Clockwise from top left: Protesters gathering in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt; Demonstrators marching through Habib Bourguib Avenue in Tunis, Tunisia; Political dissidents in Sana'a, Yemen, demanding the resignation of the president; Protests in Douma, Syria. (Picture taken from Wikimedia Commons)
This article explores how the role of social media in democratic civil unrest has been exaggerated in the wake of the Arab Spring.
The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia were quick, rapidly changing events that occurred during a a period of widespread access to modern technology. Organizers used contemporary communication techniques by leveraging social media through their own personal computers. Protests and demonstrations spread faster through digital means because of the capacity to be organized quicker and become more sporadic. Thousands of Egyptian youth successfully demonstrated in Tahrir Square by harnessing social media tools, using Facebook and Twitter for planting the seeds of revolution. Young Tunisians collaborated with young Egyptians through online forums; Tunisians would tell their fellow Egyptians, “Put vinegar or onion under your scarf for tear gas.”[1] Even though the digital age has fueled protests and mass mobilization as shown by the tech-savvy generation of restless young Egyptians, the idea that technological social media platforms are providing the foundations for revolution is an immense exaggeration of their true proportional significance on the revolutions.
The widespread protests in the Middle East and Northern Africa have been largely conducted by the disenfranchised youth who are frustrated by the lack of job opportunity, rampant corruption, failed promises in economic reform, and limited political freedom, all attributed to the autocratic regimes throughout the regions. Especially in Egypt and Tunisia, autocratic rulers such as Hosni Mubarak and Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali ruled their countries for over 30 years. The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt were building up behind the scenes, slowly yet steadily, as if they were waiting to burst out. These revolutions were all propelled by ideas not inspired by new social media, but rather guided by it.
The day Mubarak stepped down, former Google executive and a chief symbol in the revolution Wael Ghonim said the following:
I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him […] I’m talking on behalf of Egypt. […] This revolution started online. This revolution started on Facebook. This revolution started […] in June 2010 when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians started collaborating content. We would post a video on Facebook that would be shared by 60,000 people on their walls within a few hours. I’ve always said that if you want to liberate a society just give them the Internet.[2]
Now here is one of the chief leaders of the revolution, a Google executive, giving thanks to Mark Zuckberg for indirectly starting a revolution in Egypt. The fallacy lies in this idea that Facebook itself spurred the revolution. Revolutions are spurred through ideas and deep-rooted social activism, tied to political, economic and social tensions. It lies in the fact that the media assumes the youth are very technologically savvy and rely on the Internet and other technological means to complete everyday tasks, and therefore our main form of communication in the world now instigates revolutions.
Our generation may be known as “the Facebook generation”, the social media generation where we constantly garner and intake data, but the Internet is just a tool. It is just a new form of communicating with the world insofar it is a faster and easier way to spread ideas. The Internet by itself is ineffective. A user can hit the “like” button on Facebook for Darfur or tweet about curing world poverty, but that is only “slacktivism”[3], wherein people are casually participating to seek social change. Facebook and Twitter themselves do not spur ideas. Social media are tools that facilitate them on a message board, a forum that is opened up and allows for the Arab world’s youth to collaborate with each other to create a more pragmatic and just approach to governance. Before the consumer market emergence of the Internet, older communication technologies, such as TV and radio, provided similar roles in assisting regime change. One revolt, led by the charismatic Ayatollah Khomeini, took advantage of cassette tapes to spread his message in over 9000 mosques in Iran during the 1979 revolution.
The social media phenomenon has the same effect as Guttenberg’s printing press did during the 1400’s in Europe. It’s allowed for less political oppression and a more open public sphere because acts of tyranny cannot be hidden. The social media phenomenon makes it that much easier for everyday people from Spain to Alaska to see images of what is going on in Egypt. What social media does is provide ground for “shared awareness” in the political sphere in Egypt as the world saw what happened when the Egyptian people became aware in the public sphere is what often happens in the shadows: a young protester being bullied, bloodied, and beaten to death by law enforcement agencies.
Shared awareness greatly influenced the revolutions in Egypt by allowing the violence to enter the public sphere. The Mubarak regime started to restrict text-messaging services, and inevitably “killed” the Internet by not allowing access to social media services such as Facebook during the protests. Shared awareness leads to the dictator’s dilemma: New media increases public access to speech and assembly; the monopoly on speech that regimes such as Egypt and Tunisia once had on the press were slowly dissipating. This allowed for even more dissent to take place and created a situation where shared awareness led to political outrage. This led the authoritarian regime to underestimate not only the power of social media, but it also led to a series of missteps that have let the Mubarak regime slip on its grip on power within Egypt. Even tools of social media, if properly used, can guide and influence the public sphere as seen in Egypt and Tunisia. They can open up and dismantle authoritarian regime, and have a significant effect on social revolutions.
There is no denying that Facebook and Twitter were ways to mobilize the masses of young protesters who sought immediate change from Mubarakism, but revolutions existed before people had to tweet their thoughts, and will exist after the Arab uprisings. Social media helped a thousand flowers blooms, but is not the seed itself that needs to grow. What revolutions need is organization, funding, and mass appeal.[4] The Egypt and Tunisia uprisings certainly did have these conditions, with the help of social media, but they are only platforms for ideas, the core roots of deep seated activism and causes that need to be stirred as it was done in Egypt and Tunisia. The world is not witnessing a Twitvolution, but rather a revolution that is conducted through new modes of communication that have assisted in the birth pangs of an Arab Spring.
Works Cited
[1] Sanger David. “Egyptians Tunisians Collaborated to Shake Arab history”. 13 February 2011. New York Times. <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/world/middleeast/14egypt-tunisia-protests.html?ref=davidesanger>
[2] Smith Catharine. “Egypt’s Wael Ghonim thanks the Social Network”. 11 February 2011. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/11/egypt-facebook-revolution-wael-ghonim_n_822078.html>
[3] Shirky Clay. “The Political Power of Social Media”. February 2011. <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67038/clay-shirky/the-political-power-of-social-media?page=show>
[4] Noonan Sean. “Social media as a tool of protest”. 3 February 2011. <http://www.cfr.org/democracy-and-human-rights/stratfor-social-media-tool-protest/p23994>
