#Egypt, social media and determinism

I talked about the dangers and ironies of media determinism, showed a few insightful network analyses of Twitter feeds which make clear that quantity does not equal quality, and repeated several times that, no, social media are not the only reason why people in Cairo are now in their second week of protests against the Mubarak regime. They facilitate rapid communication and help give a quick sense of how many others agree with certain points of view of course, but there are other networked technologies (most obviously the mobile phone) that can be equally important in spreading messages and rallying people. The interview went very well, until the Nieuwsuur reporter asked me his last question. Did I think that the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions would not have taken place without social media? It would be wrong to say yes, but I also did not want to assert that today's communication technologies are of no importance at all in instigating change. So what did I answer? "I think that without the Internet the revolutions would not have taken place, not social media."

Hmmm.

That came out somewhat foolish, and it was made into something even more foolish when the context of the question was edited out of the broadcasted item. I immediately checked the twitter stream for #nieuwsuur to see how many people had balked at my suggestion, and yes, there were a few, but luckily -- or worryingly? -- not as many as I feared. Those that had, though, made use of two types of responses: 1) the Internet is social, and 2) revolutions do not require the Internet. I replied to most via Twitter to clarify what I had meant, but I will take the opportunity here to use a bit more than 140 characters to do so again.

To the first group I replied that the Internet of course can be used -- and has been used since its early days -- for all kinds of social activities, but that it is made up of much more than just Twitter, Facebook, of whatever it is how 'social media' are now ought to be understood. I completely agree that the term 'social media' is misleading in the sense that it creates a skewed idea of what the Internet was before the mid-noughties, but it is popular discourse that has bestowed regime-changing powers to Web 2.0 services almost exclusively, and my answer in the Nieuwsuur interview was aimed at debunking exactly that. In that respect I share one of the arguments Cory Doctorow puts forward in his review of Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion , which is that it is the Internet as a whole that has created today's mindset of participatory possibilities. Additionally, I would argue that 'the Internet' is a much less ideologically charged term than 'social media'; as my colleague Mirko Tobias Schaefer always says, just because something is social does not mean it is inherently good for all those involved. If ten people are gathered in a boat that can only hold nine, the process of throwing someone overboard is very much a social one...

My reply to the second group, comprised of those that had called me on my apparently deterministic view, took the shape, at first, of a Neil Armstrong defense: I know what I said there did not sound right, but you get the gist of my point! What I meant to say was, of course, that without the Internet, or rather networked communication technologies, the revolutions would not have taken place in the way they do now. A truism, I admit, but much more in line with what I had been telling the reporter in all the bits that had been cut out of the interview: neither the Internet nor social media are the only true cause of what has unfolded in the Middle East. Revolutions have taken place without the Internet for ages, so why assume they require it now?

And yet... The more I thought about the original Nieuwsuur question and my hesitance to answer it with an unambiguous yes or no, the more I had to admit that I found myself quite uneasy with the idea of just chucking out new media as a major factor in the creation and unfolding of the events. The Egyptian authorities thought they were important enough to have the whole country wiped from cyberspace for a few days, and we certainly know that groups of Internet-savvy Egyptian youth are at work every day, letting the outside world know what is going on, organizing rallies and tactically circumventing technological and infrastructural obstacles. Some of the protesters even feel obligated to thank Facebook. While all this of course does not prove the assumption that new media technologies played an essential role in the uprising, many actors involved are, to use a Picardian phrase, making it so.

So in hindsight, then, my reply to those who frown upon giving the Internet a central role in the Egyptian events would be that, yes, we need detailed network analyses of Twitter feeds, Youtube clips and comments, Facebook traffic, and many other types of online and wireless communication in order to assess the specific places and roles these media have as heterogeneous actors in a vast socio-technological network (an excellent example can be found here). Not only can this dispel myths (such as that of the Iran uprising being a Twitter revolution), but it can also show how new media technologies frame the cultural debates about what kind of impact these technologies have in the first place. However, I would stress that new media are not neutral; they do function differently from handing out flyers or contacting people through a fixed line telephone tree. They have what are called 'affordances', which define a loosely determined range of possibilities of use. Think of a menu in a restaurant; you can choose among many dishes, but your choices are not unlimited. The same goes for communication technologies, they open up all kinds of new ways to connect but not endlessly so. Networked technologies like the Internet, then, indeed provide us with tools to facilitate and accelerate communications, but I would argue these are not mere tools. They do not determine, but they surely set up broad guiding lines along which action can take place.

The questions that remain to be answered, then, are: What menu was available to the Egyptians, what were their choices, and do they like what they're eating? That will be the first thing I'll say next time an opinion program or news reporter approaches me again :)

Teaser image posted by @karimmarold on Yfrog