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Chapter II Literature Review
This chapter is divided into two sections debating and synthesizing cross-over theories and concepts. The first section discusses detailed the key concept which is narrative of the social media. Base on relevant literature, the second section offers analysis of political movements in an aspect of social movements’ theory, political participation and e-participation, democracy and e-democracy theory. By looking at pertinent literature within the Thai context, the analysis begins with a general introduction, and then proceeds with the explanation of concepts used by theory and the discussion on cross-over theories and concepts.
Key Study Concepts on Social Media
As being a tool for people to share their opinions and express their feelings and needs in public space, there has been more and more academic discussion and an increasing number of research on social media (e.g. Siala, 2012; Becker and Wehner, 2001; Carafano, 2012; Christensen, 2011; Dahlberg, 2007; Kahn R and Kellner D, 2007; Palczewski, 2001; Terranova, 2004; Wimmer, 2007) and social network. Generally speaking, the public sphere is constituted by an open, reasoned and reflexive communication. Jürgen Habermas (1991), his work is the starting point of the study on theories regarding the Internet as a public sphere. It is suggested that the public sphere is based on the matization and critique of moral, ethical and pragmatic validity claims and accompanied by inclusive, sincere and respectful reasoning. This sphere is seen as the center of strong democracy which enables the voicing of diverse views on any issues, the constitution of publicly-oriented citizens, the scrutiny of power and, ultimately, public sovereignty. Defying media are required to support such communicative action. A variety of critical theorists have shown that the modern mass media (print and broadcasting) have largely failed in this role.
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In contrast, the Internet has offered citizens the opportunity to encounter and engage with a huge diversity of positions; as a result, the public sphere is extended. Through email, discussion sites, web publishing and webcasting, a great variety of actors articulate and claim critique validity locally, nationally and internationally. The research on the possibility of the Internet in expanding democratic culture points out the significant factors which limit open and reflexive onlinedebateincluding inequalities in access and participation, non-reflexive communication, corporate domination of online attention and state surveillance and censorship.
Social media are a way of life. Research shows that active participation on online sites, such as Facebook, communication via texting and chatting programs, and creation of blogs are everyday occurrences for new era of mankind communication. Moreover, social media have grown in number and influence. They play an important role in political participation around the world, for example, Arab’s spring, Occupied Wall Street, and Thai people factions’ conflict. Therefore, social media is a key concept for this research. Although social media have received significant attention in academic and political discourse especially in social movement arena, the meaning and definition are still under a scholarly debate.
Mayfield (2008) also explains the definition and concept of social media as a group of new kinds of online media, which shares most or all of the characteristics. Participating in social media encourages the contribution and feedback from everyone who is interested. It blurs the line between the media and audiences.
Moreover, most social media services are open to feedback and participation. They encourage voting, commenting and sharing of information. Barriers in accessing and making use of content password-protected content are rarely found. Regarding conversation, whereas traditional media is about ‘broadcast’ (content transmitted or distributed to an audience), social media is better seen as a two-way conversation. In a community aspect, social media allows communities to form quickly and communicate effectively. Communities share common interests such as a love of photography, a political issue or a favorite TV show. Moreover, most kinds of social media thrive on their connectedness by making use of links to other sites, resources and people.
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Similarly, Boyd and Ellison (2008) give more definitions of social media. Their works rather focus on applications. They consider social media applications (SMAs) as the Internet based platforms that help people to communicate via multiple media to potentially unlimited numbers of people worldwide. These applications include social network sites (SNSs) namely Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, weblogs (blogs) namely Twitter, Kiwi Blog and Word Press, and video or picture sharing sites namely YouTube and Flickr. These new media applications allow almost anyone to voice their opinions, to become fans (members of others’ pages and profiles), and to join online interest groups that may be politically orientated, business and entertainment driven, or just of interest to the user.
