A mature understanding of the role of the internet in the Middle Eastern revolutions

Really interesting interview of Zeynep Tufekci.

This is very close to my own understanding of the role of technology.

The interview (excerpts)

The European: What are the inextricable linkages between politics and technology that we’ve seen exposed in Tunisia or Egypt?

Tufekci: Autocratic regimes don’t stay in power for decades by governing randomly; rather, they do so by following a tried-and-tested playbook of strategic censorship, isolation and repression of dissent. And control over information flows and the public sphere is a key element of this model of autocratic regime. Regimes in the Middle East actively sought to prevent and control the spread of information because they understood that keeping sparks of dissent from lighting prairie fires of uprisings was crucial. Dissidents were punished disproportionately – long prison sentence for the smallest offenses, torture — not just because the security forces happened to be composed of sadists, but because of the same problem: to prevent cascades of dissent from taking off. The Internet has opened up the public sphere; it has allowed citizens to express their views and coordinate with each other. Does that always lead to revolution? No, you need the dissent to be there on the ground. But it does mean that such that regimes cannot continue to govern as before. They are forced to play a new game.

The European: From a Western perspective, it is tempting to say that the Arab Spring began with a big bang on January 25. You’ve already mentioned the ten-year timeframe. What is the long history of social media and revolution in the Middle East?

Tufekci: On January 26th, 2011, the Egyptian uprising needed the internet less than on January 24th,2011 – there was already an uprising, one that had been in the making for at least a decade. This long story involved a changing media ecology: The rise of Al Jazeera, the rapid spread of cell phones with video capabilities, and the rise of social media and other tools which alter the infrastructure of connectivity. When I talk to politicized Arab youth, they often say that when the internet got introduced in their region, their first thoughts were about politics. They did not think first about downloading music; rather, they realized the power of a new political space. Unlike most of us, they lived in severely censored societies and could not freely express their views. State television blabbed on about same old leader who’d been in power for decades, about meaningless elections, about nothing. People did not talk politics to each other openly because they were rightfully scared—there just weren’t somewhat free “spaces” of politics in the public sphere. And then the Internet came along. Suddenly you could begin to see them hanging out online, talking politics. Al Jazeera came along and opened up space for a kind of discourse that had just never been seen in the Arab world. You could have listened to BBC in Arabic previously, but there was never that kind of homegrown critical coverage. The other big change along with the Internet and Al Jazeera was when the cell phone camera appeared on the scene. Everyone could document events! Activist bloggers took these photos and videos of events that were not talked about otherwise and published them. It is hard to imagine how big of a red line was crossed: Bloggers published videos of corruption, of electoral fraud, of torture – a lot of torturers actually taped their action because the sense of impunity was so prevalent. With the internet, things stopped disappearing in the pit of censorship. At some point, even Egyptian state television had to address topics like police brutality or sexual harassment because the whole country was talking about it—because of bloggers.

The European: One of the questions that comes out of that observation is whether the internet is a politicizing force, or an enabling force: Does it make more people political, or does it make people more political?

Tufekci: They feed each other. When you have more political people, they talk more about politics, which might compel more people to become politically active. If people are quite happy with their regime, or if there is a lot of polarization and ethnic division, the result may be increased polarization rather than a revolutionary cascade. There’s no magic wand to revolution or democracy. So my assertion is not that the internet leads to more democracy but that it leads to more participation. What more participation leads to depends on the context, country and many other factors.

The European: How particular are these observations to the Middle East? Clearly, the internet is not bound by regional borders, but my hunch is that its consequences might play out very differently in different contexts.

Tufekci: While the public sphere is relatively diverse in the US or in Europe, it is not wide open to all groups and that is changing. In the past, the threshold for organizing outside the system of electoral politics was much higher: the rise of the Green Party in Germany, for example, is a story that was not easily replicable. As we speak, we see Newt Gingrich propelled back into the race for the presidency in the United States through grassroots enthusiasm among the Republicans. I believe such enthusiasm is sustained partly by the ability of regular people to find one another and draw strength from that — that others who think like them exist and are vocal. The Republican establishment is scared of a Gingrich nomination but their base keeps pushing from below. Old gatekeepers still exist, and still wield enormous power, but they find themselves pushed by other players.

The European: Are those just novel players, or are they a new form of gatekeepers? When I look at big bloggers or platforms like MoveOn, it’s hard to see them as anything but bottlenecks for the spread of information.

Tufekci: There are some new gatekeepers and new forms of power. Increasingly, such power can in the form of algorithms rather than organizations – Twitter’s tending topics or Google search are examples of a way in which an algorithm can focus attention. Curator-journalists like Andy Carvin are emergent gatekeepers as well. But that does not mean that old gatekeepers are becoming irrelevant. Broadcast news in the US is declining, but compared to all the other ways of reaching people, TV is still very important. The evening news is still the 800-pound gorilla: Instead of reaching 50 million people, you might reach 20 million. But that is still a huge number.

The European: Do we tend to confuse openness and access to information with power?

Tufekci: Politics is still about getting attention, and any online movement needs to navigate through the existing bottlenecks. But it used to be that you had to be very rich or important to get through. Now you can organize for attention. I don’t think that is good or bad by itself – sometimes I’m scared: The US-based anti-vaccination campaign is not just irrational, it is dangerous. It endangers the health and well-being of children. And I don’t think it could sustain itself so powerfully if the adherents couldn’t find one another through social media. The old gatekeepers would likely have filtered it out. So, it’s a different world. Is it better or worse? I say, yes. It is better and it is worse.

The European: So here’s a caveat: When the public sphere opens up, you cannot control what ideas are nudged forward. And we’re willing to say a lot of things over the internet that we would not say in person to someone.

Tufekci: We feel most powerful when we know that others hold similar opinions – and we can now know that because you can it on the Internet. The Arab Spring worked similarly: When hundreds of thousands of people clicked on the “Like” button for the “We are all Khaled Saed” page in Egypt, or “accepted the invitation” to attend the demonstrations on January 25, 2011, it makes it more likely that something will really happen. It becomes a self-fulfilling spiral of preference assertion, a cascade of action. You see other people, and you feel powerful. Social science calls this overcoming of “pluralistic ignorance”: “Hidden preferences” — preferences that people hold privately but believe are in a minority because others who also hold them also hide them – are revealed to be widespread. That empowerment is true across the political spectrum and across causes — and across time as well. The “Economist” recently published a great article on the use of viral media during the era of Luther’s reformation. It is my assertion that social media predates digital media. The internet happens to be a medium that is particularly participatory. That’s a stroke of luck: the people who designed it never imagined it as a global network, so they designed an open system for people who knew and trusted each other.”

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