22 Social media in the Bahrain Uprising: From hope to despair
22 Social media in the Bahrain Uprising: From hope to despair
Marc Owen Jones, University of Tübingen
Casting one’s’ eyes back to 2011, there was certainly a lot of hope vested in the potential of social media. From Egypt to Tunisia, protesters held aloft banners bearing the logos of Facebook and Twitter. In Bahrain, the widespread sense of hope among thousands of Bahrainis was evident in their use of social media. Many people, grinning as only people do when a future of unlimited possibility stretches before them, used their smartphones to document their attendance at the Pearl Roundabout, Bahrain’s ‘Freedom Square’. They then shared it on Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, and other social media platforms.
Twitter and Facebook in particularly held an almost redemptive promise; Could this networked sense of triumph somehow galvanize a whole population into mobilization, while raising the costs for the state of engaging in repression? YouTube videos also allowed the refrains of the revolution to become ingrained in people’s minds. Chants such as as ‘silmiyya, silmiyya’ (peaceful peaceful), ‘yasqut Hamad’ (down with Hamad) ‘ashshaʿb yurīd islāh/isqāt anniẓām’ (the people want the reform/fall of the regime), ‘birūh, bidem, nafīdak yalBahrain’ (with our blood, our soul, we sacrifice ourselves for you, Bahrain) grew to be iconic of the uprising. This is especially true of the refrain of yasqut Hamad, which was soon translated into a series of beeps or pips that were frequently honked on car or air horns. The sounds of these pips were often written in an onomatopoeic fashion as ‘1010 1010 or ‘tin tin tityn.’ Other, more ambitious activists even made and distributed on YouTube a film featuring an air horn as the protagonist. The film dramatized the arrest, torture and death of a Bahraini citizen, with the air horn and its indefatigable ejaculation of the tin tin tityn refrain representing the notion of ‘Sumood’ (or steadfastness).
In addition to this, other acts of peaceful, creative defiance were circulated on social media. These included balloon releases, in which V for victory signs, pictures of martyrs, or slogans like ‘Down with Hamad’ were attached to balloons and then released into the Bahraini sky. Such seemingly harmless acts were taken seriously by the authorities, often to comic effect. In one instance, a balloon displaying the phrase ‘Down with Hamad’ was filmed being released. Later, another video emerged that showed policemen attempting to capture the balloon. Eventually the police succeeded, and put the fully inflated balloon in the back of a police jeep. Satirically, those who filmed the video titled it Itiqal Nafaakha Yasqut Hamad (Arrest of Yasqut Hamad Balloon). Similarly, a wooden mannequin of a woman with a sign reading ‘free our prisoners’ was arrested and put in the car.
Statutes of the Pearl Roundabout, which itself had become symbolic and metonymic of the uprising itself, were often made by activists following its vindictive destruct