Picking a fight with Clay Shirky

There is an interesting comment that Clay Shirky has just posted to GigaOm:

No one believes social media _causes_ otherwise complacent citizens to become angry enough to take to the streets. It’s a convenient straw man for the skeptics, because, as an obviously ridiculous narrative, it’s easy to refute.

I guess I must be the skeptic touting this straw man argument, because Clay told me the same thing over Twitter. What's most intriguing about this comment is Clay's deliberate use of the term "social media". I've noticed that whenever it comes to debates about the Internet & democratization, this is now his new preferred term (see his Foreign Affairs piece "The Political Power of Social Media").

On Clay's account, "social media" is just a tool that people use to coordinate. So, saying that people want a revolution because of "social media" is akin to saying that people want a revolution because of the telephone. Fair enough and - hold your breath! - I actually agree with Clay on this one.

But this is a very sly recasting of the terms of the debate on Clay's part; the debate about the Internet's impact on democratization has never been about social media only. For example, the impact of social media on social mobilization plays a very minor part in my overall argument; I'm much more interested in understanding the long-term impact of new technologies on authoritarianism and here I also have to consider how it may boost their attempts at surveillance, propaganda, censorship and even the trivialization of public discourse.

A substantial intellectual chunk of this broader debate has been devoted to trying to understand whether giving people the ability to access banned or highly critical information will politicize them in the long term. It's not an argument about mobilization during protests - it's an argument about whether the Internet boosts the odds that such mobilization might eventually happen in the long term.

This is why, I think, we spend so much time debating what to do about circumvention tools that help to bypass censorship. Will giving everyone in China access to a technology like Tor have the desired outcomes of politicizing the masses and enticing the revolution or will the Chinese just use Tor to download porn and get disengaged from politics altogether? Mind you, it's not just about facilitating access to Twitter and Facebook - the tools of social organization- it's also about facilitating access to sites of Human Rights Watch or Radio Free Asia.

Anyone who has seen reports about Tunisia's "WikiLeaks Revolution" would know that those accounts mostly focus on the role that the cable revelations about Tunisia played in enticing the protests (this is an account I don't agree with, if it's not yet obvious). To suggest that a term like a "WikiLeaks Revolution" does not also celebrate - perhaps, implicitly - the factors most commonly associated with the Internet (its resilience against censorship, its spirit of mutual collaboration, etc) would be extremely disingenuous. When people say that events in Tunisia were a "WikILeaks Revolution", they are consciously or subconsciously cheering the fact that there is this former-hacker guy Assange who used the Internet to do the unthinkable. If this is not what is celebrated by the term "WikiLeaks Revolution", then it doesn't have any meaning at all.

WikiLeaks, alas, is not "social media" - so it doesn't meet Clay's rigid definition. But if you broaden the terms of the debate to the Internet proper - and those are the terms that are most interesting to me - you are bound to notice that there are plenty of pundits and analysts celebrating the power of the Internet to politicize future protesters - not only to help them organize. This, by the way, is the same argument that was used by plenty of neocons in the wake of the Soviet collapse: it was assumed that the Western radio informed Soviet citizens about the superior value of Western goods - and the Soviets eventually rebelled. Apologies for self-promotion, but anyone who thinks these are not real intellectual narratives being pimped in Washington DC should take a look at my book, where they are extensively documented (including in the 70-page bibliography!)

Here is just an excerpt from Thomas Friedman's "The Lexus and the Olive Tree", p. 66:

"Put all of this democratization of information together and what it means is that the days when governments could isolate their people from understanding what life was like beyond their borders or even beyond their village are over. Life outside can't be trashed and made to look worse than it is...On the Internet people are ... uploading and downloading ideologies. In a few years, every citizen of the world will be able to comparison shop between his country and his own government and the one next door".

Now debunking Thomas Friedman may seem less gratifying than debunking a social media guru like Clay Shirky - but Friedman is a much better proxy for what people in Washington really think. Anyone who has looked at his columns over the past 5 years would see that he hasn't really changed his view on the power of the Internet.

So, yes, we can have an intelligent debate about the virtues and downsides of social media - but I would not like us to lose sight of the broader intellectual debate about the Internet and democratization, especially in this post-Cablegate era. After all, the debate we are having in Washington is not about the future of "The Social Media Freedom Agenda", it's a debate about the future of the "The Internet Freedom Agenda".

Is Clay himself making a straw man argument here? 

UPDATE: Clay has posted an update to his original comment. 

What if Tunisia's revolution ended up like Iran's?

(I am not a big fan of counterfactual thinking, but in this particular case it does help to generate new insights.)

So let's assume that the protests in Tunisia had eventually gone the way of the Green Revolution in Iran: the government stayed in power, regrouped, and began a massive crackdown on its opponents.

As we know from the post-protest crackdown in Iran, the Internet has proved a very rich source of incriminating details about activists; the police scrutinized Facebook groups, tweets, and even email groups very closely. Furthermore, the Iran government may have also analyzed Internet traffic and phone communications related to the opposition.

Now, Tunisia is no in Iran. Its long-ruling dictator is now gone and the new government is unlikely to engage in repressions on the same scale. Yet if Ben Ali's regime didn't fall, it appears certain to that the authorities would be brutally going after anyone who has ever posted a damning Facebook post or an angry email. As we have seen in the few weeks leading to Ali's exit, the Tunisian cyber-police have proved to be far more skilled in Internet repression than their counterparts abroad: it's safe to assume they would have dug as much evidence as the Iranians.

This brings me to a somewhat depressing conclusion: if the dictator doesn't fall in the end, the benefits of social mobilization afforded by the Internet are probably outweighed by its costs (i.e. the ease of tracking down dissidents - let alone organizers of the protests).

