The Revolution will be
tweeted. Or will it?
by
Alan Zisman (c)
2011 First published in
Columbia
Journal May 2011
So-called social media have become increasingly popular in the past few
years – web services including Facebook (with over 600 million users)
and Twitter (with over 200 million users) where anyone, at least anyone
with Internet access, can set up an account and share what they’re
thinking with ‘friends’ and ‘followers’.
Also increasingly popular – suggestions in the mainstream media that
these sorts of services play a critical role in mass protest movements.
When mass protests swept Iran in following 2009 elections, the US State
Department asked Twitter to postpone scheduled system updates to make
sure that Twitter remained available to the protesters. US security
analysis Mark Pfeifl suggested, “Without Twitter the people of Iran
would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and
democracy,” There was talk of nominating Twitter for a Nobel peace
prize.
Early in 2011, in the midst of its own series of mass protests, the
Egyptian government cut off nearly all Internet access within the
country for five days, hoping to remove the protesters from these
organizing tools.
It’s not just limited to the third world. In 2008, the Obama campaign
made social media one of their tools to mobilize voters and raise
funds. Locally, Facebook was used by organizers of the anti-HST
movement, who gathered over a quarter of a million members of two
anti-HST Facebook protest groups. (It’s not limited to left-wing
protest movements, of course. Right wing and racist movements can also
use social media as organizing tools).
Of course, there have been mass protests and revolutions prior to
social media. During 1991’s attempted coup in the (then) Soviet Union,
mass opposition to the coup was reportedly organized using a de facto
network of fax machines, for instance.
Not everyone agrees that social movements are inevitably empowered by
social media, however. In “The Net Delusion”, Evgeny Morozov critiques
what he refers to as ‘cyber-utopianism’, suggesting that technology can
be used to enslave as readily as to liberate. He notes that during the
2009 protests, few Iranians were actually Twitter users. Instead, he
points out, Iranian exiles were far more active on Twitter than
Iranians within the country, accounting for the bulk of the Twitter
messages about the elections and ensuing protests.
Malcolm Gladwell, in the New Yorker (
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell)
gives his views on ‘why the revolution will not be tweeted’. He
suggests that while social networks make it relatively easy to build
large groups, they are connected with what he considers ‘weak ties’;
it’s perhaps too easy to click ‘Like’ on a Facebook page promoting a
cause. Gladwell contrasts that to the small groups of activists whose
civil disobedience shook segregation in the US South in the 1950s and
60s. In his opinion, Facebook groups can easily get thousands to join
up because they don’t ask too much of them – in stark contrast to being
asked to risk imprisonment or beating by sitting in at a segregated
lunch counter.
He points out that “the Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has
1,282,339 members, who have donated an average of nine cents apiece”,
implying that Facebook activism is like Facebook friendship – broad but
shallow.
On April 9th, Adel Iskandar of Georgetown University’s Centre for
Contemporary Arab Studies was interviewed on Coop Radio’s Redeye show.
(You can hear or download the interview at
http://www.coopradio.org/station/archives/62
- select April 9, 2011, 9 am).
He reported that a Facebook page ‘We're all Khaled Said’ played a key
role at the start of this year’s protests in Egypt. The page, attacking
corruption and abuse of power by Egypt’s police’ had garnered 430,000
followers and was the first to call for protests for January 25. He
noted, however, that while 60% of Egypt’s population is under 30, only
a minority has access to the Internet or social media.
As Iskandar describes it, the January 25th protest became successful
because organizing for it spread beyond Facebook – first through
satellite TV and opposition and human rights groups, and finally
through direct appeals to residents of Cairo’s poorer neighbourhoods.
When the Egyptian government was successful in turning off the Internet
for five days, this became more apparent – social media played a role,
but organizing had to go beyond it to succeed.
After Net access was restored, as with the 2009 Iranian events, social
media played an important role in informing people outside the country
about what was happening with the protests. Iskandar’s perspective:
social media can be used to create portals for communication that
otherwise would not exist. This can be an important component for a
modern social movement, but isn’t going to determine whether a
revolution will succeed or fail.