Blue Collar Rocket Science

Over on Flip the Media, the blog of the MCDM program, a new poll asks two questions:

1. Did social media tools like Twitter and Facebook drive the Egyptian and Tunisian Revolutions?
2. Could social media tools like Twitter and Facebook spur widespread demonstrations in the US or UK?

I find it hard to answer these questions as posed. Not only are “drive” and “spur” vague terms open to interpretation, but answering them invites a deeper discussion of Malcolm Gladwell’s article Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted, which simply is not possible in the binary mechanism of a poll. From the moment it was published, Gladwell’s piece has been the subject of many strawman challenges, in which many people have deftly countered all sorts of things that Gladwell never actually said. The poll also comes at the end of an article called “Could Online Political Activism Ignite the US like it did Egypt?” which seems to more or less give away the poller’s opinion even before the questions are asked.

When we talk about media tools, we have to remember that they are just tools. A house is not built out of hammers and saws, but they do make building the house easier. A revolution is not built of the tools used to organize it, but they make the revolution easier. Does a hammer “drive” the building of the house? Of course not.

In my mind, what “drove” or “spurred” the protests in Egypt that now seem to be spreading through the region is a very complex set of circumstances. The autocratic ruling elite in these countries are holding together systems that in their present form date back to the decades following World War II. It appears that a plurality of the populations they rule has reached such a state of frustration with the situation that they are protesting. To me, the driver is the social conditions that create that frustration, which includes the percentage of young people in the populations of those countries. Social media has been a valuable tool in giving voice to that frustration, because it is an existing disseminated network of communication. Because it’s one that’s not well understood by the rulers they find it especially threatening.

In May 1968, a youth revolt nearly brought down the government of French President Charles de Gaulle. At the time, in attempts to deny the true causes, blame was laid at the feet of rock and roll and rebellious movies. But looked at historically, it seems clear that what really happened was an old order had become so out of touch with the lives of the emerging generation that it led to an uprising. Rock and roll and movies may have helped express the frustration of the protesters but the media creators involved, the musicians and filmmakers, didn’t drive that frustration or the actions it led to. Those in the ruling class who didn’t understand what was really going on latched onto emblems of the protesters’ generation, therefore devaluing their legitimate complaints and dehumanizing them as individuals.

When we credit the actions of protesters using the social media tools to the tools themselves, we likewise devalue and dehumanize the protesters. In fact, we make the same mistake that the regimes they protest against do, by confusing emblems of the protesters’ generation with the actual protests. What makes these events historic is not that calls to action were issued via social media, but that there were calls to action and people responded to them. In Gladwell’s term, the message and the medium used to disseminate it are weak ties. The solidarity of the people who came out en masse and put their bodies at risk facing down the state police is the strong tie that actually drove the events. To confuse the bravery of what they did with the media used to share information about it is to do them a grave disservice.

What Facebook and Twitter have done is to disseminate the role of media creator to anyone with an Internet connection. Any of us may express common frustrations or make a suggestion about an action, but if the underlying conditions for that action to feel worthwhile aren’t there it will fizzle out.

The actual communication that organized the protests in Paris would have been mediated in the same way as the everyday communication among the participants was in 1968. Likewise in Egypt the communication went through the channels the protesters were already using in 2011. To not communicate via Facebook and Twitter in 2011 would be like ignoring the telephone system in 1968. People use the tools they have available. Facebook and Twitter may be better tools than phone trees, but they aren’t magical catalysts that play by rules radically different from how people have used their media for millenia.

As to whether social media could spur an uprising in the United States, it’s not necessary to invent a scenario when there’s a real life example playing out in this country every day. Social media is used to publicize protests that appeal to people who identify with the “Tea Party” movement. Often these events succeed and crowds turn out to express their frustrations. But does that mean the Tea Party is a movement “driven” by social media? Are those who are eager to embrace the idea of a “Twitter Revolution” equally eager to embrace the idea of a “Facebook Fringe Political Movement?” I don’t see how you can have one without the other, and I’m not convinced that either description is useful in understanding what’s really going on.

I’m still not sure that answering the poll questions will capture any of my actual views on the subject.

Do I think that Twitter and Facebook provided openly-accessible communication media platforms that helped tremendously in organizing mass protests? Absolutely.

Do I think that organizing the mass protests in such a way that they led to the current situation would have been feasible if Twitter, Facebook, or even the Internet itself didn’t exist? Absolutely.

Do I think social media tools either drove recent events in Egypt and Tunisia or could spur similar events in the US or UK? Absolutely not.

That doesn’t mean I think social media isn’t important. In times of unrest, communication is the most dangerous tool that can be employed against the established order. During television’s half-century of uncontested dominance, it sometimes seemed all it took to effect a government overthrow in some countries was to take over the TV station and announce you were the new ruler. Social media is different because it is disseminated, not centralized. Controlling the message is harder even when you attempt to take it over by turning off the Internet as the Egyptian government did. At that point, it was too late — the weak ties of social media and relatively safe message sharing had been supplanted by the strong ties of direct and dangerous action. And it’s those ties — the ties of people in the street expressing themselves in public instead of on Facebook and Twitter — that forced the change.

It’s still the case that as McLuhan wrote, “media are the extensions of man.” As dedicated to media as I am both professionally and personally, putting media in the driver’s seat is the sort of dystopian role reversal that would send me into the streets to protest.