Social Media Tribes: Policing the Margins of the State in Jordan

Dominant depictions of social media have often focused on its technical dimensions, especially the growing ability of individuals to disseminate words and images through far-flung networks thanks to the proliferation of low-cost micro-computing and ubiquitous cellular telephony. However, social media has also relied on key political and legal shifts and the renegotiation of the state-society divide.

In this talk, Geoffrey Hughes emphasizes how social media is part and parcel of neoliberalization more broadly. Drawing on substantial fieldwork conducted in Jordan, he focuses on how Jordanians have constructed online tribal publics as a means of responding to these trends in global political economy.

These publics herald a more agonistic concept of the political ('politics of accusation') that may challenge incumbent elites, but also offers new avenues for intimidation and cooptation. Like so many more physical frontier zones before it, the internet here becomes both a place where people seek refuge from authority, but also a laboratory where new forms of social control can be perfected. At a moment when liberal democracy seems to be in retreat, Hughes suggests that authoritarian contexts like Jordan might offer a glimpse of the future of our global media and politics more broadly.

Geoffrey Hughes holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan and is currently a lecturer and researcher based at the University of Exeter. His research and teaching focuses on the politics of everyday life in the contemporary Middle East, with an emphasis on kinship, gender, Islam, and the state.