I wanted to address a common question that has been thrown
around since the Middle East revolutions started.
Namely, did social media cause them, or merely aid them?
More accurately put, has social media incentivized revolutionaries
to organize? Or has it been ineffective?
No, the revolution was not caused by social media–it was caused
by the atrocities committed by the respective regimes on their
citizens. Without social media, the revolutions could have still
existed. But their potency would have greatly diminished, both from
activists and from those watching from around the globe.
By now you have likely read Malcolm Gladwell’s “Small Change” piece
in the New Yorker, in which his purpose evidently was to explore
“why the revolutions will not be Tweeted”.
He asks: “Are people who log on to their Facebook page really
the best hope for us all?”
We also “seem to have forgotten what activism is”.
But if that’s so, then I guess my other posts are irrelevant–
the ones about Egyptian and Libyan activists leveraging these
tools for their cause, and how governments are censoring it.
But that’s exactly the point–if social media is ineffective,
why did Mubarak and Gaddafi bother to shut down certain networks?
The fact that they did this, and that activists immediately
started using other available networks, evidences two things:
1) Social media is a powerful communication tool for its
ease of use, speed, and decentralized format.
2) Governments recognize and fear these qualities and
their role in the power of revolution.
This proves Gladwell and the other social media skeptics wrong.
It also proves Southwestern University law professor and author Butler Schaffer right.
His assertions on LewRockwell.com state that more decentralized
tools are quickly becoming popular with citizens, in an attempt
to reorganize societies globally. Nowhere is this more evident than
with social media.
“Perhaps it is reflective of mankind’s capacities for tool-making that,
rather than plumbing the depths of our thinking, we have created
technologies that allow us to share the contents of our respective
conscious and unconscious minds. Our computerized technologies are not
only the products of our thinking, but the means for expanding its content
to exponential levels of awareness”.
That very awareness, contrary to Gladwell’s speculation, indeed led
to offline action in the streets. This escalated once Mubarak and Gaddafi
started shutting down various social media networks. We even saw knee-jerk
reactions to this decentralized activism from China, who quickly
put the kabash on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
This reinforces the second point about governments’ fear.
If what you say about your government can be instantly seen
and shared worldwide, you have a problem on your hands as
an authoritarian system. You have to still maintain some
desperate forms of control as your state is crumbling.
The question now is, what will the ‘replacement society’
be for Egypt and Libya, and how will social media play a role in
that? (Hint: Libyan citizens don’t want us there, but Obama
and the UN Security Council think sanctions and intervention actually work).
From now on (sorry Gladwell), the revolutions will be Tweeted,
as decentralized tools continue to reinforce revolutionary ideas.
Stateless Social 