Harvard Anthropological Reflections on Social Media Reflective Essay Read the text and write a 1 standard page long reflexive essay. The essay should comp

Harvard Anthropological Reflections on Social Media Reflective Essay Read the text and write a 1 standard page long reflexive essay.

The essay should comprise the following components:

1. Author’s main thesis, described in 2-3 sentences.

2. 3 main arguments supporting the thesis.

3. Methodology used.

The essay could contain critical reflection on the thesis and arguments by other anthropologists or political scientists (no more than 3-4 sentences) StateTube: Anthropological Reflections on Social Media and the Israeli State
Author(s): Rebecca L. Stein
Source: Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 3 (Summer 2012), pp. 893-916
Published by: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research
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SPECIAL COLLECTION:
Social Thought & Commentary on Digital Militancy in Contex
StateTube: Anthropological
Reflections on Social Media
and the Israeli State
Rebecca L. Stein
Duke University
Computers and keyboards are the weapons- Facebook and Twitter
are the battlefields. It is there that we fight, each and every day.
– Israel Defense Forces spokesman, New Media Division
Facebook pages… have as much impact as a tank- and sometime
even more.
– Israeli Member of Parliament, Danny Danon (L
Consider, Israeli
Israeli social social
as a networks
networks
point of in departure,
in October
October of a of
set 201201
of 1 .1Their
. Their
images occasion
occasion
that wentwas
was viralthe
the rereon
lease of abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, held for five years by Hamas
and freed in exchange for over 1 ,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody.1 Popular Israeli criticism quickly mounted about the ways Israeli Prime
Minister Netanyahu had mobilized Shalit’s release for electoral gain. Some
Israelis voiced their disapproval in the language of the “meme”- that is,
an image, video, or phrase that circulates virally between social media
users “in the form of parody, pastiche, mashup, or other derivative work”
(Shifman 2011). The basis of this pastiche was a photograph issued by
the Israeli government on the event of Shalit’s release, picturing Shalit
embracing his father against the background of the smiling Prime Minister
Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 3, p. 893-916, ISSN 0003-5491 . © 2012 by the Institute for
Ethnographic Research (I FER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.
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StateTube: Anthropological Reflections on Social Media and the Israeli State
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Figure 5: Prime Minister Netanyahu on YouTube.
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StateTube: Anthropological Reflections on Social Media and the Israeli State
video production, including poor lighting and shaking cameras. Netanyahu
responded in kind, often speaking directly to the screen as he employed
the exaggerated informality that is social media’s hallmark. The event was
hailed as a success by members of the prime minister’s staff who praised
the Prime Minister’s ability to address the international Internet public
“without filters” (Ha’aretz201 1).
Within the broader context of Israeli state practices where new media are
concerned, these two incidents are by no means anomalous. Rather, over
the course of the last few years, numerous Israeli state ministries and insti-
tutions have begun employing social media platforms such as Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr as tools of state. The hybrid forms that are
produced by Israeli state users- a mix of popular new media practices
and more traditional modes of statecraft- are by no means unique to the
Israeli case. For its part, the Israeli governmental model borrows directly
from the kind of “digital diplomacy” practiced in the US White House and
Department of State, where government 2.0 has been pioneered (what
Secretary Hillary Clinton has also referred to as “21 st century statecraft”).4
Indeed, the first fact-finding trip made by the head of the Israeli “Internet
and New Media” department in 201 0 was to Washington, DC where they
met with members of Obama and Clinton’s new media teams. Israeli ef-
forts in the sphere of digital diplomacy have grown considerably in recent
years. Israeli state budgets for social media work have increased dramati-
cally, as have the number of ministries and state institutions employing
these tools to do official work- chiefly disseminating the official line and
managing Israel’s international reputation, tasks deemed particularly essential during episodes of military confrontation.
All of this is to suggest that the prominence of social media within the-
so-called “Arab Spring” context confirmed what many Israeli state officials
already knew- namely, the political potential and indeed urgency of such
technologies and platforms within regional theaters.5 Yet the example of
Israeli state usage of such technologies stands in sharp contrast to the regional case, challenging the media narrative of technological determinism
that was frequently marshaled to explain the success of populist uprisings
in Egypt and Tunisia- a narrative embraced by CNN and Al Jazeera alike
and which echoed accounts of Iran’s supposed “Twitter Revolution” in
