurs – an age of viral reality. The article ends with a brief discussion of the implications of the emerging techno-political order for the future of representative democracy in Spain and elsewhere, concluding with suggestions for future media epidemiographic research.

Keywords: ethnography, media epidemiography, virals, viral reality, techno-politics, democracy, Spain, indignados, 15-M

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Figure 1. A demonstrator wearing an Anonymous mask and holding a banner that plays on the famous Monty Python sketch “Noboby Expects the Spanish Inquisition”. The use of a hashtag before the term ‘Spanish Revolution’ signals the importance of the microblogging site Twitter to the organisation and spread of the 15 May movement across Spain and internationally. Source: BoingBoing.net: http://www.boingboing.net/assets_mt/2011/05/17/300559476.jpg

Introduction

Reports of recent episodes of social unrest and protest in cities across the Arab world, Europe, North America and other world regions have often pointed at their ‘viral’ nature and speculated on the role played by digital media in their explosive growth (e.g. Almiraat 2011, Cohen 2011). The sociologist Zeynep Tufekci (2011a, 2011b) has described the new media landscape in the Arab world as ‘a game-changer’. The combination of a politicised pan-Arab TV network (Al Jazeera), widely available mobile phones with photo and video capabilities, and the rapid growth of social media since 2009, has created a ‘new media ecology’ that authoritarian regimes are finding very difficult to control. Using an epidemiological idiom, Tufekci argues that until recently repressive governments had been able to ‘quarantine’ pockets of resistance through using force selectively, preventing highly local outbreaks from spreading. However, with the proliferation of portable digital media, autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt were overwhelmed ‘by simultaneous and multi-channel uprisings which spread rapidly and “virally”’ (see also Starbird and Palen forthcoming).

Some work in the United States likewise signals the growing importance of viral contents to politics in democratic countries. Wasik (2009) has described America as a viral culture where countless amateurs experiment with sophisticated media to produce and share ‘nanostories’. This author is pessimistic about the implications for democracy, and sees the emergence of a nanopolitics around trivia that ‘go viral’ but are

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quickly forgotten. For their part Nahon et al (2011) have mapped the spread of presidential election viral videos through the US blogosphere and found important differences in the ability to set the agenda amongst different categories of blog. Previously, Boler (2008) found that bloggers have a stronger sense of community and a greater faith in their ability to influence the mainstream media than ‘tactical media’ artists or viral video producers.

‘Viral communication’, argues Boler, poses a significant methodological challenge, as it raises difficult questions about

tracking the kinds of networks of circulation and forms of communication of viral video (online videos, animations, etc…), whose “effects,” trails, and links are harder to trace [than those of blogs].

In this article I take up this key challenge by laying out a provisional framework and set of methodological strategies for future ethnographic research into the virality of protest. Building on existing anthropological work on cultural and media epidemiology and on recent fieldwork in Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain), I propose a new approach to the study of popular politics in the digital era: ‘media epidemiography’. This is a composite of the terms ‘epidemiology’ and ‘ethnography’ that I shall use as a heuristic to explore the rapidly changing techno-political terrain in which popular struggles unfold today. My main intent is exploratory; I use Spain as an example to explore some of the key logistical and methodological challenges and opportunities open to ethnographers (and indeed other social scientists) embarking on studies of protest movements.

The article opens with a brief account of Spain’s 15-M (or indignados) movement from its inception as a peaceful day of protest on 15 May 2011 through its pandemic growth in subsequent days to more recent events. This is followed by a media epidemiographic sketch of the movement in which I develop four working concepts: campaign virals, viral campaigns, niche virals and sustainable virals. I argue that viral media have played a key role in the movement so far, with Twitter as the central site of viral propagation. As I show below, Spain’s indignados have used Twitter – along with other viral platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and blogs – to great effect and in a range of different ways, including as a means of setting the tone and agenda of the 15 May marches, spreading slogans and organisational practices, and offering alternative accounts of the movement from those provided by the mainstream media.

I suggest that the kind of protests that erupted around Spain and internationally in 2011 may herald the coming of an era in which political reality is strongly shaped by viral contents ‘shared’ by media professionals and amateurs – an age of viral reality. I then briefly discuss what this highly viral media ecology may entail for the future of democracy in Spain and other media-rich countries. Inspired by free software ideals and practices and empowered by new viral tools, I conclude, protesters are gradually ‘hacking’ Spain’s democratic system.

