Egypt, social media, and democracy

At a certain point, the protests in Egypt provoked the same question that almost all popular uprisings in the past five or so years have provoked, which is whether, or how much, their success is due to the use of the new media. This idea goes back to 2001 protests in the Philippines, in which the role of the cell phone has been much commented upon. These protests resulted in the resignation of the sitting president. Social media were credited for promoting political protests in Belarus, in Madrid, and the election protests in Iran in 2009. Tunisia's recent regime change has created the same sort of debate, this time in regards to wikipedia. Claims about the importance of Twitter, and Facebook, and text messaging, in spreading the word and in coordinating massive public actions have also produced push back, most notably in an essay by The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell, who dismissed the idea that social media played much of a role in the Iranian protests. In fact, both he and the Net's most famous skeptic, Evgeny Morozov, have even suggested that the social media may have helped police track down and arrest protest leaders.

It's a silly argument, in a way. Of course social media play a role in any modern political mobilization, just as the mass media play a role, and also traditional media, and of course also interpersonal communication (also cars, and various other forms of technology). Social media play a role in modern life. The question is, what sort of role do they play? That seems to be obvious, but the problem at this point is that so many people are so invested--emotionally and professionally--in the idea that new media have created a fundamental break with how things worked in the past (the past defined as about 2001). So we don't ask specific, answerable questions that could be asked by some solid empirical research: say, a series of interviews among opposition leaders about how social media were used to create public meetings, whether media networks overlap with interpersonal networks, and to what extent, etc. The legwork involved would take time, of course, and effort, and would probably come out sounding not nearly so dramatic as the claim that new media are the best tool for controlling a population ever invented, or the tools for constructing a brand new, democratic universe.

But revolutions happened before Twitter. There were democratic possibilities before smart mobs and texting. So the first, fundamental issue has to be not whether Twitter or Facebook are decisive for creating popular opposition: they obviously are not. The question now has to be: now that they are playing role, what character do they give to the new political movements. But as long as we have the evangelists and the dystopians making large claims and counter-claims about the Direction of History, we're never going to figure that out.