Social Media Tribes: Renegotiating the State-Society Divide in Jordan
Dr. Geoff Hughes (University of Exeter)
Dominant depictions of social media have often focused on its technical dimensions, especially the growing ability of individuals to disseminate words and images through far-flung networks thanks to the proliferation of low-cost micro-computing and ubiquitous cellular telephony. However, social media has also relied on key political and legal shifts and the renegotiation of the state-society divide. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Jordan (a soft authoritarian regime that never really pretended to foster a vibrant public sphere and civil society), I conceptualize social media as a form of privatization and as part and parcel of wider mutations in political economy that often go under the label of neoliberalism. In particular, I focus on how Jordanians have constructed online tribal publics as a means of responding to these trends in global political economy. These publics herald a more agonistic concept of the political (which I term a 'politics of accusation') that may challenge incumbent elites, but also offers new avenues for intimidation and cooptation. Like so many more physical frontier zones before it, the internet here becomes both a place where people seek refuge from authority, but also a laboratory where new forms of social control can be perfected. At a moment when liberal democracy seems to be in retreat, I suggest that authoritarian contexts like Jordan might offer a glimpse of the future of our global media and politics more broadly.
Biography
Geoffrey Hughes is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Exeter. His work is primarily concerned with how people in Jordan and the wider Middle East have engaged with various technologies for large-scale population management. His first book, Kinship Islam and the Politics of Marriage in Jordan, was based on 16 months of fieldwork in a mixed Palestinian-Jordanian village and involved fieldwork at the local Sharia Courts, Jordan’s Housing and Urban Development Corporation, and an Islamic Charity called The Chastity Society known both for its mass weddings and its publications about what it terms the country’s “marriage crisis.” More recently, he has been studying how Jordan’s Bedouin think about social media as part of a book project tentatively titled Social Media Tribes. Before becoming an anthropologist, he taught English for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in a primary school in Jordan's southern desert.