A peaceful protest

Barcelona, 15 May 2011. I arrive at Plaça de Catalunya at around five thirty, half an hour before the scheduled start of the pro-democracy march. It is a beautiful spring afternoon. On approaching the square on foot I notice the leading open-top truck parked by a row of coaches. I make my way to the truck and recognise the demo organisers by

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their yellow T-shirts bearing the slogan ‘Toma la Calle’ (‘Take the Street’). I greet one of them, Arnau, 30, who runs a seminar on digital media and civil society at my host research institute. Arnau and I have often talked about the build-up towards this day – a process he has experienced first-hand as an active participant in Real Democracy Now!, the platform responsible for today’s protests across Spain. He is busy with the onboard laptop, so I say goodbye and head for the square.

As I wander through the centre of the square I see the odd familiar face, mostly people I have met over the past year while conducting research into activism and social media. After a short while I bump into Carlos, a lawyer who specialises in internet cases, and some of his co-marchers, including Joan. Carlos is optimistic about today’s protests which he sees as another milestone in the struggle against a corrupt political class. A few months earlier Carlos and three others launched the platform No Les Votes (‘Don’t Vote For Them’) that called on the Spanish electorate not to vote for any of the three major parties. Joan, a former trade union leader, is not as enthusiastic as Carlos about today’s march, and cannot understand the indignados’ hostility towards the trade union movement.

As we march towards Ciutadella Park I join in the chanting: ‘None of them represent us’, ‘Yes, it can be done’, ‘There’s not enough bread for all these chorizos (thieves)’. Ahead of us, a noisy samba ensemble works the crowd into a mood of joyful indignation. On either side of Via Laietana a bemused motley of locals and tourists watch us pass by; some of them take pictures. Carlos is glued to his smartphone and every now and again updates us on the progress of the protests in Madrid and other major cities. The reports are encouraging, although the mainstream media still refuse to cover the event.

After a couple of hours we reach our destination. Carlos tells me that the protest hashtag is now Twitter’s second most popular topic worldwide. We walk round the truck and convey this information to Arnau who is delighted to hear the good news. A fittingly ‘social media’ way to end my Barcelona fieldwork, I think to myself on the way home to nearby Poblenou. I have no inkling that this is only the preamble to a much larger historical drama.

The Big Bang

In the early hours of 16 May something unexpected happened. A group of some forty protesters decided to set camp at Madrid’s main square, Puerta del Sol, instead of returning to their homes. One of them, a member of the hacker group Isaac Hacksimov, explained later: ‘All we did was a gesture that broke the collective mental block’ (quoted in Sánchez 2011). Fearing that the authorities may evict them, they sent out calls for support via the internet. The first person to join them learned about their action on Twitter.

By the following day their numbers had swollen to 200 and by 20 May there were nearly 30,000 people at the square. This demographic explosion was mirrored online (see traffic figures below). Other cities around Spain followed suit, and the 15-M movement was now a global media event. The encampments rapidly evolved into ‘cities within cities’ governed through popular assemblies and committees. The committees were created around practical needs such as cooking, cleaning, communicating and carrying out actions. Decisions were made through both majority rules vote and consensus. The structure was horizontal, with rotating spokespersons in lieu of leaders.

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Tens of thousands of citizens were thus experimenting with participatory, direct and inclusive forms of democracy at odds with the dominant logic of political representation. Displaying a thorough admixture of utopianism and pragmatism, the new movement drew up a list of concrete demands, including the removal of corrupt politicians from electoral lists, while pursuing revolutionary goals such as giving ‘All power to the People’ (European Revolution 2011).

By mid-June 2011 most encampments were dismantled following arduous consensus-seeking assemblies. The aim was to take the movement from the central squares and streets to the neighbourhoods (barrios), but not without first warning the authorities that protesters ‘know the way back’. Neighbourhood assemblies were created in many localities across Spain, albeit with uneven levels of participation and at times highly localised concerns. Contrary to expectations, the movement continued throughout the summer – traditionally a period of political quietism in Spain - with a series of high-profile actions in defence of vulnerable collectives such as foreign immigrants and victims of evictions. Tongue in cheek, the author Juan José Millás (2011) describes these actions as those of a ‘collective superhero’ who ’materialises wherever an injustice is about to be committed’.

As I write these lines in February 2012, Spain’s indignados have inspired similar protests in the United States, Canada, Britain and many other countries, in what has come to be known as the Occupy movement (Adbusters 2011).