2009, so dubbed by eager pundits. Many commentators went further, particularly in the early stages of these revolts, to suggest that the digital tools
employed by demonstrators and activists were somehow naturally suited
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REBECCA L. STEIN
to liberatory politics from below- painting a picture of grassroots move-
ments in the Middle East that were organically driven and given shape
by Facebook, Twitter, and the mobile technologies that enabled them.6
This variant of the digital democracy theorem depended on a companion
narrative about Middle Eastern states as strictly repressive actors where
digital tools were concerned- a narrative that stressed the investment of
these states in monitoring, infiltrating, and/or repressing social media as
a means of maintaining authoritarian control (Egypt’s Internet blockade in
the midst of the popular protests in Cairo was marshaled as the central
example of such a state project).
The case of Israeli state usage complicates both poles of this popular
narrative about digital media- that is, both the notion of new technologies that organically liberate from below, and of states invested chiefly
in their repression from above. Rather, the Israeli state case illuminates
the political flexibility of digital tools and platforms, illustrating the highly
variable political functions and ends that social media can serve (a corrective most famously associated with the work of Evgeny Morozov in
The Net Delusion [2011]). For while the Israeli state does employ social media for means of classic counter-insurgency- by means of digital
monitoring, surveillance, and the like- numerous state institutions are
also positioning themselves as lateral social media users in their own
right, generating their own user-generating content as they labor to cre-
atively exploit social networking and new technologies in ways that ad-
vance state PR and political aims while also abiding by the emerging
popular protocols and vocabularies of these platforms. In my interviews
with Israeli state officials, they proudly trumpeted their difference from
neighboring Arab states where state social media policy was concerned,
pointing to their own creative engagement with these tools and platforms as yet another instance of Israeli regional exceptionalism.
This essay provides an anthropological window onto the Israeli state’s
recent work in social networking, with a focus on the everyday labor of
which it is comprised. The state’s quotidian labor in this domain illustrates
what has long been true of states, and long evident to anthropologists-
namely, that states are made and sustained through daily practices.7
Ethnographic research conducted among lower-level officials in Israeli
governmental and military institutions, and with the digital documents
and social media debates that their labor generates, reveals a state
that is slowly and sometimes reluctantly learning to incorporate these
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StateTube: Anthropological Reflections on Social Media and the Israeli State
platforms into their official toolbox by means of considerable experimentation, improvisation, and gradual on-the-job training.8 Despite efforts to
coordinate Internet and social media usage across various government
branches and ministries (enabled by sizeable state investment), and to
foster a culture of social networking fluency, the state learning curve is
steep and uneven, and the margin of error is high. On any given day, suc-
cess is mixed and the subject of considerable scrutiny from civilian social
networkers and bloggers. For despite the US precedent where digital
statecraft is concerned, the Israeli playbook remains a work in progress.
“There are no rules about how to bring the government into Facebook,” I
was told by a senior official from the Prime Minister’s office, tasked with
heading up its new media efforts. “We have to invent them.” The longterm political effects of the state’s still-experimental engagement with so-
cial media remain to be seen – including how such digital projects might
impact Israeli relations with neighboring Arab countries, international per-
ceptions of the Israeli regime and its military occupation, and the lives of
Palestinians living in its grip.
The politically instrumental nature of Israeli state usage is undeniable;
social media is employed for everything from political campaigning to
public relations work in times of military engagement. Yet ethnography
conducted within state ministries highlights the ways that state users are
laboring to adopt the discursive and aesthetic norms of social networking-dimensions of digital usage that can be overlooked when strict political instrumentalism is attributed to the state’s digital investments. When
focusing one’s attention on a state learning digital labor and corresponding norms of intelligibility, what becomes evident are the ultimately inde-
terminate political effects of such usage- indeterminacy that runs counter
to prevailing wisdom about both state hegemony in general terms, and the
supposed supremacy of the Israeli state in particular.
More broadly, at stake in this inquiry is a rethinking of the story we con-
ventionally tell about Israeli state power, both its means and effects- a
rethinking made possible by Foucault’s invitation to complicate the default
account of repressive state power in favor of power conceptualized in pro-
ductive terms and studied at the scale of daily practices and technologies.