In addition, as Turnšek (2008) points out, social media has become the buzz word. It is available on the Internet including blog, photo and file sharing systems (e.g., Flickr, SlideShare, YouTube) and social networking sites (e.g., Friendster, MySpace, SecondLife). Although the social network sites (SNSs are largely designed for personal presentation and political speech, action can be sometimes emerged within the sites. This is evidenced by postings protesting government actions on YouTube, creation of candidate headquarters in SecondLife, and utilization of image and video functionalities on mobile phones during demonstrations and police confrontations.
Multiple new areas of analysis emerge due to the introduction of the Internet and social media into the political arena such as e-democracy (electronic democracy) and computer-mediated political communication systems (CMPC) (Ainsworth, Hardy & Harley, 2005). Therefore, social media is evidently the supporting communication tool for the concurrences of political and social movements in this era.
Moreover, Sousa (2009) describes social media that it is fairly a new phenomenon. Social media is the concept of having an electronic platform where people can interact and have conversations about a wide variety of common subjects using computers. The idea started roughly four to five years ago around 2004 when Internet websites such as MySpace.com and Blogger.com were created and allowed users from all over the world to interact with each other.
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Since the early 1990s, the Internet has grown into a network of nearly 180 million websites by the end of 2008. Many of these websites are news and gossip blogs where people can write their opinions and thoughts about news items and other subjects. Readers can also leave their comments about the article or information they read on these sites. This ability to comment on information and news, in a way, has changed how news is disseminated and how politics in the United States and elsewhere has been run.
Alam (2011) mentions that social media is helping to create revolution.
Innovation has always been a salient ingredient in any people driven movement for political change. Also the writer from the Nation Newspapers said “the social media also allows general participation in news and current affairs by providing a channel through which network members can become sources of real-time factual information, opinion, or reaction” (Boonnoon, 2010). The social media thus continue to grow in popularity in Thailand, not only because networks such as Facebook and Twitter generate two-way communication among friends but also because they have become innovative tools for political issues.
Also as Jankowski explains and gives the example of social media channel in U.S. presidential election (2007). Web 2.0 has become the buzzword describing a plethora of social media available on the Internet, including blogs, photo and file sharing systems (e.g., Flickr, SlideShare, YouTube), and social networking sites (e.g., Friendster, MySpace, SecondLife). Last year, as candidates began preparing for the U.S. Presidential Primaries, CNN coined the term YouTube‐ification of Politics to describe this development. From the perspective which describes the importance of everyday settings as venues for political expression and by taking the Arab Spring as an example, these internet‐based social media has become the tools for sites of politics.
According to Leuschner’s study (2012) on presidential elections, it is found that while the use of new media in presidential elections clearly provides important advantages to candidates, citizens and the public sphere also benefit by having an easy method of acquiring diverse information on the election, a platform for organizing and gaining resources for meaningful participation in democracy, and a means to engage in public dialogue and interact with candidates. However, it is also
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suggested that citizens should remain conscious of candidates’ underlying motive for using social media which is to ultimately gain enough votes in order to win the presidential election. To avoid any misguided beliefs that candidates use social media for the primary purpose of handing power over to citizens or building “friendships”
with voters, social media campaigns enacted by a candidate’s team should not employ the title “grassroots”. By avoiding the use of this term, citizens can more readily recognize their role as voters to candidates , and a mutually beneficial relationship can exist.
Social media is a new channel or a new tool for communication especially in political movements. We can see many movements around the world which use social media to mobilized people and create activities for political movements. Empirical evidences which demonstrate the role of social media can be seen in many real phenomena. For example, Safranek (2012) argues that, in the spring of 2011, the world was watching as revolutionary fervor swept the Middle East, from Tunisia to Egypt, to Syria and beyond. The courtesy of distribution via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even mainstream media allowed startling images captured by civilians on the scene to be viewed by people around the world.
There can be no doubt that information and communication technologies, and particularly the burgeoning social media, played a part in the upheavals. On January 17 in 2001, during the impeachment trial of Philippine President Joseph Estrada, loyalists in the Philippine Congress voted to set aside key evidence against him. Less than two hours after the decision, activists, with the help of forwarded text messages, were able to organize a protest at a major crossroads in Manila. Over the next few days, over a million people arrived. “The public’s ability to coordinate such a massive and rapid response was remarkable as close to seven million text messages were sent during that week. The event marked the first time that social media had helped to force out a national leader” (Shirkey). On January 20, 2011, Estrada resigned.
