by Cory Barker
This space of flows is important, and as Philip N. Howard and Malcolm R. Parks note, “there is a connection between technology diffusion, the use of digital media, and political change. But it is complex and contingent.”21 Of course, we should be wary of overstating the importance of digital communication technologies. As Zeynep Tufekci and Christopher Wilson have argued in their study of the Egyptian protests, “Nearly half of those in our sample reported that they had first heard about the Tahrir Square demonstrations through face-to-face communication,” while Facebook accounted for 28 percent of meaningful communications, and only 1 percent cited texting, e-mail, or Twitter. Interpersonal communication, for Tufekci and Wilson, continues to be a dominant and affective means of communication.22 Merlyna Lim pushes back on the label of “Facebook revolution” to stress the relationship between online activism and those who work to promote it, arguing “the power of networked individuals and groups who toppled [the] Mubarak presidency cannot be separated from the power of social media that facilitated the formation and the expansion of the networks themselves.”23
One of the most-cited instances that sparked the Egyptian revolution was Asmaa Mahfouz’s January 18 Facebook vlog, which was later uploaded to YouTube and subsequently spread through social networks and other forms of virtual sharing. Mahfouz’s video makes clear that the Internet can spread social revolution in profoundly new ways. As if mirroring the event it represents, so too does The Square spread digitally—not only is it viewed through Netflix or through illegal torrent downloads, but information about it is also shared, liked, retweeted, and posted across a number of social media platforms. Much as the documentary itself attempts to raise consciousness about the events in Egypt, so too do the tools of social media allow viewers and users to promote the documentary through social media networks.
Henry Jenkins’s ongoing work on online participatory culture is instructive for demarcating and tracing the implications of media’s spreadability. As opposed to media distribution, which may send a media text through one channel and in one form, the idea of spreadability allows an object to be changed and appropriated for a number of contexts.24 This complicates how we conceive of viewing The Square, as it is ostensibly only “available” on Netflix yet also downloadable through torrents; it is both distributed and spread. As Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green assert, “This shift from distribution to circulation signals a movement toward a more participatory model of culture, one which sees the public … as people who are shaping, sharing, reframing, and remixing media content” in new ways.25 While The Square has not been “remixed”—users have not yet reedited its digital images—it exists, like many political documentaries, to be spread.
Spreadability is, then, “the potential—both technical and cultural—for audiences to share content for their purposes,” where sharing is amplified by social media platforms that emphasize items like “the embed codes that YouTube provides, which make it easier to spread videos across the Internet, and encouraging access points to that content in a variety of places.”26 The aim of spreadability, if it circulates through enough channels, is to move “audiences from peripheral awareness to active engagement.”27 Beyond acts of re-circulating, spreadable media allows users to become participatory and active in ways that range from sharing and clicking hyperlinks to moving into actual physical spaces.28 The move from awareness to engagement is thus analogous to the movement between online and offline spaces. Joseph Turow has nuanced the importance of the hyperlink by calling attention to its connections to corporate tracking and other modes of monitoring that entail the “industrialization” of the link by quantifying clicks and shares for things like advertising.29
The notion of spreadability relies on the human capacity to spread media through hyperlinks, clicks, shares, and other emergent forms of digital communications tools that connect the Internet. This stands as a sharp contrast to another oft-deployed metaphor of digital culture, virality, which for Jussi Parikka says, “expresses such key tendencies of network culture as communication, self-reproduction, transmission, and de- and reterritorializing movement.”30 Drawing on Steven Shaviro, Parikka contends, “Selfhood is increasingly depicted as an information pattern, where the ‘individual’ becomes merely a host of parasitic invasion by information capitalist patterns of repetition.”31 If media spreadability envisions a potential for subjects to create communities through communicating meaningful media to each other, this model of virality sees digital culture as wholly disempowering, where the self gradually disappears. That is to say, a debate about the terms used to describe how media and selfhood work in digital culture is also a debate about what the self can do in a politically empowering way. As much as media circulation can spread in newly democratic ways, so too is it controlled at corporate and policy levels in ways that significantly effect how we might use it socially and, importantly, democratically.
