A few months and seemingly a lifetime ago -- before the Oscar bait "The Social Network" hit theaters, before Time declared the Facebook cofounder and CEO "Person of the Year," before the Middle East and the Arab world were turned upside-down in a matter of weeks -- I asked Mark Zuckerberg what role he plays in what he's called "the Facebook movement." When he introduced Facebook as a platform in the spring of 2007, addressing a gathering of geeks and techheads in Silicon Valley, that was his pitch: Facebook was a movement.
"How do you see yourself in this movement?" I asked last fall. "Are you the leader of this movement?"
"No, I am not," he answered quickly. As is often the case, Zuckerberg spoke less of himself and more of the company he runs. "I think Facebook has taken on a leadership role to some extent," he said. "But we always think about it in the context of what's going on with the Internet and society in general."
I asked Zuckerberg how Facebook will iterate as cultural nuances get trickier.
"Well, I think an idea needs to be fairly simple in order to resonate at a large scale," he said. "But I think that the single reason why [Facebook] was able to go from being just a college thing at the beginning to now spreading to rural villages in India is because of like the common humanity there, and that, like, people share just the same basic thing, which is that they all have friends and family and they want to stay connected."
"Common humanity."
In other words, it's not the tools, it's the people.
Here in the America, where "freedom of the press" and "freedom of speech" are not just printed in the U.S. Constitution but ingrained deep in the psyche -- so much so that we often mock them, or worse, take them for granted -- there's something that can seem downright trite about all of this hyper-communication. Americans already over-communicate. And the irony is, the more ways we communicate, the less it seems we understand each other. Facebook? Twitter? What a waste, the general line of criticism goes -- nothing but Narcissism 2.0!
Zadie Smith, writing in The New York Review of Books, speaks for the gang of social media naysayers and doubters when she wonders if "the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous." The first time I read those words, I thought perhaps Smith was using Facebook in a "falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous way." Facebook, after all, is what you make it out to be. If your relationships on the social networking site seem trivial and superfluous, maybe it's because they are. Facebook merely exposed it.
Since Tunisia's uprising unfolded in real-time -- and as the people-powered, grassroots-oriented upheaval spread to Egypt -- many have struggled to contextualize technology's impact on the events of recent weeks. Overall, much of the discourse have fallen on two sides of the same proverbial coin, symptomatic of the kind of right-versus-left, black-or-white false equivalency that passes for much of the political analysis in our discourse.
On one side are those who hail, in varying degrees, "The Twitter Effect!" or "The Facebook Revolution!" (though, curiously, the folks at Twitter and Facebook know better than to make those kinds of simplistic arguments themselves). "Cyber-utopians," they are called. And on the other side are those who continue to understate and devalue the role of social media and mobile technology as communication and organizing tools. They are the "cyber-skeptics" whose writings are accompanied by head-scratching headlines such as "What's Fueling Mideast Protests? It's More Than Twitter" (Wired's David Kravets) to "Does Egypt Need Twitter?" (New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell, who last year wrote about social media, activism and "weak ties." Turns out, what was weakly tied -- and I write this as a certified Gladwell fan -- was his 4,453-word essay).
The most lauded cyber-skeptic of them all -- and one whom Gladwell quoted in his much-discussed and much-maligned essay, at least in the Twittersphere -- is Evgeny Morozov, a blogger for Foreign Policy and author of newly published "The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom." It's tempting but unfair to say that it's a contrarian book written for the sake of being contrarian; Morozov, a visiting scholar at Stanford University, is too smart and too well-read for that. But it's a sign of our rapidly evolving times that even a previous skeptic like the New York Times' Roger Cohen -- who less than two years ago published columns headlined "A Journalist's 'Actual Responsibility'" and "New Tweets, Old Needs" -- recently called Morozov's book "dead wrong." What's accurate and insightful, of course, lie somewhere in the middle.
"Wildly overdrawn claims about social media, often made with weaselly question marks (like: 'Tunisia's Twitter revolution?') and the derisive debunking that follows from those claims ('It's not that simple!') only appear to be opposite perspectives. In fact, they are two modes in which the same weightless discourse is conducted," Jay Rosen, the noted media critic and professor at New York University, wrote me in an email recently. "Revolutionary hype is social change analysis on the cheap. Debunking is techno-realism on the cheap. Neither one tells us much about our world."
Rosen continued: "Almost everyone knows it's not as simple as saying Twitter or Facebook 'cause' revolutions. Almost everyone knows it's foolish to discount social media and peer to peer communication as new and potentially disruptive forces. Grown-ups trying to puzzle through what is actually happening will have to leave the sandbox in which the debunkers and their straw man playmates throw headlines at each other."
