action get promoted as if by acclaim, as happened to the original ‘Twenty Reasons’ blog post. Activists describe this process as ‘memetic’, drawing on Richard Dawkins’ proposal of information ‘memes’: ideas that behave like genes, fighting for survival and mutating in the process.
Underpinning the social media is mobile telephony: in the crush of every crowd we see arms holding cellphones in the air, like small flocks of ostriches, snapping scenes of repression or revolt, offering instant and indelible image-capture to a global audience. Cellphones provide the basic white sliced bread of insurrectionary communications: SMS. SMS allows you to post to Twitter, or to microblogs, even if you don’t have Internet access and can’t read the results. Texting is traceable, of course. But as all fans of The Wire understand, you can thwart surveillance if you use a cheap, pay-as-you-go handset, which you can throw away if you’re in a tight corner. What’s more, for many of the impoverished youth and slum dwellers, pay-as-you-go is all they can afford.
Finally, there is blogging. Though blogging was an early form of social media and has been heavily colonized by the mainstream press, 2011 saw a revival of what was essential about the format: the ability to express your own agenda through montaging stills, movies, words and links to create indelible statements of attitude and contempt. In some countries, residually, bulletin boards have played a role: the Athenian revolt of December 2008 was initially organized through newsflashes on the Indymedia bulletin board.
Blogs have been most influential in the Arab world, where the mainstream press has been subject to various degrees of censorship and self-censorship. But in all the theatres of revolution, blogs have offered that vital resource: somewhere to link to. They have become, like the newspapers of the nineteenth century, journals of record. Their impact can be measured by the fact that, in 2011, 7 per cent of Middle Eastern bloggers surveyed reported they’d been arrested by their respective security forces.9
The ability to deploy, without expert knowledge, a whole suite of information tools has allowed protesters across the world to outwit the police, to beam their message into the newsrooms of global media, and above all to assert a cool, cutting-edge identity in the face of what Auden once called ‘the elderly rubbish dictators talk’. It has given today’s protest movements a massive psychological advantage, one that no revolt has enjoyed since 1968.
Suddenly, the form of today’s protests seems entirely congruent with the way people live their lives. It is modern; it is immune to charges of ‘resisting progress’. Indeed, it utilizes technology that is so essential to modern work and leisure, governments cannot turn it off without harming their national economies. And, as Mubarak, Gaddafi and the Bahraini royals discovered, even turning it off does not work.
Because—and here is the technological fact that underpins the social and political aspects of what’s happened—a network can usually defeat a hierarchy.
The pioneer of network theory, Walter Powell, summed up the reasons for this as follows: the network is better at adapting to a situation where the quality of information is crucial to success, but where information itself is fluid; a hierarchy is best if you are only transmitting orders and responses, and the surrounding situation is predictable. Above all, ‘as information passes through a network, it is both freer and richer [than in a hierarchy]; new connections, new meanings are generated, debated and evaluated.’10
However, the early network theorists were only studying the advantages of, say, collaborative workshops in the textile industry versus big factories. Now we are studying networks with many millions of individual nodes, and they are in conflict with states. Once information networks become ‘social’, the implications are massive: truth can now travel faster than lies, and all propaganda becomes instantly flammable.
Sure, you can try and insert spin or propaganda, but the instantly networked consciousness of millions of people will set it right: they act like white blood cells against infection so that ultimately the truth, or something close to it, persists much longer than disinformation.
In fact, this quality of Twitter means, according to the South Korean authors of the first data-based study of it, that it is not really a ‘social network’ but more like a news service. Services like Flickr, MSN and Yahoo involve a high level of ‘reciprocity’, since about 70 per cent of relationships are two-way. Facebook is constructed in such a way that this reciprocity is 100 per cent: I ‘friend’ you, you ‘friend’ me. On Twitter, by contrast, only about 22 per cent of relationships are two-way—there is a much higher ratio of ‘followers’ to those being followed.11
A second implication is that forms of protest can change rapidly. Whereas the basic form of, say, a Leninist party, a guerrilla army or even a ghetto riot has not changed in a century, once you use social networks the organizational format of revolt goes into constant flux. Even in the period between the Iranian uprisings of July 2009 and the time of writing (autumn 2011), changes have taken place in the way protesters use social media, in the way rioting is directed (as with the ‘Blackberry riots’ in England in 2011), in the way people evade Internet shutdowns and in the tools used for ‘denial of service’ attacks by hackers.
Indeed, during the actual course of the Iranian uprising of 2009, the ways of using social media visibly evolved. Protesters called the process ‘wave creation’, using email, blogs and SMS to evolve the protests in real time. Looking at this phenomenon, Stanford scholar Saeid Golkar concludes:
The Internet enables users to suggest new mechanisms to expand protests and gather feedback on these suggestions. On one hand, this makes the movement more flat and democratic, and on the other hand, it makes its activities more rational, with lower costs of action.12
As the real-world revolt was suppressed, activists took to the digital rooftops: launching ‘Googlebombs’ against Ahmadinejad and cyber-attacks on government websites, while putting psychological pressure on members of the repressive forces by naming them and disseminating their details. In response—in what remains the best-documented example outside China of cyber-repression—the regime trawled Facebook for the identities of activists, unleashed cyber-attacks against their networks and instructed 10,000 members of the Basij militia to set up their own, rival, blogosphere.13
The new technology, then, makes possible a new relationship among protesters themselves and between protesters and the mainstream media, and gives protest movements increased leverage over NGOs, multilateral bodies and guarantors of international law. It provides instant evidence of truth and can facilitate swift neutralization of lies, including those of state propaganda. All this, however, is only a side- effect of the much bigger change this technology has brought about: the change in human behaviour.
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