Spanish activists and observers alike are agreed that the 15 May protests were long overdue. The collapse of the housing market in 2008 had left the Spanish economy in a feeble state, with an overall unemployment rate of 45% among young people, with millions more having to survive on low-paid or seasonal jobs. The combination of a political class discredited by a string of corruption cases, an electoral law that perpetuates a two-party system, and the precedent of pro-democracy uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, set the scene for a spring of discontent in Spain (López and Rodríguez 2011).

Media epidemiography

In the introduction I noted that the new coinage ‘media epidemiography’ combines the terms ‘epidemiology’ and ‘ethnography’ as a provocation to think about how we may study ethnographically the media epidemiology of popular protests that ‘go viral’ and morph into new social movements.

Following Dan Sperber (1996), I am using the term ‘epidemiology’ in a neutral sense to refer to the study of the distribution of a given cultural representation within a population - here the distribution of media contents related to the 15-M movement. Sperber’s (1996) ‘epidemiology of representations’ programme seeks to explain human culture by means of the mental and social micro-processes whereby cultural representations (words, songs, poems, images, recipes, etc.) spread throughout a population (see also Boyer 2000, 2001).

Debra Spitulnik’s (1996) work on radio and public culture in postcolonial Zambia complements Sperber’s epidemiological model. Spitulnik asks why some types of radio discourse but not others have spread widely in Zambia. Through the ethnographic example of the phrase ‘Over to you’, which originated in a Zambian radio programme by

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this name, she shows that some discursive items are inherently more ‘detachable’ from their original contexts and reproducible than others. ‘Over to you’ is a form of meta-pragmatic discourse (‘speech about speaking’) that can be more easily transferred to speech situations outside a broadcasting context. During her field research in Zambia, Spitulnik encountered this phrase in a range of contexts.

Most contemporary anthropologists, however, have little time for diffusionist or epidemiological models of human culture (Downey 2008)1. For example, Ingold (2000) contends that to understand human life we must study its embedded sociality and not the alleged diffusion of cultural representations or ‘memes’ whose ontological status is questionable at best. It is for this reason, he contends, that ethnographers rightly focus on social context rather than on ‘transferable content’. The problem with Ingold’s position is that it rests on a false dichotomy. In fact, to understand media-rich societies we have no choice but to consider both situated context and transferable content. Spitulnik’s research demonstrates how certain kinds of radio discourse – or indeed, any other kind of mediated discourse - can be recontextualised beyond the immediate contexts of their reception.

This section is a brief epidemiographic account of the 15-M movement in Spain. My aim is to exemplify some of the potential uses of an epidemiographic approach in the study of digital media and popular uprisings. I do so by means of four working concepts, namely campaign virals, viral campaigns, niche virals and sustainable virals.

Campaign virals

In his bleak account of contemporary America, Bill Wasik (2009) describes how the Web is now awash with sophisticated amateurs vying to be the creators of the next viral video, photograph, or catchphrase. To this end they obsessively monitor the ever changing societal trends through backend statistics provided by their blogs and other platforms and ceaselessly experiment with new tools and contents. America has become a ‘viral culture’ in which stories have an ever decreasing lifespan and political campaigning becomes one long succession of trivial ‘nanostories’ – a societal shift from politics to ‘nanopolitics’ (see also Spitulnik’s [1996] notion of ‘small genres’).

The first part of this portrayal travels well to contemporary Spain. Like Wasik’s American amateurs, Spain’s netizens employ user-friendly statistics to discover which online contents ‘work’ and which do not through a process of trial and error. Estalella (2011) has documented ethnographically the sophisticated handling of audience statistics by Spain’s ‘passionate bloggers’ in 2006 and 2007 – just prior to the explosive uptake of social media sites which have radically reconfigured the Spanish blogosphere. Some of the A-list bloggers discussed by Estalella went on to become early adopters of social media and leading participants in the 15-M movement, taking up the crucial role of bridging older and newer media in the emerging informational ecology.

But Spanish nanopolitics look very different from those in Wasik’s account, which is based on US presidential campaigns. What is striking about 15-M nanostories is how successfully leading activists used Twitter in the build-up towards the 15 May protests across Spain. By means of Twitter hashtags such as #15M or #15mani (#15mdemo), DRY supporters were able not only to rally protesters at short notice but also to set the changing political and emotional tone of the campaigns (@galapita and @hibai 2011).

