I conducted my interview practicum with my friend from the MENA region about how he uses social media, and the use of social media for politics around him. As I set off to expand on this interview, and began combing Twitter for political posts from various countries in the Arab World, I was constantly confronted with the unrest and activism in the US. After spending a few hours in the last two days scrolling through pages and pages of content from protesters in Portland, and being presented with a considerably lower proportion of political activity on Arabic Twitter, I decided to shift my regional focus back home for this class’s final project. At first I thought perhaps it might be interesting to compare the use of social media in countries like Lebanon with its use in the US, but I found myself not only confronted with an unclear vision of what social media activism looks like in Lebanon from my observations, but also a daunting translation project of videos, screenshots, and other online media for only one week.

My original interview was broad and lacked any participant observation as backup to guide my questions. Having now done a few hours of participant observation, I feel more prepared to approach this ethnographic study with a more focused research question. As I scrolled, I noticed an interesting phenomenon: different people posting about the same video or tweet would have radically different reactions to the same piece of content. This makes me think of the various audiences that each poster is aiming to read their post, and the separations between these audiences, and their overlaps. What does the political geography of social media look like? Are there tone/audience differences between platforms? It’s obvious how the physical world affects this virtual one, but how does this virtual one affect the real world?

ِAn interesting approach to carrying out this research more in-depth would be to identify pieces of popular political content, and find various posts and reactions to them on a multitude of internet platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube comments, and more.

For a multimedia platform, I found the various types of text, image, video, and gif interfaces especially compelling, and something that would be well-suited for this type of project. By centering an approach on the media of the posts themselves, the research would lend itself well to being conveyed via a multimedia presentation.

For an example I’ve included two posts of different people reacting to the same video of protesters at the Columbus statue in Grant Park.