A key driving force in this new equilibrium is the role of the media -- and, more specifically, the rise of the "me" in media, allowing any educated and literate global citizen with an Internet connection or mobile phone to tell his or her own story, in many instances bypassing traditional journalists and in other ways deliberately aiding them. It's difficult to imagine Al Jazeera's invaluable coverage of the Eygptian protests without social media, for example. But in addition to Al Jazeera, CitizenTube -- YouTube's well-curated politics and news page -- is posting raw and visceral footage from people on the ground in Egypt.
Follow Jose Antonio Vargas on Twitter: www.twitter.com/joseiswriting
Jason Erb: Ensuring Egypt's Victory By Repealing Emergency Laws
Thanks for a good overview. I've actually experienced a revolution (the Orange Revolution in Ukraine) and it seems clear to me that social media is making a difference. If you're interested, I wrote about it here: http://www.digitaltonto.com/2011/social-media-and-revolution/
- Greg
You said, "Facebook and Twitter do not a revolution a make.”
I think we need to give Facebook and Twitter more credit. There are many components to a revolution: ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ etc. So, I think Facebook and Twitter, as tools, are mightier than the pen. Why? Because they are faster and cheaper. But these are just two factors that they contribute.
Continuing your point, “Years, if not decades, of repression, economic instability and individual frustration are the root of the dissatisfaction and outrage that spilled over the streets of Tunisia and Cairo...”
Now Facebook and Twitter enter the picture again. Repression and frustration existed for ages. People wanted to strike out, but couldn’t find a way. What was missing? Three additional factors that Facebook has enabled: the ability to EASILY find and connect with like minded people; a format that automatically organizes information; an information depository that allows easy searching and recall of information. I think the combination of these factors has clearly created revolution ENABLING tools in our time.
I predict this article will seem quaint, if misguided, when viewed from that lofty 50 year mark at 2050.
Testament to that is the appearance of Wael Ghonim, a young Google executive who was detained by the authorities for participating in the Egypt protests. Ghonim is also the administrator of the Khaled Said solidarity page on Facebook. Khaled Said was a young Egyptian man beaten to death by police in Alexandria for failing to give them money.
It was this Facebook page that played an instrumental role in mobilizing and galvanizing Egyptians to protest. There are about 5 million Egyptians on Facebook today - and that number is now growing rapidly.
Egypt, like Tunisia, have socio-economic denominators that fueled dissent and anger at repression of all kinds. Social media did not cause these societies to take to the streets in open defiance of curfews and rubber bullets. But social media did help get the word out and served as a vehicle, a catalyst which increased the speed and ferocity with which these things happened.
This year is going to be pivotal in the Middle East - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/firas-alatraqchi/middle-east-in-2011-socia_b_803037.html
why not give credit to those gutsy Egyptians, rather than one of the methods they used to spread information? whether it was a mimeograph in a basement, or a facebook page, protest movements find a way to get the word out
Another point. EVERYTHING in Egypt is different. In previous years, protests were limited to a few hundred and organized by opposition groups like April 6 or Kefata, or opposition parties. This January 25 protest which has swelled to encompass all of Egypt has been historic and unprecedented because it was grassroots, involved all walks of life and has included more than 3 million people nationwide. Furthermore, we are hearing of several resignations from state owned media.
And for Egyptians to carry banners saying "Mubarak leave, you filth" well no one would have ever imagined that happening.
Mubarak is a figurehead, even people within the NDP agree that he is on his way out. Suleiman is the power at the moment. In any case, the fear that Egyptians once had has been broken forever. The dynamic between the people and the unelected government has changed.
No, this is very different. Do not measure it by the results or lack thereof at this point. This regime has been in power for 30 years. It won't go overnight.
I would love to see a true people's revolution sweep across the world. Elites have caused too many problems for too many people for too long. But I think we're seeing upper-middle-class, out-of-power elites overthrowing upper-middle-class, in-power elites. Meet the new Boss? God I hope not; I'm just an incurable curmudgeon.
It's easy for the MEdia (including the new boundless social networks) to conflate being an accessory with being a cause or lynchpin in processes such as what is happening in Egypt.
Billions of people on the planet are NOT wired in, but that does not diminish their needs or intelligence. In some ways it means they haven't been as thoroughly suck(er)ed into the techno-fantasy. So many people are opting for the blue pill...
Alison
www.healthjournalistblog.com