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The nanostories being shared about specific protests or power abuses may be short-lived, but over time they add up to a powerful sense of common purpose amongst hundreds of thousands of people. Together, they form a grand narrative of popular struggle against a corrupt political and economic order. A key part of Real Democracy Now’s (DRY) strategy prior to the demonstrations was to make the campaign a regular occurrence on Twitter’s ‘trending topics’. Knowing that Twitter’s trending algorithm favours novelty over volume (Cullum 2010), they succeeded by regularly changing the campaign keywords and encouraging followers to retweet the newly agreed hashtag so that it would ‘trend’, thereby reaching a much wider audience2.

Slogans were particularly important to DRY’s success as a galvanising meta-platform. Thus the twin slogans “Real Democracy Now!: we are not commodities in the hands of politicians and bankers” were the negotiated outcome of intense discussion across a range of newly formed platforms in early 2011 (see above). Two main culprits of the country’s profound crisis were singled out in these exchanges: politicians and bankers. To leading participants, the two-part slogan both captured Spain’s current predicament and helped to unite the disparate platforms (Elola 2011).

In the weeks prior to the 15 May protests, DRY became a manner of ‘meme factory’ by encouraging ordinary citizens to submit slogans both face-to-face and via their official website. The best of these submissions were then remediated onto small placards and other technical supports, resulting in scores of potentially viral slogans making their appearance on the streets and squares of Spain on 15 May.

Whilst some of these slogans rapidly ‘caught on’ (e.g. the just mentioned “We are not commodities …”) others rapidly faded into oblivion, unable to withstand the powerful selective pressures at work in a highly viral media ecology3. What to me and other DRY observers appeared at the time to be a cacophony of messages turned out to be a strategy perfectly suited to Spain’s present mediascape. This is an increasingly democratised and ‘flattened’ landscape in which activists, bloggers, hackers, journalists, politicians, intellectuals, celebs and countless ordinary citizens strive to spread (or ‘share’) virals in competition and cooperation with one another4.

Media epidemiographers can make a contribution to this research area by being selective and tracking a manageable set of virals, as indeed do research participants struggling to keep abreast of a fast-moving campaign. As always in ethnographic research, the guiding principle is ‘follow the locals’ – in this case by tracking their navigation of a changing mediascape teeming with virals. In addition to conducting synchronous participant observations, the media epidemiographer can reconstruct the main stages of a media pandemic by revisiting the key sites of viral production, mutation and propagation. In the case of the 15-M movement, these sites include campaigners’ meme factories, public spaces such as streets and squares, and key websites, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, blogs and news sites.

For example, one could revisit the 15 May demonstration presented in the ethnographic vignette with epidemiological questions in mind, using materials freely available on YouTube, Flickr and other sites to gain a situated understanding of how the main slogans were used on the day. One could also request information from protesters about the main slogans that they recall from that day, and later present them with the materials to elicit further data. Additionally, and taking our cue from Carlos’ close

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attention to Twitter throughout the march, we could interview leading campaigners about their viral strategy prior to and on 15 May, e.g. on how they went about ‘playing the algorithm’ so that the campaign would become a global trending topic on Twitter.

Viral campaigns

If a campaign viral can be defined as a campaign-related item (e.g. a slogan, a photograph, a video) that becomes popular ‘by circulating quickly from person to person, especially [via digital media]’5, a viral campaign can be said to be a campaign that achieves popularity by spreading from person to person, especially by digital means. Following the 16 May encampment at Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square and the failed attempt by the authorities to dismantle it, the 15-M campaign itself ‘went viral’, that is, it experienced exponential growth in a matter of days, as detailed below.

What started as carefully planned and executed day of protest on 15 May mutated in a few days into both a mass movement and a global media event. The following list is but a partial inventory of the media forms that contributed to the information/action pandemic:

Web forums, e.g. Burbuja.info had 17,000 posts by 20 May Blogs, e.g. top blogger Ignacio Escolar’s received 10,000 visits per hour Collaborative documents such as manifestos, press releases and directories Pedagogical materials on Spain’s electoral system Analogic versions of digital media forms, e.g. post-it tweets on square kiosks Cartoons published online as well in print form Mainstream and alternative radio phone-ins Citizen photography, including Flickr group Spanish Revolution Videoclips, e.g. 40-second aerial view of Puerta del Sol by an independent media

company viewed 275,000 times in less than 24 hours Live streaming by small alternative media Aggregators and link recommendation sites, especially Meneame, experienced

unprecedented traffic growth Facebook – by 10 June the DRY Facebook group alone had 400,000 members Twitter users linked to 15-M numbered just over 2,000 users on 25 April and

4,544 users on 15 May; by 22 May this figure had expanded tenfold to 45,731. DRY had over 94,000 followers by 22 August6.

