What does it mean to participate in a protest from afar? In the past, I’ve argued, quite strongly, that a protest is only an event in the moment, that its importance resides within those participating, for its recording somehow diminishes its presence and vitality, leaving it open to easy misinterpretation, dissection, repurposing and, most often, vigorous dismissal. It has also always seemed to me that underlying the trenchant and lengthy debates within activist movements over the use of direct action, is a disagreement over how to experience the moment of protest. Though such debates often characterize themselves as being about drawing attention to issues, how best to intervene in systems of power without replicating them and so on, what seems equally important to all sides is how to be there, to actually be there, in front of the police, or at the site, or in front of the cameras, and what to do with one’s body in that time and space.

I’m glossing and parsing here, because obviously there’s more to it – there’s more to building a movement than the visible flowerings of protest from the roots of long months of organization. But it is still these moments, these outbursts that draw media attention, although increasingly this is not be case (one need look at the mainstream media silence at the start of Occupy Wall Street). Sometimes I think, though, that we’ve overstated the importance of the media; that it doesn’t really matter what is or is not covered in the press. One of the things that certainly came out of the Maple Spring was the cross-generational, cross-class reports of unfettered joy at having been a part of the march on May 22 nd and the Casseroles, at having gathered and walked with others and danced and made noise together through the streets. Though a number of short films tried to capture the specialness of these moments, that specialness was obvious but could not be shared with those of us who weren’t there. Nevertheless, the sense of community and possibility that came out of those actions was arguably much more important than the way the intervention of the clanging pots and pans echoed across mainstream and social media. And if the actions could be dismissed or criticized for not having halted Bill 78, perhaps that’s just a way of missing the point – that something altogether important and potentially more lasting happened in those moments.

Back to my original point: what does it mean to participate in a protest from afar? I wanted to be in Montreal. I wanted to support students and be a part of the actions in the Spring of 2012 1. But I wasn’t and I couldn’t, and while I did what I could in my hometown, this paper is really about whether that “altogether more important” moment can stretch out of the geographically bounded space of the actual action. For the 1500 words of this thought piece I’m actually largely setting aside the issues, about access to education and the right to organize, which have and should have resonance in all other provinces and beyond Canadian borders. They deserve their own analysis, and I’m using these few words to get at the more ephemeral (but hopefully lasting) links that were built when people took to the streets. I wonder if it is possible to be a part of that celebratory resistance from afar.

There has been a lot written lately about the importance (or lack thereof) of social media to activist movements. One of the most oft quoted articles is Malcolm Gladwell’s takedown of Internet “slacktivism” in the New Yorker. Gladwell starts with a description of the February 1960 sit-in, by four black students, of the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. He talks about how the protest spread, drawing hundreds to the sit-in and resulting in numerous copycat actions across the southern United States, despite threats of violence and persecution. But now, he suggests, we are to believe that “the new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns.” 2 Gladwell is not positive about this change. Though he explores the role of Twitter in protests against the Communist government of Moldova, and of social media in protests in Iran, and suggestions of new forms of activism made possible by the instant spread of social media, “Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools,” he writes 3. Gladwell was writing before Tahrir Square, before the Arab Spring, surely the epitome of a social-media led revolution. Perhaps his opinion has since changed, but his points are worth analyzing nonetheless. Gladwell contrasts the strong ties of activist movements – of friends and family members also willing to put their bodies on the line, with what he calls the weak ties of social media activism. While social media is good for distributing information about activist causes, “weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.” 4 Gladwell also argues that the networked dispersion and weak ties of online activism demand low commitment and little sacrifice. While I’m less inclined to accept his point that successful activist movements tend to be organized hierarchically (the alter-globalization movement clearly showed the opposite), his point that a million likes on Facebook does not equal a movement, or even an intervention, is a pointed one. 5

Nevertheless, what Gladwell is talking about is the organization of a movement, and its consequent publicization or spread. The passing-on of a cause by liking it on Facebook, posting articles and write-ups and so on, is different from watching it unfold in real time: something that did happen on social media in Tahrir Square, and later with Occupy and the student and Bill 78 protests in Quebec. What I’m thinking of is somewhat different even from live press coverage, which tends frame protest from the vantage point of a single camera and is often guided by or accompanied with commentary. Rather, what I’m referring to is the Twitter feed – multiple comments and perspectives, video clips, sound bites, pictures all rolled into a constantly moving scroll of information and images across the screen. This is how I experienced the May 22nd protests in Montreal, and this is, I suggest, a new and potentially active form of engagement, despite the apparent passivity of watching action unfold from a distance. I suggest this tentatively and with some qualms. However, if what is important about a protest is the actions that it may encourage in the aftermath – the slow forms of organization and everyday decisions that make a movement, then yes, I do think that the protest can, through social media, have an impact beyond its bounded geography.

