So there's this debate going on whether social media have played a critical role in the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions and in the broader wave of social unrest sweeping North Africa and the Middle East. The mainstream media uncritically latched onto the idea from the first, slavishly repeating the old trope of sophisticated Western innovation making culture and progressive change accessible to inferior and impoverished brown people all around the world. Tunisia was made possible, we were told, by educated youth using twitter and facebook to coordinate their protests, and the Egyptians found out about the Tunisian revolution through their facebook accounts and promptly went out and did the same thing.
That early reporting never bothered to ask specifically about the mechanisms that could have allowed social media to have this revolutionary impact, and without that critical discussion it was easy to simply assume that technology in and of itself was the driving force behind the movements. Replace twitter with radio, or moving pictures, and the story could have been written in the 1920s.
Now, however, a homegrown twitter/facebook revolution seems to be taking root in Wisconsin and Ohio, as working peoples in both states mobilize mass protests against vicious assaults on their collective bargaining rights and, ultimately, their standard of living and job security. In the absence of significant national reporting on the protests, it seems clear that social media is a driving force allowing activists to connect and to coordinate their activities.
How does it work? Terry Gross yesterday interviewed Twitter founder Biz Stone specifically on the question of how Twitter has been employed by revolutionary movements in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and his comments strike me as being fairly insightful. See excerpts on the flip....
At about the thirty-three minute mark, Stone talks about some revelations he had while attending the 2007 South by Southwest conference in Austin. Twitter had been in existence for a couple years at that point, but hadn't yet taken off in a big way. Here's what Stone had to say:
This was the first time and the right crowd that we were able to see Twitter in the wild, so to speak. And what we saw was really amazing.
There was a couple of stories that came out of that particular week that were really, really big for us. One, there was a lecture going on that I was attending, I was just watching from the audience, and I noticed all of a sudden that all of these people started getting up in the middle of the lecture as if a PA system had announced "everyone leave." But there was no PA system and what it was was it was people using their mobile phones and their laptops and Twitter to communicate that there was a much more interesting lecture going on across the hall. And so they silently got up and they moved across the hall as one.
Later, that night, there was a party -- because this event is also about the parties at night -- and there was a guy at a bar who really wanted to be able to talk more with his friends and it was too loud, so he sent out a tweet that said "this place is too loud, I'm going to this other place." And he named the other place, and in the eight minutes it took him to walk to this other bar it had completely filled to capacity and there was a line out the door. So his plan backfired, but what had happened was his one tweet had been received by his hundred or so followers, they sent the same tweet out saying "hey, this is what we're doing" and within eight minutes eight hundred people descended upon this bar.
So Stone gives us a couple of examples from South by Southwest of capacity of social media -- Twitter specifically -- to coordinate social behavior in palpably perceptible ways. He goes on from that to offer some conclusions about why the media have that capacity:
The thing that really got me fired up was this idea if you think about it of a flock of birds moving around an object in flight. This is something that looks incredibly choreographed, it looks beautiful, they just all move as one around a telephone pole, for example, and it's not choreographed, it's very simply rudimentary communication among individuals in real time that allows the many to behave as one, and this is something that we were seeing happening with people. This is the first time, to my knowledge, that people were able to coordinate and move in real time like this.
It's that idea that simple, rudimentary communication between individuals -- birds in a flock, fish in a school, or humans in a protest movement -- that collectively allows the many to behave as one that may very well explain why the protests in the Middle East have taken off as they have, and why the good people of Wisconsin and Ohio might actually have a chance to put a stop to the vicious assaults misguided teapartiers are perpetrating against them.