Tweeting Towards Utopia: Technological Utopianism and Academic Discourse on Political Movements in the Middle East and North Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation offers a critical reading of Western academic discussions of the role of new communication technology in the Arab and Iranian movements that started in 2009.It demonstrates that while academic efforts to interpret the role of new technology in the movements display discursive variety, technological utopianism is operative in many of these efforts, generating particular images of the movements in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).Critics, James Carey (1989) and Vincent Mosco (2005), understand technological utopianism as an extension of religious ideology (Carey) or ancient mythology (Mosco), concealing unequal economic relations (Mosco, 2005;Carey, 1989).This conceptualization of technological utopianism results in a lack of attention to technological utopianism's internal complexity and heterogeneity.This study attempts to acknowledge the discursive reality of technological utopianism by heeding its discursive, institutional, and historical nuances, while also tracing its effect on developing perceptions of the contemporary movements in MENA.Acknowledging the multi-stranded nature of Western discourse of technology and its ramifications, this study employs a mixed-perspective approach.The first part of the dissertation (Chapters 2 and 3) is an historical and philosophical investigation that looks at Western discourse of technology, with special attention given to technological utopianism.Through this exploration, I put forward various models that have informed prevailing visions of technology.The second part (Chapters 5 and 6) relies on these models to critically and empirically assess their distribution in academic texts iii investigating the MENA movements.It detects, through this assessment, ways technological utopianism affords particular images of MENA's politics and societies.In order to carry out these two projects, the multi-stranded history and the empirical examination of academic discourse, this dissertation puts two discourse traditions in dialogue (Chapter 4): Foucault's sense of power and history (1971, 1977a, 1977b, 1988) and Fairclough's critical discourse analysis (2013).The empirical evidence for this study is provided via two different means of data sampling: systematic and casebased.This work carries out a systematic study of journal publications representing academic research discourse on technology in the MENA movements.It offers further evidence in three case studies chosen from three academic-related domains: public, pedagogic, and policy-setting.Informed by these analyses, this dissertation offers a critical, reflexive, and rigorous analysis of Western academic discussions of the MENA movements.As "discourse" is characterized by ubiquity and plurality, writing this dissertation about discourse, needless to say, has been a collective process, wherein I have acted as an element rather than the originator.I am grateful, first, to my supervisor, Professor Chris Russill, who has immensely shaped my thinking and instilled in me the love to reevaluate, negotiate, and revise grand ideas and master narratives.His immense knowledge and perspicacious mind have inspired me -even before this project began -since my first PhD seminar with him.The erudite insight and feedback he has provided throughout the writing of this dissertation has considerably shaped its direction and outcome.Thank you, Dr. Russill, for a great and fulfilling mentorship.I give Professors Miranda Brady
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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 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".