Twitter & Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

Zeynep Tüfekçi is a Turkish sociologists and writer, who currently writes as an opinion author for the New York Times, along with teaching at the University of North Carolina, and being a research fellow at Harvard University, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society Research Facility. In the beginning of the semester, after a hectic first week and transferring into this digital sociology course, the first thing I saw on our page was that we would be reading her book at the end of the semester. I was very excited, of course. Now, after having read many of her chapters in the book, I thought I’d jot down some of my opinions…

In summary, I enjoyed reading through her interviews and informational stories regarding street protests, Twitter, and digital technologies overall. While reading through the book it seemed as many of her ideas were unpopular ideas for the topic that she was talking about. At times, the book itself felt like a social movement, didn’t it? I almost feel like it was to get everyone to agree on the same thing. Which isn’t bad necessarily. But, it did seem biased sometimes, and there was a change of tone towards the end of the book as well.

Lastly, my favorite topic to read about was the event of the Gezi Park in Istanbul, Turkey, of course. I still don’t know if this is because how much I could relate to the events and how familiar I was with it considering it happened in my country and city. Or maybe it was also intriguing because of the new information I learned about the whole event. Regardless, I enjoyed her interview methods with individuals, and her discussion of civilian journalists who report out from the moment, raw, factual information. I will definitely continue to follow her work from now on, and can’t wait to read more from her on the New York Times!