Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest: Book Reviews

Abstract

Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist and associate professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, is a prolific scholar and a frequent contributor to many high profile popular-writing venues, including The New York Times. She's delivered two TED talks, those highly polished mini-lectures on an ecstatic range of topics packaged into compelling and consumable lunch-break-long videos that begin with an exploding supernova (or is it a firing neuron) and the phrase IDEAS WORTH SPREADING. In a moment when academics are being constantly reminded of the value of “working in public” and “maintaining our personal brands,” Tufekci is an excellent scholar and a master at keeping her work accessible to the general public while maintaining academic rigor in her scholarly publications. So it is not surprising that her first full-length book, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, released by Yale University Press in the summer of 2017, is a good book with valuable scholarly content. It is not, however, itself a scholarly monograph. In the preface, Tufekci notes that this text is aimed at a general audience, one “ranging from an interested student in college or high school, to activists involved in these movements, to people who care about how digital technologies and social change impact the world” (p. xix). That is a broad net to cast. Such a diverse audience has a wide range of needs from a given text, especially in terms of background information and the complexity of the arguments presented. Tufekci manages the authorial trick of addressing this diverse group of ideal readers well, but ultimately this means that the book chooses not to do the more detailed, complex work one might have otherwise expected from a scholar of Tufekci's standing. It is possible this is because of the breadth of the intended audience: With so many people to reach, it is difficult to rely on any given member of the imagined audience to follow where she might otherwise want to go.