What are we to make of this media explosion? What is the causal relationship between viral media usage and the birth of a new mass movement out of a day of protest? Unlike their counterparts in more repressive countries, Spain’s journalists, bloggers and microbloggers are in principle free to report on the protests without risking their lives7, yet the mainstream media are still in the hands of powerful interests with strong ties to the country’s ruling class. Like their North African brethren, pro-democracy activists in Spain chose to build the protest’s momentum through Tahrir-like occupations in order to attract mass media attention8. Overwhelmed by the speed and scale of the square occupations, Zapatero’s government was never in a position to set the media agenda, not even by the government-controlled broadcaster RTVE. Once the information/action stream had turned into a cascade (cf. Tufekci 2011a) and protesters were gathering in

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their hundreds of thousands across the country, there was little the Spanish government could do to stem the tide of mobilisations.

A media epidemiographic reconstruction of the 15-M ‘Big Bang’ would add context and nuance to the impressive statistics on the huge rise and diversification of media usage (see Borge-Holthoefer 2011). One important set of issues that ethnographers can document is the experience of living through a media pandemic. What was it like to contribute to the birth of a mass protest movement? What part did different virals (slogans, videos, photographs, news reports, etc.) play in those experiences? How did participants cope with the viral overload? How did they decide which viral media platforms (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr), if any, to rely on for their information/action? Were there any turning points or epiphanies, and can they be explained epidemiographically?

To address this last question, let me briefly recount my own experience as a participant researcher at Plaça de Catalunya, in Barcelona, during the first days of the occupation. On arriving I could barely recognise it as the same square that I had known only a few days earlier at the start of the 15 May march. The square had metamorphosed into a bustling urban settlement filled with people, stalls, signs and tents. After perambulating the square, I sat on a kerb next to an amateur film-maker at work. Passers-by were invited to sit in front of a camera and adlib about the historic events they were living through.

I still recall vividly the strong sense of connection to the strangers I spoke to during that fleeting moment, namely the Portuguese film-maker, a local activist from an anti-eviction platform, an old-age pensioner and a West African immigrant. Under normal circumstances – say, on an underground train – we would have found no reason to talk to one another, but the present situation was anything but normal. The 15-M movement had brought us together, and the sense of ‘contextual fellowship’ (Rapport and Amit 2002:5) cutting across divides of age, class and race was very powerful. This was a textbook moment of Turnerian liminality and anti-structure, a time in which the city’s socio-political conventions were being held in abeyance (see Juris 2008: 138-9).

We could describe this moment as the return of the politically dead (myself included) to Spain’s streets and squares, which were now crowded with ‘political zombies’. Many participants later reported a range of psychosomatic reactions such as goose bumps (carne de gallina) or tears of joy. I felt as if a switch had been turned on, a gestalt switch, and I had now awakened to a new political reality. I was no longer merely a participant observer of the movement, I was the movement. From that moment onwards, virals such as #takethesquare or #Iam15M (#yosoy15M) acquired for me – and countless other ‘converts’ – a very different meaning; they became integral to the new paradigm that now organises our emic understanding of Spain’s political reality. As Jeff Juris (2008: 156) has argued of anti-corporate globalisation actions and mobilisations, these episodes

generate intense emotions, which prepare activist bodies for action….[M]ass mobilizations produce their effects by transforming embodied feelings into affective solidarity (my emphasis).

These affect-laden ‘episodic memories’ render visible to the media epidemiographer the main faultlines running through an emergent movement such as 15-M. In my case, the

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epiphany just described allowed me to distinguish between people who believe in the illusio of the ‘games’ played in the 15-M field of endeavour (Bourdieu 1996) and those who have maintained a critical or antagonistic distance from the movement - a distinction between believers, sceptics and nonbelievers that shapes the circulation of viral contents related to the protests. To extend Juris’ point, affective solidarity prepares activist bodies not only for action on the ground, but also for the viral propagation of the movement through the means at their disposal.

Niche virals

In our fascination with the more successful campaign virals and with the explosive growth of certain campaigns, we should not lose sight of more thinly distributed media contents. Anderson’s (2006) renowned concept of ‘the long tail’ is pertinent here. This author argues that modern economies are gradually moving away from a focus on a small number of goods and services that are ranked and celebrated as ‘hits’ (e.g. bestselling books or DVDs) and towards ‘a huge number of niches in the tail’ (Anderson n.d.). In the present digital era when storage and distribution costs are practically nil, many niche products and services are becoming economically viable, as Amazon.com discovered long ago.