Netflix’s content cannot be freely circulated. Although users can give passwords to each other or implore other Netflix users to seek out particular texts—not to mention circumventing Netflix entirely through illegal downloading—it still strives to control the flow of spread and circulation. When the content is political, both its movement through space and the barriers to its spreadability take on political dimensions. User decisions to engage The Square, similarly, become political, such that “audiences play an active role in ‘spreading’ content rather than serving as passive carriers of viral media: their … actions determine what gets valued.”32 Spreadability, then, is a crucial step of participatory culture, where “the erosion of traditional boundaries,” such as those between “mere” fans and “political” activists, becomes central.33 Even as this boundary is unsettled by digital distribution and the ability to circulate media images, texts, and ideas, Netflix and The Square are still somewhat positioned in a traditional model of media delivery—on-demand, certainly, but nevertheless a form of controlled consumption, to borrow Lefebvre’s phrase.34
Digital inequalities have social consequences for spreadability’s actual capacity to enact grassroots political activism—to enact movement across different kinds of space. As Jenkins, Ford, and Green note, spreadability “has made it easier for grassroots communities to circulate content than ever before, yet the requirements of skills and literacies, not to mention access to technologies, are not evenly distributed across the population.”35 This call for media literacy harkens back to Warschauer’s analysis, and has also been at the heart of the Egyptian revolution and other global protests’ efforts to generate international attention and conversation about their work. If “acts of circulation shape both the cultural and political landscape in significant ways,” then The Square generates even more complex problems; its circulation is not tied to an explicit call for political action, but to a documentary whose ostensible goals are to teach, inform, and enlighten. American viewers, to use one hypothetical example, can draw parallels between Egypt’s situation and Occupy Wall Street—or any other extant or nascent activist movements—potentially using the film as a template for their own forms of activism. It is not enough to merely discuss the mobility and fluidity of media; we must strive to understand where it circulates and to whom.
At the heart of this discussion is a question of how we might consider being at a computer a form of activism, and whether or not the consumption and spread of media texts is a kind of user engaged, politically motivated, and ultimately effective way of raising consciousness, shaping discourse, and—hopefully—altering social or political landscapes. To put it another way, “an individual who ‘productively’ responds to one media property, brand, or cause may be a ‘passive’ listener to many others; activity and passivity are not permanent descriptions of any individual.”36 Certainly, Netflix’s efforts at controlled consumption attempt to structure certain modes of activity of access. Ganaele Langlois has similarly argued that despite the democratic potential of online participatory practices, we must also attend to notable cultural p
aradoxes; namely, we must “identify processes of governance” that articulate humans, technologies, and processes to each other to render the sense of stability in online social environments.37
Michel de Certeau’s distinction between uses and tactics, where the former is imposed by some kind of power structure and the latter represents how users actually act within that structure, is useful here.38 The models of governance Langlois identifies fit into the ideological structures that in some way determine how media spread and are used. In contrast to spreadable media, Rita Raley invokes the term “tactical media” to define “the aesthetic and critical practices that have specifically emerged out of, and in direct response to, both the post-industrial society and neoliberal globalization.”39 Raley looks at more politicized “digital art practices” to consider how new media technologies have created a space for digital artists to mobilize their politics. Tactical media then “signifies the intervention and disruption of a dominant semiotic regime,” drawing on de Certeau’s sense of how users navigate an imposed structure.40 Tactical media operates briefly—its use is not protracted—and there are strongly ambivalent questions about whether this kind of political work can affect broad social transformations; de Certeau argues, “There are no proffered fantasies of radical systemic change: it exists as a possibility within the realm of the imagination—another technology of simulation—but it requires collective action.”41 As de Certeau further claims, tactics give up what they win; they offer “mobility, to be sure, but a mobility that must accept the chance offerings of the moment.”42 Raley’s analysis speaks to how art and media operate as critiques that might create sparks leading to social transformations. Different from the consciousness-raising projects of shareable and spreadable media, where education and ideas are often prized, these are more radical and politically subversive works that aesthetically, politically, and ideologically challenge the hegemonic constructs of neoliberalism. They offer “a more fluid, extensive, and thereby more powerful set of art-activist practices.”43
Raley’s work on political performativity may seem counterintuitive in a discussion of The Square. She establishes, however, a crucial lens for what it means to make media that spreads. The Square was not explicitly produced as a text to be circulated digitally—it initially premiered at Sundance and Netflix bought distribution rights after several festival screenings. In a sense, The Square’s relatively conventional aesthetic and structure may mark it as not pushing the politicized bounds of Raley’s tactical media model. I want to argue the act of digital distribution itself is a political performance. Marking it as such fosters connections between the Egyptians shown watching Facebook and YouTube videos in the diegesis and the viewer watching The Square from a laptop or tablet from a number of geo-locations. The potential links between these two subjects—film viewer and diegetic video watcher—point to the hope for this kind of media to continue tactical proliferation. That is to say, the film envisions a world where tactics do not give up what they win, but can have broader transformative impacts.
Beyond the hopeful, tactical conceptions of spreadable media favored by scholars like Jenkins and Raley, Evgeny Morozov’s concept of “slacktivism” provides a useful counterpoint to the potential bridges between online and offline space. “Slacktivism” is the “digital sibling” of activism—a way of engaging causes that “makes online activists feel useful and important while having preciously little political impact.”44 Slacktivism is online activism that cannot—for any number of reasons—bridge into offline space; it cannot enact “real” social change. Morozov takes technological determinism to task, noting the actual effects of technology—especially in relation to their ability to empower or liberate the individual user—“were often antithetical to the objectives their inventors were originally pursuing.”45 The quick satisfactions slacktivism offer gets in the way of “risky, deep, and authentic … commitments.”46 The danger, then, is that the bridge between online and offline space remains forever unbuilt.
