The Jasmine Revolution II: Will the revolution be tweeted?

Posted on | maart 12, 2011 | No Comments

One of the most talked about features of the recent wave of pro-democracy demonstrations and uprisings occurring across the Arab world, has been the role played by information communication technology and social networking software. Of the latter much has been made of the fact that protests were ‘advertised’ as forthcoming events on Facebook while Twitter has become an instant source of information as it happens on the ground.

Indeed in response to an anonymous posting on Twitter calling for protests in Chinese towns and cities on February 20th authorities swiftly arrested a number of online activists, deployed a heavy security presence on the date in question and began a crackdown on foreign journalists. While few anticipated or expected the demonstration effects from North Africa to have any significant effect in China clearly the events dubbed the ‘Jasmine Revolution’ reveal the deep insecurity of the regime despite its booming economic growth. And yet all this begs the question how important social networking really is as a tool for social organization and political protest. Will the revolution really be ‘tweeted’ or is the impact of ICTs greatly exaggerated?

Use of cellphones was ubiquitous in the recent Egyptian revolution

The impact of new information communication technologies on political mobilization is not new. The use of cellphone text messaging by demonstrators to coordinate protests was first witnessed during the revolution that brought down General Suharto in Indonesia in 1999, during the ESDA II protests in The Philippines in 2001 that led to the resignation of Joseph Estrada in The Philippines and during the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan in March 2005. Similarly Facebook was used prominently during the uprising by Buddhist monks in Burma in 2007, while Twitter, a microblogging tool that limits users to 140 characters, gained prominence during the failed Green Revolution in Iran in 2009. Likewise conventional blogging has become a common feature of politics in Southeast Asia particularly in Malaysia where prominent anti-government bloggers have risen to prominence and notoriety.

Nevertheless what is new is the integration of these disparate technologies into the latest generation of cellphones (dubbed smart phones) that allow the user to take photographs, record video, access the Internet and communicate instantly via text messaging and social networking. The result is according to Philip Howard, professor of communication at the University of Washington, that “savvy opposition campaigners [have] turned social media applications like Facebook from minor pop culture fads into a major tool of political communication” (2011, p.4).

In many countries worldwide, including Southeast Asia, governments have traditionally relied on their control of the mainstream media to silence or limit opposition voices while restricting access to alternative media sources, including foreign media. Traditional media was a unidirectional structure in which the state could monopolize the production of content. The new media by contrast is fundamentally challenging this. On the one hand the nature of the new media is such that users are both consumers and producers of content. Individual users can post their own stories and become citizen journalists which in turn can be shared and evade even the harshest censorship controls and repressive regimes. In Burma in 2007 citizen journalists equipped with handheld camcorders, provided by the Norwegian based Democratic Voice of Burma, were able to record and broadcast footage of the Buddhist monk uprising and its repression (as documented in the award-winning documentary Burma VJ). Similarly during the Green revolution in Iran hundreds of videos were uploaded daily on YouTube. On the other hand these technologies now allows ordinary citizen to effectively conduct surveillance and monitor the state, documenting human rights abuses and improving the capacity of civil society.

Critics of the ‘leveling and enabling thesis’ advance a number of arguments of which the most often heard are firstly that all technology is neutral — even the new information communication technologies can be manipulated to expand the reach of the state rather than to minimize it, and that secondly the impact of the new media is exaggerated because significant digital divides continue to exist. Thus the spread and penetration of Internet access remains limited to a small largely urban middle class elite and is not a widespread social phenomenon.

Courtesy of Slate magazine http://tinyurl.com/63ttddf

While it is certainly true that some regimes have proven to be incredibly sophisticated in controlling the Internet there remains sufficient cause to be optimistic that the decentralized, diffused and non-hierarchical character of the Internet mitigates even the strictest controls. Much is made for example of ‘The Great Firewall of China’ that enables Beijing to deny access to certain Internet IP addresses (thereby blocking access to certain websites, e.g Voice of American and BBC News) as well as the ability to scan the URL and packet transmissions for certain censored keywords (such as Tiananmen or more recently even the word Jasmine). Nevertheless for all its sophistication Beijing’s surveillance system largely relies on self-censorship, in other words the fear that a user will be caught and punished severely for accessing banned websites. Internet users and content providers have become ever more sophisticated at circumventing such controls. The use of proxy servers outside China, virtual private networks, mirror sites, and onion routing (the development of software to allow anonymous encrypted communication) means that there is constant competition between regulators and has become an ongoing cyber war. In addition countries like China limit the number of nodes that connect the ‘national’ information infrastructure to the ‘global’ worldwide web in order to enable them to operate their firewalls effectively. Ironically this can make such regimes information infrastructure vulnerable to Denial of Service attacks against the limited number of servers and ISPs that are required to operate strong filtering technologies effectively.

In terms of the diffusion of ICTs and the question of digital divides, the diffusion of mobile phones has far-outstripped the penetration of personal computers and fixed landlines in the developing world. For examplel, it is estimated that within 5 years mobile Internet access will exceed PC Internet usage. Already 20 per cent of cellphones worldwide are 3G with sales of the iPhone and Android driving this figure ever higher. In addition as Howard notes it is largely irrelevant whether cellphone and social networking users are largely urban and middle class since these groups invariably form the social elites upon which regime legitimacy effectively rests in authoritarian countries. In addition internet penetration rates are often an inaccurate measure of the number of people who have access to the internet since it is difficult to measure the number of people who access the Net via cybercafés. In addition computers and cellphones are often shared among families.

While social networking and the diffusion of ICTs does not substitute for traditional political activism “in times of crisis banal tools for wasting time.. become the supporting infrastructure of social movements” (Howard, 2001, p. 12). While it may be true, as the detractors argue, that cellphones, Facebook and Twitter of themselves are not a substitute for traditional forms of social organization, protest and collective action; it is safe to say that it is now inconceivable that such technologies will not be a critical feature of all future collective action. As Howard concludes, “it is clear that increasingly the route to democratization is a digital one” (p. 201). The revolution in other words will be tweeted.