Applying this insight to the study of social unrest opens a broad avenue of epidemiographic investigation, e.g. through interviews with participants about their recollection of particular media contents related to the movement. For example, in the early days of the movement a friend ‘shared’ with me via Facebook a link to a Guardian video report about the Spanish Revolution. The video included footage of a ten-year old boy addressing the crowds gathered at Puerta del Sol in Madrid. I happen to know the boy and his family, so I sent a link of the video to his mother via email, along with a congratulatory note. I assume that his mother in turn forwarded the hyperlink to friends and family.

Although this video did not go viral, but it nevertheless holds special significance for those of us who know the young speaker. It is reasonable to suppose that millions of Spaniards will have likewise shared digital contents related to the 15-M movement that will never enjoy media fame. Yet this long tail of 15-M propaganda is likely to be substantial both in quantity and in its cumulative significance throughout Spain. The fact that millions of Spaniards began to avidly share media contents of a political nature in May 2011 is a mass phenomenon worthy of attention, not least on account of the low public visibility of niche materials in a digitised culture that celebrates viral ‘hits’9.

Sustainable virals

Some years ago, following research among the Iban of Sarawak, in Malaysian Borneo, I coined the term ‘sustainable propaganda’ to refer to those propagated representations that have become ‘part of the culture’ (Postill 2006). Of course, 15-M propagandists have had far less time than Malaysia’s politicians to spread their ideals and practices, but some sustainable contents are already in evidence. These include terms such as ’15-M’, indignados, or acampadas (encampments), slogans like ‘Real democracy now!’ and pragmatic devices such as turn-taking by spokespersons (as opposed to leaders) at press conferences and other public presentations.

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What are the factors that contribute to the long-term survival of certain items of civic or political propaganda but not others? A shortlist would include repeated exposure, relevance to participants10, truthfulness, intriguing nature, aesthetic value, opinion leader backing, and cross-media reinforcement.

As I found in Sarawak, propaganda is more likely to ‘stick’ when it has demonstrable empirical support, e.g. finding employment after completing school or university, as promised by Malaysia’s state propagandists (Postill 2006). Similarly, in the 15-M case the idea that ‘another world is possible’ has been lent support by numerous actions in which ordinary citizens have joined forces to protect vulnerable people from arbitrary abuses of power, their efforts being documented and disseminated via digital media. The status quo may remain in place, but 15-M participants have ample evidence of the emergence of new techno-political practices that presage – or so many intuit – a more robust civil society intent on changing the existing political system.

Another likely factor in the stickiness of a mediated representation is whether or not people find it intriguing. In this regard, it is worth reflecting on the success of ‘Democracia real ya! as one of the defining slogans of the indignados movement across Spain. Although further research is required on this matter, this slogan appears to possess both inherent detachability and reproducibility – to use Spitulnik’s terms. Whilst some competing rallying slogans are equally ingenious, it is only ‘Real democracy now!’ that possesses Sperber’s (1996) ‘relevant mystery’ quality, i.e. this is a slogan that invites interrogation whilst eluding any final explanation. During fieldwork I participated in eager discussions about what the notion of ‘real democracy’ actually meant. Often criticised for its vagueness, it is in fact its semantic openness that makes this slogan an ideal motto for a broad-based movement that brings together highly disparate actors.

A media epidemiographic study of a protest movement would retrace the career of enduring representations through key sites of viral production and dissemination, e.g. campaign meetings, blogs, hashtags, street actions, and so on. It is not sufficient to establish the inherent attractiveness of a popular discursive item, we must also study the techno-political contexts in which it was born and propagated by human agents competing and cooperating to set the movement’s agenda.

Distributed democracy

The literature on the relationship between new media technologies, political protest and democracy is voluminous and cannot be surveyed here (see Loader and Mercea 2012). Of particular relevance to the present case study are recurrent debates about the role of social media to pro-democracy protest movements in Europe, the Arab World, and most recently in connection to the global Occupy movement.

On one side of the debate there are those who, like Shirky (2009), are optimistic about the emancipatory potential of social media with its greatly lowered financial and labour costs for collective action in comparison with previous technologies. On the other side stand scholars such as Morozov (2011) who are highly sceptical of these claims. Rather than advance democracy and social justice, they counter, the Internet ultimately strengthens the hand of repressive regimes such as Iran and China and of powerful transnational corporations. Other scholars have sought a middle path. For example, Hands (2010) prefers to eschew media controversies of the ‘Twitter revolution’ kind

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(see, e.g. Gladwell 2010) and regards digital media as being integral to protests rather than as extraneous technologies impacting on a dormant civil society.