The promotional material for The Square heavily favors the offline spaces of protest, while also favoring Netflix’s position as an online streaming service rather than the tensions between online and offline activism in the protests themselves. The official trailer, released on YouTube one month before the film’s premiere, does not include any mention of social media, although there are several shots—including the trailer’s final shot—taken from amateur video cameras. Much of the posters and images circulated online and elsewhere featured the tagline “The people demand the downfall of the regime,” focusing on the revolutionary thematics of the film. The day of the Oscar nominations—one day before the film’s release—Netflix took to its social media accounts to usher a new tagline: “Oscar nominated today, streaming tomorrow.” This sort of rhetoric reframes the documentary towards the availability of on-demand culture and the promises of media circulation.
The promotion of The Square across social media platforms supports Netflix’s desired strategy of using social media to encourage product consumption, but taglines like “Oscar nominated today, streaming tomorrow” can also suggest Netflix rather cynically co-opted the political power of circulation for capitalistic gain. This view omits any kind of political empowerment that may come as a direct or residual effect of consuming and sharing this media. One of participatory culture’s many goals might be understood to be the creation of new channels that instill a more democratic media culture and, in turn, a more democratic political culture. In a discussion between Nico Carpentier and Henry Jenkins on this democratic potential, Carpentier suggests, “Democracy and participatory culture will always be unrealized…. There will always be struggle, there will always be contestation.”47 Democracy and participatory culture are dual ideals, but for Carpentier, this utopian thrust is part of what gives them their power. He implores us to realize the impossibilities of this culture without straying from its immense potential: “Participation allows for the performance of democracy, which is deemed an important component of the social in itself.”48
The production of The Square also reveals a participatory, democratic ethos. Shot by an Egyptian and with the help of Egyptian subjects, the film serves in part as a model for what this mode of on-the-ground, localized independent filmmaking might accomplish in representing social revolution. David MacDougal’s emphasis on creating empowered subject voices, and Thomas Waugh’s concept of a “committed documentary” that works with politically motivated communities are two crucial intersections from the field of documentary studies that again emphasize the importance of individual voices in creating politically powerful representations.49 In The Square, Noujaim’s filming is as much a part of the revolution as she is an observer of that revolution. She further constructs subjectivities by screening portions of her film to revolutionaries throughout her editing process and incorporating their responses; in her words, “What the film does … is it humanizes the struggle of Egyptians and really shows what the human story was behind those scenes.”50 Her work with her community constructs civic media as representing and aiming to inspire particular forms of political action. The goal of this distribution strategy is to actively circulate “a greater diversity of perspectives” and, in turn, “motivate participation in the political process.”51 As the site of distribution, Netflix subscribers could—through the educative aims of something like The Square—work towards better policy decisions for social equality when given civic opportunities. In short, beyond its desire to be spread and shared in order to educate, this documentary has a tactical aim.
The Square in the Rectangle
As it has acquired social and political documentaries, Netflix increasingly functions as an archive that can spread socially progressive political ideologies. Tryon’s work thinks both about digital deliveries and circulations of media writ large as well as Netflix as a specific entity bound up in the wider web of cultural engagement digital circulation engenders. As he argues, digital delivery is both a promise of “ubiqu
itous access,” but also instills a more individualized mode of consumption, where film-going in particular loses its social import.52 Tryon introduces “platform mobility” and “resistant mobilities” as two disparate ways to understand how texts circulate in digital space. In platform mobility, “it’s not just texts that circulate. So do screens,” and viewers can seamlessly “move” media across devices, creating an “individualized, fragmented, and empowered media consumer” who makes her own pathways through the media she selects.53 While Tryon’s discussion of platform mobility nuances the relationship between online and offline spaces—especially as online media can “move” through or inhabit increasingly more offline spaces—he importantly considers systemic constraints barring how users can consume texts. For instance, geo-blocking, where texts are available on Netflix in one country but not another, leads to alternative methods of cultivation and consumption, where users must use extralegal measures to acquire content. Tryon defines these as “resistant mobilities,” or “activities that defy the practices promoted by the entertainment industry.”54 The problems of geo-blocking are crucial to understanding the circulation of The Square; although “it’s been released in more than 40 other countries, it did not receive distribution in Egypt until June 2014, nearly half a year after its US Netflix debut.”55 Much as Tryon talks about “resistant mobilities” in individual as opposed to communal terms, larger media entities—in this case, YouTube—have stepped in on behalf of The Square and allowed it to circulate digitally. The film received “an exclusive YouTube release in its home country of Egypt, despite not yet being approved by official censors.”56 YouTube, in turn, geo-blocked the film for every country except Egypt to encourage others to view it through Netflix. Here, geo-blocking and resistant mobilities work together to create access and circulation that make the media more widely accessible.