Google executive, Wael Ghonim, also helped to spark Egypt’s 2011 unrest. Egyptian businessman Khaled Said died after being beaten by the policemen who had videotaped themselves taking confiscated marijuana. Hoping to draw attention to police corruption, he copied that video and posted it to YouTube. Ghonim
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created a Facebook page called ‘We Are all Khaled Said. It featured horrific photos of Said’s face which were shot by a cellphone in the morgue. That visual evidence undermined the official explanations of his death. The Facebook page attracted some 500,000 members (“Information Age: Egypt’s Revolution”). Protestors flooded Cairo’s Tahrir Square under the watchful eye of a military that was loath to turn on citizens. To thwart the protestors, the government sought to block access to Facebook and Twitter and severely restrict an access to the Internet. However, the strategy failed because the insurgents, with help from supporters around the world, were able to subvert the censorship. Also, Internet restrictions negatively affected companies’
and the government’s ability to do business. Under increasing domestic and international pressure, longtime Prime Minister Hosni Mubarak resigned February 11, 2011, following 18 days of protests.
Regarding social media as a new channel for e-participation in Thailand’s political movements, Paireepairit (2012) points outthat the first recorded evidence of Internet usage in Thailand was in 1987. Although real Internet connection started in 1990, the first commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) started in 1995.
National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC), a government technology agency, has monitored Thailand Internet statistics since 1991. According to NECTEC, Internet use in Thailand has increased from 30 users in 1991 to 18,300,000 users in 2009, covering 27.4% of population.Other good sources of Internet usage statistics come from the World Bank, which reports 14,653,913.61 users in 2010, and The National Statistical Office of Thailand, which reports 13,844,400 users in 2010.The NBTC also tracks the number of Internet broadband subscribers in Thailand.
As of June 2012, the latest report to date was Quarter 2/201139 with the number of 3, 484, 736 subscribers. Thailand follows global technology trends such as mobile and social media. According to NBTC data, the latest number of mobile subscribers in Thailand is 74.59 million which more than 100 % penetration rate is. The “smart phone boom” has strongly encouraged Thai mobile phone consumers to purchase new smart phone models. All Thai major mobile operators have various special data packages for iPhone, iPad, Android and BlackBerry as to increase non-voice revenue. Though there are no official statistics for mobile Internet
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users separated from normal mobile subscribers, IDC predicted 968 million USD on mob
shown in Figure 2:
(Source; Sriram Vadlamani on May 14, 2012 in Social Tech
In 2003, Manager.co.th was already the
whose popularity rose from sixth in 2003 to third in 2004.The audience of Manager.co.th is generally
white-collar workers who can access the I consume news from the Internet as many have also stopped watchi
still had not invested seriously in online stra news sites in Thailand,
from normal mobile subscribers, IDC predicted Thais w
on mobile data services in 2012, a 15% increase from 2011 as
Figure 2: Asia Social Networking Users
Source; Sriram Vadlamani on May 14, 2012 in Social Tech
In 2003, Manager.co.th was already the most popular Thai news site popularity rose from sixth in 2003 to third in 2004.The audience of Manager.co.th is generally the middle class in urban areas. Most of these viewers are lar workers who can access the Internet at workplaces. These people mainly
the Internet as some do not have time to read newspapers, many have also stopped watching TV. Even after 2005, news companies, however,
invested seriously in online strategies. There were not many high
news sites in Thailand, and Manager.co.th was the single obvious choice for these Thais would spend increase from 2011 as
Source; Sriram Vadlamani on May 14, 2012 in Social Tech)
most popular Thai news site popularity rose from sixth in 2003 to third in 2004.The audience of in urban areas. Most of these viewers are nternet at workplaces. These people mainly ot have time to read newspapers, and ng TV. Even after 2005, news companies, however, tegies. There were not many high- quality d Manager.co.th was the single obvious choice for these
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connected people. This isthe reason why Manager.co.th has become one of the most influential media during political unrest since 2005. The situation changed soon after 2010s when competition in online media was getting more serious. Now, Thai people have more choices for online news consumption. The influence of Manager.co.th has declined in recent years, but it is still the most visited news site in the country.