Considered through this lens, social media might be received not merely
as a new domain of statecraft, but as a Foucauldian “art of government”
in its own right.9
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REBECCA L. STEIN
Social Media as Battlefield
In March of 2011, I visited the Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF) new media
headquarters. Their unassuming office is housed in a nondescript highrise above a coffee shop, several blocks from Jerusalem’s central bus
station- a place full of young, uniformed soldiers bent over their desktop
computers. I was meeting with the IDF’s head of the “new media desk”
(since replaced), who worked on a Mac laptop in a windowless corner
office. During the course of our interview, she received calls and SMS
updates from IDF personnel in the field- some about the aftermath of
that day’s bombing in West Jerusalem’s central bus station (the result of
an explosive placed in a suitcase); some about the Qassem rockets being fired from Gaza into southern Israel. Once verified and given security
clearance, much of this information would be translated and abbreviated
into English-language Tweets (the IDFs followers then numbered some
24,000) and posted to the military’s official blog. Breaking news about
incoming Qassem rockets interrupts our interview. She calls in her young
associate, “Can we tweet this, Tal?” The news came back a minute later.
No, the details in the report were unconfirmed. For the IDF, the new media
buck stopped with her; after confirming its non-classified status, she de-
cided what should be posted to subscribers.
Like others at the new media headquarters, she was young, in her early
20s having assumed the position a mere four years after her immigration
to Israel from the United States. She was the perfect candidate for the job,
her superiors told me, as her native English, youth, and digital fluency were
deemed crucial to the position. Despite her uniform, there was a casual air
about her- with hair in a ponytail, and an unceremonious mode of address.
Indeed, this posture of informality is what the IDF has strived to project in
their new media work, albeit within limits. This balance between the official
and the casual- one that undergirds all Israeli efforts at digital statecraftis difficult to maintain. For the IDF, it involves the conjoining of the hierarchi-
cal and highly regulated work of the army with digital platforms demanding
lateral engagement with civilian social media users, often in the idiom of
casual intimacy. Senior representatives from the IDF spokesman’s office,
for whom this tension is a primary source of concern as they advance their
new media work, described the challenge to me in this way:
They [social media] are contradictory to the military institution. Any
army is a closed organization, and usually it keeps its secrets and
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StateTube: Anthropological Reflections on Social Media and the Israeli State
operational details inside. And new media works on the opposite
[sic], also the language is different. The military language is very
strict- there’s a lot of abbreviations, it has very specific intonations.
And the new media is exactly the opposite- a lot of emotions, a lot
of questions… Informality. So it’s a bit difficult to teach the military
how new media is really an asset, but we’ve been doing it for the
past two years.
While she touted the potential of new media as a means of information
dissemination, reaching audiences that traditional media cannot, she
conceded that it has been difficult persuading high-ranking military officials to embrace this shift, given its departure from conventional military
structures, protocols, and modes of public address. The army increasingly employs internal education, chiefly through officer’s courses, to ad-
dress this challenge. But both considerable IDF skepticism and ignorance
has remained, particularly in senior echelons. At times, this ignorance has
resulted in embarrassing public missteps. Such was the outcome in the
spring of 2011, when senior IDF spokesman Avi Benayahu spoke publically of military intentions to enlist “little hackers who were born and raised
online,” young people whom the IDF would “screen with special care and
train. ..to serve the state.”10 His comments were immortalized through
YouTube capture. But the IDF’s spokesman later clarified their error by
email, explaining that Benayahu meant “an army of bloggers” (this when I
pressed for further details). When I looked for his remarks on YouTube at
a later date, they were gone- having been scrubbed, I presumed, in the
interest of IDF professionalism.
Belying the prevailing notion of the omniscient Israeli state, the mili-
tary’s early engagement with social media began almost accidentally
(as per the IDF’s own telling)- the result of an experimental YouTube
venture undertaken by two young soldiers in the early days of the Israeli
incursion into Gaza in 2008-2009. One of these soldiers would be subse-
quently named the “head” of the IDF “New Media Desk.” The first videos
uploaded to YouTube showcased aerial footage of the Israeli assault and
video blogs (vlogs) from IDF spokespersons. Ironically, the manifest amateurism of such vlogs articulated closely with YouTube visual protocols
governing everyman production and arguably bolstered their popularity.
The success of this initiative, with some videos viewed more t…
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