For the social movements scholar della Porta (2011) the indignados movement is

an attempt to create high quality discursive democracy, recognising the equal rights of all (not only delegates and experts) to speak (and to be respected) in a public and plural space, open to discussion and deliberation …

This is an intriguing remark about the democratic possibilities opened up by the indignados’ assemblies. However, there is more to the 15-M movement than this Habermasian portrait. I wish to suggest that the democratic potential of the movement lies both in its deliberative and in its distributed (or viral) nature. So to keywords such as Tahrir, popular assembly, consensus, or deliberative democracy I would add Iceland, wiki, copy-paste-modify-share, work in progress, democracy 2.0 and distributed democracy. In other words, I am suggesting that Spain’s indignados are collectively ‘hacking’ their democracy, and that virally distributed practices and contents are integral to this process.

To be sure, Egypt’s Tahrir Square was greatly inspiring to Spain’s demonstrators. Yet when envisioning a more hopeful future 15-M activists look North – not towards Bonn, Paris or Brussels as a previous Spanish generation did, but rather to Reykjavik. Iceland is widely regarded as having set an example when popular mobilisations in 2009 led to the dissolution of Parliament and fresh elections, after a financial collapse that citizens blamed on their politicians and bankers (Sanz Loroño 2011). Icelanders’ current use of Facebook and other web platforms to ‘crowdsource’ a new Constitution is now being emulated by 15-M supporters in Spain. ‘When we grow up we want to be Icelandic!’ was one of the slogans chanted by demonstrators (Seco 2011).

Both the Internet and the square are central tropes in the 15-M imaginary. Participants reject any separation between online and offline, or between the digital and the analogic. They see these two spheres as mutually constitutive and emphasise the ‘horizontal’ nature of communicative flows across internet and co-present spaces. To quote two prominent activists:

The face-to-face assemblies at each of the encampments are essential. Not only for logistical reasons but because within them, through the committees, both daily and mid-term plans are laid out. They are primarily a massive, transparent exercise in direct democracy. Yet the direction (el sentit) is created mostly on Twitter. Hashtags serve not only to organise the debate but also to set the collective mood (@galapita and @hibai 2011).

These participants stress the importance of Twitter to democratic participation across a flattened, networked media terrain in which ‘politicisation is omnipresent’ (@zzzinc 2011). Borrowing from the subculture of free software, influential activists promote a non-ideological, pragmatic approach to sharing, improving and propagating the movement in the ‘network society’. The roots of this strategy can be traced to the anti-corporate globalisation movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and especially to its focus on the network as both a metaphor and an organising principle. Following

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anthropological fieldwork in Barcelona, Jeff Juris (2008: 285) contends that internet-savvy activists regard the network as ‘an emerging political and cultural ideal’ characterised by ‘open access, free and open circulation of information, self-management, and decentralized coordination through diversity and difference’. In this hacker spirit, citizens are encouraged to participate through whichever technologies and activities suit their interests and capabilities, including corporate viral media such as Facebook or Twitter – at least until free platforms can be developed (@galapita and @hibai 2011).

Responding to what they regard as the popular misconception that social media trivialise political activism (e.g. Gladwell 2010, Morozov 2011), these activists argue that the explosion of user-generated contents around the 15-M movement cannot be dismissed as mere ‘noise’. Rather it is a way of breaking mainstream media’s hegemony over the power to communicate (@galapita and @hibai 2011, see also Juris 2008: 270-4).

Participants will often employ epidemiological metaphors such as ‘viral’, ‘contagion’, ‘infection’ or ‘meme’ – many originating in digital culture (see Senabre 2011). Thus in a late August 2011 retweet about the planned 15 October protests, a DRY coordinator wrote: ‘#15o infects [contagia] and proliferates a global effect of solidarity, justice, dignity and freedom’. Around the same time, a fellow DRY activist tweeted: “Viral action to 83 members of #parliament: 30,936 tweets saying #iwanttovote and 23,792 with #referendum Let’s send more”.