The Red camps started their online activities in the pre-coup period too. 1 In contrast with the yellow movements, early red movements were organic, fragmented and disorganized. Since the red netizen did not have a single site such as Manager.co.th, their discussion started in online discussion forum “web boards”
instead. Since 2008 and 2009, the rise of social networks, especially Facebook, has changed the online landscape in Thailand. Many web boards and community sites were gradually abandoned and replaced by Facebook walls, groups and pages. Online politics communities were facing a similar fate. However, people who joined such communities are the same, and the discussions continue as ever. As both camps have adopted Facebook as the space for their online activities, the opinion clash and flame war have been moved from forums to Facebook walls and pages.
In 2009 and 2010, top national politicians started using Facebook and Twitter extensively. Facebook tended to bethe first choice for politicians because of its media rich capacity. The politicians normally post thoughts and activity photos on their Facebook pages. Some posts are linked for their articles from newspaper sites or their recorded TV interviews on YouTube. Twitter has also received more attention from Thai politicians. The political
1The name and red color scheme was invented much later after the coup d’état.
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political situations. According to the statistics reported this week, there are currently more than 3 million people appear to be a Facebook userfigure is 3,132,860.That is a growth rate of more than 1 million five month or more staggeringly 50
emphasizes the current political situation which has seen Thais flo to discuss, share and publish their thoughts
in Figure 3: political situations. According to the statistics reported this week, there are currently
people appear to be a Facebook user in Thailand, and the 3,132,860.That is a growth rate of more than 1 million
or more staggeringly 500,000 new users in 6 weeks. This evidently the current political situation which has seen Thais flocking to the website to discuss, share and publish their thoughts. Facebook users on Facebakers is
Figure 3: User Growth
Source:http://asiancorrespondent.com, 2010)
Moreover, there were many Facebook pages being created for political March 12, 2010 –May 30, 2010 as shown in Table 1.
usage of Twitter tends to be more dynamic and in real time fashion the Thais flocking to social networks, particularly Facebook, has been seen as the concurrence of the current political situations. According to the statistics reported this week, there are currently in Thailand, and the actual users added within 0,000 new users in 6 weeks. This evidently cking to the website . Facebook users on Facebakers is shown
created for political able 1.
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Table 1: Facebook pages being created for political movements
No. Objects/aims Amount Percentage
1 Oppose the red shirt 423 32.4
8 Promote peaceful activities 45 3.4
9 Complain 43 3.3
10 Being neutral 36 2.8
11 Being affected from political activities 30 2.3
12 Support the military 29 2.2
Source: http://www.siamintelligence.com, 2010 and translated by author)
According to the report in politics category of Socialbakers website in July 2013, Abhisit Vejjajiva, former prime minister, had 1,139,358 subscribers on his Facebook page while Yingluck Shinawatra, current prime minister, has her Facebook fans as high as 882, 673 subscribers. This clearly demonstrates that the conflict is the situation which occurs between the supporters and opponents of Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister. The pro-Thaksin faction is centered on the action group called the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) and characterized by its use of red. Its political alliance in the parliament is the Pheu Thai Party (For Thailand Party) which is accounted for the largest number of opposition seats in the assembly. On the other side, the political movements of the anti-Thaksin faction are led by the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) which uses yellow as its symbol.
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In the parliament, the group supports the ruling Democrat Party and its coalition partners. The coup in 2009 has accelerated political confliction and turmoil nationwide especially in Bangkok. Yet, Bangkok Poll (2013) concluded their survey that almost 70% Bangkok people and city nearby used social media to express their political opinion, moreover, 93.8% subscribed in social network as Facebook members.
Social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube’s increasing
Social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube’s increasing