By Any Media Necessary by Henry Jenkins

Author:Henry Jenkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781479829712
Publisher: NYU Press

Silence and Surveillance

Being a Muslim in America is not easy at all. There are a lot of uncertainties about our role in American narratives because of 9/11.… I think this is an issue for people, for Muslims in our community, whose civil liberties are being completely pillaged. You know there are people held without … whatever, I don’t want to get into that too much.

Selina, a young American Muslim woman and an environmental activist, cut herself off when the conversation she had with Shresthova turned to concerns about civil liberties and privacy. She worried that post-9/11 security measures, such as the Patriot Act, have “pillaged” civil liberties. Selina also hesitated to speak about how surveillance of American Muslim communities had affected her behavior, but explained that she is not very active online even though she recognized that utilizing platforms like Twitter and Facebook would help her spread the word about her environmental causes.

Privacy and surveillance are both fraught concepts often positioned within a dichotomy of private versus public premised on what Helen Nissenbaum (2004) identifies as “the sanctity of certain spaces, or more abstractly, places” (102). While the specifics of the private/public dichotomy certainly merit attention, the American Muslim youth we interviewed articulated privacy in ways that echoed danah boyd and Alice Marwick’s (2011) definition, “a sense of control over how and when information flows.” American Muslim youth certainly do worry about surveillance that invades traditionally private realms—specifically, systematized monitoring systems put in place by governmental authorities and companies that work with them or may sometimes be obliged to. Such surveillance has, indeed, become a reality for some young American Muslim activists, particularly those involved in contentious social justice campaigns. Even youth who may be less involved in activist campaigns often practice “self-censorship” within what Evgeny Morozov (2012) describes as a “pervasive climate of uncertainty, anxiety, and fear” (145). As they struggle to find a semblance of comfort as they weigh the risks and possibilities of public expression, many young American Muslims strike a constantly shifting balance between finding voice and choosing silence.

During our research, one of the most urgently articulated concerns around the silencing power of surveillance surfaced in connection with what became known as the Irvine11 campaign, supporting a group of University of California, Irvine, students (all members of the Muslim Students’ Union) arrested after they disrupted Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s speech on campus on November 8, 2010. Prosecutors used emails and online posts as evidence that the MSU members had planned their disruption of Ambassador Oren’s speech well in advance. Tanya, an Irvine11 activist, recalled sitting in the courtroom during the trial and realizing how easily online exchanges could be used against the protesters: “They had every email from the MSU, every single email that anyone had sent out.” Reflecting on her own previous involvement with social justice organizations, local nonprofits, and labor unions, Tanya stressed that these groups were “never really active on the internet.” She recalled, “None of our communication would be online. None of it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.