15-M activists inhabit a dynamic media ecology in which their digital paths frequently cross those of journalists, politicians, intellectuals and other public figures, with Twitter as the central arena. Two tweets by the American journalist Jeff Sharlet aimed at New York City indignados refer to a different local struggle, but they capture well the symbiotic relationship between mainstream journalists and 15-M activists, including its viral nature:

1. Reporters aren't conspiratorial, #takewallstreet, they're lazy. Make them--and us--talk about you. Don't be prima donnas.

2. I love u, #takewallstreet, but quit yr "media blackout" gripes. Instead, make media. Tweet worth retweeting. Viral some vids. Tell stories.

Conclusion

In his anthropological study of the free software movement, Chris Kelty (2008) concludes that this movement signals a global reconfiguration of power/knowledge relations that goes well beyond the field of software design. This shift rests on the C21 idea of knowledge as living and in flux rather than final or static, and on the technical ease with which changes to a text can now be made and shared ‘in real time’ (2008: 280). However, adds Kelty, the diffusion and ‘modulation’ of free software principles and practices to other fields will take time, particularly in conservative fields such as academia with in-built defence mechanisms.

Spain’s indignados and their overseas comrades are modulating the free software subculture in potentially revolutionary ways by virally expanding the space of techno-

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political practice and political engagement. The movement’s massively distributed hacker ideals and practices demonstrates the power of real-time, open collaborations amongst like-minded citizens. Ironically, this colossal political experiment in open/free culture has been greatly aided by the widespread use of proprietary platforms such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter, as well as by mainstream media such as radio, television and the press.

A media epidemiographic perspective can help us gauge the implications of these developments for the future of representative democracy in the age of viral reality. It can do so in number of ways. First, this approach can shed light on the complex articulations between co-present assemblies and online exchanges via Twitter and other platforms. We have just reported claims about the inseparability of these domains as well as inklings about their specific affordances (e.g. the idea that Twitter is where the collective mood is created via hahstags). These claims need to be substantiated through multi-sited ethnographic research that pays careful attention to the selective uses of viral and non-viral contents across settings, both online and offline. Second, a media epidemiographic approach can track the spread and appropriation of digital contents across the porous media professional vs. amateur divide. Of particular importance here are the viral practices of interstitial agents such as bloggers, intellectuals and celebrities who act as ‘new mediators’ and articulators of the movement’s various media worlds. Finally, this research strategy can help with the urgent need to rethink our models of public discourse and democratic participation by highlighting the importance of ephemeral nanostories and other ‘small genres’ (Spitulnik 1996).

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Notes

1 The origins of this neglect – at least within British social anthropology – lie in the rejection of historical explanations by Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown in the inter-War period and their advocacy of fieldwork as the discipline’s paradigmatic method (Postill 2006: 12). 2 Accusations that Twitter censors or manipulates its trending topics have circulated widely in Occupy and 15-M circles and added weight to arguments about the need to further develop free/open social media platforms (Albright 2011). 3 In one early poll by the online newspaper 20 Minutos (2011), the top three slogans voted by readers were, in loose translation: ‘There is not enough bread for all these chorizos [slang for thieves]’, ‘The bank takes it all, but I’m not playing ball’ (La banca siempre gana, y no me da la gana) and ‘PSOE and PP, the same pile of shit’ (PSOE y PP, la misma mierda es). A full explication of the vetting procedures and uneven spread of different 15-M slogans shall have to await a future study. 4 This does not mean, of course, that there are no significant differentials of status and influence among the myriad ‘horizontal’ media producers. Thus a social-network analysis of Twitter posts found that 10% of Twitter users who took part in propagating the 15-M movement online generated half the messages. These prolific users included spokespersons for the main encampments, A-list bloggers, media celebrities and political parties (Universidad de Zaragoza 2011).

5 Adapted from Dictionary.com’s definition of ‘viral’, see http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/viral

6See Borge-Holthoefer et al. (2011), European Revolution (2011), Rodriguez (2011), and Senabre (2011).

7 It is worth noting that Spain’s riot police have often resorted to brutal tactics in order to intimidate protestors into submission, alas to little effect (Roos 2011a). 8 Nanabhay and Farmanfarmaian (2011) argue that the Egyptian uprisings created a ‘media spectacular’ that globalised the physical space of Tahrir square through both social media and mainstream broadcasting. 9 A well-known, fundraising version of this phenomenon is Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign in which a long tail of small donations of under $100 each generated 90% of the record $28 million raised in January alone (Catone 2008).

10 In their now classic application of frame analysis to social movements, Snow and Benford (1988) argue that social movements have a much greater chance of success if the framing of the struggle is relevant to participants’ ‘phenomenological world’.