Blesses and Curses: Virtual Dissidence as a Contentious Performance in the Arab Spring's Repertoire of Contention
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Activists have fashioned nonconventional forms of repertoire and contentious performances during the recent conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa. Salient among these contentious performances is virtual dissidence. I conceptualize virtual dissidence as a political performance in the repertoire of contention between authoritative regimes and the latter’s contenders. The metaphors of repertoire and performance bridge apparent conceptual dichotomies in analyzing the role of social media in the Arab Spring such as structure versus agency in the service of a relational account of it. This essay will not bring these debates to any final resolution; rather, my goal is to provide a modest yet productive intervention in the debate over the importance of Internet activism in social movements. The significance of understanding virtual dissidence as emerging from repertoire is that it frames a meso-level explanation of collective action and political change. It accounts for the constraints imposed by the macro structure and the array of innovative responses ignited by activists’ determination.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".