The question then is whether the social mobilization afforded by the Internet provides a force that is so powerful that no dictator would be able to withstand it. Judging by the events in Iran, the answer seems to be "no"...

It's certainly good news that the revolution in Tunisia has happened - for whatever political and social reasons - just like it's good news that the Internet has played some role in it. But we shouldn't forget that if one of the enabling political and social conditions is missing, the ease of Internet mobilization may also prove to be the opposition's Achilles' heel. 

P.S. Yes, I know that crackdowns used to follow failed revolutions before the Internet as well.  My point is simply that technology - not just the Internet but also mobile phones - make it easier to trace protesters and dissidents. It would be very hard, for example, to trace the names of everyone who gathered on Minsk's central square to oppose the results of the recent elections in Belarus before mobile phones became ubiquitous... 

Tunisia, social media and the politics of attention

Over Twitter, Sami ben Gharbia - who, I hope, will finally get a chance to return to Tunisia after his long exile - pointed out that social media did play an important role in "feeding" information to Al-Jazeera and France 24, conceding that at the same time it didn't have much of an impact on the coverage of the protests in the US.

Sami's remark made me think about my earlier blog post a bit more. My argument isn't really about the efficacy of social media in improving the coverage of the protests in the mainstream media (i.e. their venue, schedule, leaders, etc). Rather, my argument is in the vein of Ethan Zuckerman's reflections on media attention patterns - and ways of shifting them.

But while Ethan's work is focused mostly on getting ordinary Americans to care about foreign affairs, my interest here is on a somewhat different, more pragmatic level: getting Americans to care is likely to push Washington to care as well. This in itself can create powerful incentives for dictators to play by the rules or exit peacefully. (There is probably an element of this to Ethan's thought as well, even though I'm not sure if the citizens-government connection is essential to his analysis). 

As I deconstruct the original hype behind the "Twitter Revolutions" in Iran and especially Moldova, their real promise (aside, of course, from liberating the country from oppressive rulers) seemed to lie in using social media as some kind of a Trojan horse to get their countries onto the front pages of American newspapers  - and then, hopefully, on the top of Washington's agenda.

There were good grounds for believing this hype. If my memory serves me right, the time gap between me christening the events in Moldova as a "Twitter revolution" and the New York Times running a front page story about it was less than 12 hours. In the case of Tunisia, this time gap has been almost a month...I don't buy the theory that Moldova is more important than Tunisia (not to mention that few Americans ever go on holiday to Moldova...)

Now, I know that Al-Jazeera and France 24 (to their credit) began reporting on Tunisia much earlier than their American counterparts. But then it was probably not a factor of social media's influence but rather of Tunisia's unique position in the Arab and Francophone world. There is little doubt that social media has helped to make their coverage better. Has it also played a role in generating new coverage that wouldn't have happened without it? This would be one good question to investigate. 

There are probably many dissertations to be written about the way in which the rise of non-American global broadcasters like Al-Jazeera and France 24 has helped to balance the geopolitical myopia of the American media. However, as much as I'd like to think that it has led to some fundamental shifts in how the American public (and, by extension, the US government) choose their news diet, I cannot possibly see much evidence that this is actually happening.

Thus, that early promise of the Twitter Revolution - that social media could offer a way to hijack the news agenda (and thus influence foreign policy) in the US - rings somewhat hollow to me. I do hope that I'm wrong.

First thoughts on Tunisia and the role of the Internet

News from Tunisia looks good. For better or worse, many of us will be pondering the role that the Internet played or didn't play in the events of the Jasmine Revolution. Below are some preliminary reflections, which, if you know me well, are likely to change by the end of next week!

One thing to keep in mind is that revolutions will continue and Twitter won't go away anytime soon. So, it's reasonable to assume that there WILL be some new-media activity for any social or political turmoil. But correlation, as well all know, doesn't always mean causation.

To reiterate: Yes, there will be YouTube videos, Flickr photos, and Twitter messages -- some written by people on the ground and some by those outside -- accompanying any revolution, successful or not. To deny this would be silly.

What strikes me about events in Tunisia is that social media seems to have failed in what many of us thought would be its greatest contribution (outside of social mobilization) -- that is, in helping to generate and shape the coverage of events in the mainstream media. On the contrary, despite all the buzz on Twitter it took four weeks to get the events in Tunisia on the front pages of major newspapers, at least here in the U.S. (the situation in Europe was somewhat better -- and it was way better in the Middle East -- for all the obvious reasons).

How does it fare historically? Well, much of the enthusiasm related to the "Twitter Revolutions" in Moldova and Iran was based on the expectation that social media would help to push these events on the agenda of traditional media -- and it actually worked. By 2011, however, I think that the novelty had worn off -- and few media outlets were interested in carrying "Social Media Changes Everything!" stories. I'm sure there are many other reasons why Tunisia matters less than Iran for most media -- but then so did Moldova…

This is not to deny that many of us were watching the Tunisian events unfold via Twitter. But let's not kid ourselves: This is still a very small audience of overeducated tech-savvy people interested in foreign policy. I bet that 90% of Twitter users are not like that -- and that percentage will get worse as Twitter becomes more mainstream. So, if we evaluate it in terms of awareness-raising by exploiting and building off the mainstream media, Tunisia's "Twitter Revolution" (as Andrew Sullivan was already quick to dub it), seems to have failed.

I'm curious to see more data about the role that social media have played in the mobilization of protesters. I hope that Sami ben Gharbia and others would enlighten us here. Off the top of my head, it strikes me as improbable that some people in Tunisia had a higher chance of learning about the protests from the Internet than they did from conversations in the streets. Besides, many people got killed, the situation was highly emotional -- and I'm not sure how much anger twe