Summary
Zeynep Tufekci’s Twitter and Tear Gas (Yale University Press, 2017) is the canonical academic treatment of how digital network technologies changed the dynamics of protest movements. Tufekci argues that networked protest produces a specific fragility: the same tools that lower the cost of mobilisation also erode the organisational capacity that sustained mass movements in the pre-social-media era.
Body
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300228092/twitter-and-tear-gas
Tufekci’s central argument runs through a series of comparative case studies — the 2011 Egyptian uprising, the 2011–13 Spanish indignados, the 2013 Gezi Park protests, the 2011–13 Occupy movement, the 2013–14 Euromaidan in Ukraine, and the 2009 Iran post-election protests — and identifies a recurring pattern. [source: tufekci-twitter-teargas] The pattern is that digitally-networked movements can mobilise large numbers of people quickly, can sustain high-visibility public actions, and can coordinate at a scale that pre-internet movements could not reach; but they tend to lack the durable organisational infrastructure — leader development, decision-making protocols, internal communication channels that survive outside-platform interference — that historically allowed mass movements to translate mobilisation into durable political change. [source: tufekci-twitter-teargas]
The book distinguishes between two capacities that the literature often conflates: broadcast power (the ability to reach an audience) and coordination power (the ability to organise collective action under conditions of state opposition). [source: tufekci-twitter-teargas] Tufekci argues that the digital tools of the 2010s sharply raised broadcast power and only modestly raised coordination power, with the result that networked movements are unusually good at the moment of mobilisation and unusually fragile thereafter. [source: tufekci-twitter-teargas]
The book draws on academic literature from sociology, communication studies, and movement theory, and was itself widely cited in the movement-theory literature of the late 2010s. [source: tufekci-twitter-teargas] Its central claim — that networked protest carries a specific fragility tied to platform dependence and weak internal infrastructure — has been picked up and contested in subsequent scholarship. [source: tufekci-twitter-teargas]
Because the book is published by Yale University Press under standard academic copyright, this wiki paraphrases the arguments and links to the publisher’s page rather than reproducing passages. [source: tufekci-twitter-teargas] The abstract and a substantial author-interview record are freely available; the full text is paywalled and not stored or quoted beyond the publisher’s permission. [source: tufekci-twitter-teargas]
Use it for
A theoretical anchor for the networked-movements concept page; a reference for any movement-theory discussion of platform dependence; a teaching text for an organiser considering why a large mobilisation did not translate into durable power.