Both performance theorist Richard Schechner and activist John Jordan contend that the geographic layout 6 of the protest/ carnival/ festival sets it apart from official entertainment. While official festivals are arranged in straight lines and rectangles (for example, military or civilian parades), the street protest is “vortexed, whirling; people dance on anything, climb lampposts, move in every direction: an uncontrollable state of creative chaos. The street party breaks a cultural obsession with linearity, order and tidiness, epitomised by roads and cars…”. 7 Schechner argues that since the Middle Ages, carnivals, through their reclamation of public space and parodic reversal of systems of power, have playfully and blasphemously exposed official culture’s “claims to authority, stability, sobriety, immutability, and immortality”. 8

On February 13, 2012, Quebec students voted in favour of a general strike to draw attention to the provincial government’s refusal to listen to student demands. While the media tended to boil the strike down to a proposed tuition increase, the issues were actually much more complicated and tied up with larger questions of austerity, neoliberalism and Quebec culture. 9Through the Spring of 2012 the strike grew, occasionally joining with groups active against other (often connected) issues (for example Earth Day). Finally, in May 2012 the “emergency” Bill 78 was passed, granting draconian rights to police bodies, criminalizing and effectively prohibiting protest. Student groups and their supporters called for an action on May 22 in opposition to the Bill, but refused to reveal the march route (thus rendering it “illegal” under the new legislation).

May 22nd came. At the start of the day I remember feeling unsure that anyone would turn up. For days, threats of violence and arrest had been growing. The powers of Bill 78 suggested that anyone attending the “illegal” march could be arrested, tear-gassed or beaten with immunity. Protesters who had greeted the passage of the Bill into law on May 18 2012 had faced rubber bullets, tear gas and arrests. 10 Comments on (largely unsympathetic) coverage in the English language media seemed almost entirely hostile. A few people came. And then more. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands filled the streets in costume, wearing masks (which had been declared illegal), singing and marching.

Some thousand kilometers away, I turned on the computer and opened two screens, one the CUTV (Concordia Television) site, which had been providing coverage of the ongoing student strike and which included a twitter feed on the action, the second Storify.com 11, the Global News twitter feed and site, which provided a much lighter, primarily English language feed. Tweets poured in, hopeful as participants counted the growing numbers and then celebrated as a photo from the roof of a nearby building was circulated, showing a bird’s eye view of the growing crowd. Videos were posted (though as the day progressed and communications systems were overloaded, this became more difficult). At times the rush of posts was so fast it was impossible to keep up, but the action ebbed and flowed, reports poured in and were followed up, sound files were posted. In all a fragmented image of the action appeared – samba bands here, a picture of masked faces here, the police lining the street here, hundreds of views of the enormous seemingly unending crowd marching up Rue Berri. It was muted, definitely, it was not like being there. But being a part (apart) of what was happening and not knowing what was coming gave a much more complete experience of the protest than what is suggested by Gladwell’s notion of the weak ties of online activism. This is where I think his argument fades in that there are additional capabilities beyond merely pushing like buttons or shunting a cause on to the next person.

I don’t think for a minute that watching a protest unfold online is akin to being there. Obviously an action wouldn’t work if everyone were watching. But I do think that in that moment of overwhelming stimulus apparent particularly on the CUTV site, Schechner’s vortexed and swirling crowd was mimicked in virtual space. What remained was a sense of dissatisfaction, a sense of restlessness. And in that restlessness is the impetus for the kind of political action that Gladwell argues is only made possible through strong ties – through family and friends, but here made possible in a post-geographic scenario, subtended by the weakest of weak ties.

  1. I should note that I lived in Montreal from 2001-2007 and participated in numerous actions and protests in my time there, including the 2005 student protests.→
  2. Malcolm Gladwell. “Small Change: Why the Revolution will not be Tweeted.” New Yorker, October 4, 2010.→
  3. See, in the same article, Gladwell’s critique of the very idea that actions in Moldova and Iran were brought about by Twitter and blogging.→
  4. Ibid.→
  5. Gladwell was also writing long before the whole Kony fiasco. Nevertheless, the fallout of the Stop Kony campaign did seem to beautifully illustrate his points with regard to the limits of online social movements.→
  6. According to Tim Jordan, protest is composed of an instantly recognizable performative ritual. “The scenes are familiar. Crowds of people are waving placards, chanting, taking over streets normally dominated by cars. The mass of wandering people are differentiated by banners, flags, sounds and dress. They are nearly always accompanied, if not surrounded, by police who march at the front and sides and can often be seen waiting, in groups, in side streets. If we cut to a related set of familiar images, we see a motley collection of young (mainly) men throwing bottles, hurling tear-gas canisters and yelling in a state of turmoil; they are confronted by black — and blue — uniformed, frequently armed police charging and retreating, carrying some of the motley crew off to waiting vans. There are other images that we have seen time and again: small boats with flags dodging around large tankers, great crowds of cross-dressing men and women celebrating their pride. Someone is dragged from up a tree or down a tunnel; someone knocks on the door and hands in a petition….” (Tim Jordan. Activism! Direct Action, Hactivism and the Future of Society. London: Reaktion Books, 2002, p. 8).→
  7. John Jordan. “The Art of Necessity: the Subversive Imagination of Anti-Road Protest and Reclaim the Streets.” In DIY Culture: Party and Protest in Nineties Britain. George McKay, ed. London and New York: Verso, 1998, p. 142; Richard Schechner. The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 46→
  8. Schechner 1993, 46-48→
  9. See the special issue of Theory and Event 15.3 (2012) on the Maple Spring.→
  10. Caley Sorochan. “The Quebec Student Strike: A Chronology.” Theory and Event 15.3 (2012), np.→
  11. n.d.e : This platform no longer exists. For more information: https://storify.com/faq→