We've now seen a series of waves of popular unrest which were, if not triggered by, at least accelerated and sustained for a period of time by social media, text messaging, easily-distributed digital imagery and all the rest of systems of our wired world. The latest reports out of Egypt are that the state has either disrupted or shutdown key social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as well as text-messaging and Blackberry service. It's unclear to me in this report from the AP whether Internet connections themselves have been blocked; but clearly access to the Internet has been significantly curtailed.
On its face, this seems like an obvious step for any embattled regime to take. Taking a whole country off the grid for any period of time would likely be catastrophic in the early 21st century. But surely an authoritarian or episodically repressive regime could disrupt connectivity for some period to prevent its overthrow and not have it do too much damage to the economy.
So two questions occur to me. One is just how much digital media really plays into these episodes of popular unrest in Iran or Tunisia or Egypt. It seems clear to me that it plays a role -- just as print played an important role in creating a popular self-consciousness among hitherto scattered and isolated communities and in facilitating communication. But just how much is unclear to me. Does digital communications really make spontaneous organization and collaboration possible or does it just give us a window into a process that's taken place with less technology in countless popular revolts over the last few hundred years? I don't have an answer to that. But I think it's worth reminding ourselves that it's still an open question.
My personal thoughts are that, especially for those my age and younger, Twitter, Facebook and other social networks allow for nearly instant mass communication with not just people inside the protest zone, but outside as well. Knowing that a world community has your back is a powerful incentive, and getting real-time updates from protests is powerful information, information that a regime cannot always control.
So yes, authoritarians have much to fear in tweets and texts. Egypt's crackdown on the net ahead of today's protests are certainly a sign that the Mubarak government is very, very scared.
The question is, could it happen in the US.
Not only could it happen here, it's exactly what they're planning for:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/28/egypt-just-turned-of.html
it would be a lot harder to turn off the internet in the u.s. (aside from the fact that if they pulled it off, the u.s. economy would collapse. too much of it is based online now, so that would be a major incentive not to even if the u.s. government found a way to do it)
ReplyDeletethe reason it would be harder is because the u.s. has a lot of cables connecting our network to the rest of the world. egypt has just a handful. in 2007 and 2008 the cable broke (or was cut) and egypt lost its internet connection. at the time people wondered whether the mossad was behind it (because that's what people wonder anytime anything happens in the middle east), but it seems odd that israel would cut the cable of it's best regional partner as opposed to all the other ones who are a lot more hostile. it probably was just a series of accidents. those accidents don't happen in the u.s. because there are so many cables we have a lot more redundancies.