Here’s an impressive video, not only for its great animation, but because it supplies the metaphor everyone’s been looking for in explaining Qaddafi’s staying power in relation to that of Ben Ali and Mubarak. Qaddafi, despite being neither popular nor an occasional friend of the West, seems to have built the walls of his regime of ultimately sterner stuff than his neighbors did. What really interested me about this video was the way it uses the idea of the “social media revolution” or in this case just the “Twitter revolution” in visual form.
Surely little Twitter birds sent careening towards North African dictators is just a shorthand for the many processes that went into the revolutions (and a way for the video to imitate Angry Birds). I think what that image speaks to is how often that “social media revolution” shorthand is used in the media, particularly in visual art forms such as cartoon, design and video.This can be a helpful shorthand in describing the mostly accepted role that social media played some role in enabling Middle Eastern revolution, and this is generally how it’s used. But we should make sure that the repetition of this trope does not communicate a digital utopian message to those not familiar with the Middle East or the complicated world of social and political movements.
Does this image communicate Twitter's role in revolution or show Twitter as revolution?
I agree with Prof. Webb that it’s quite hard to find a full-fledged digital utopian among scholars and observers of media and politics today. I would describe a digital utopian as someone who believes that the introduction of internet access or mechanisms for digital organization (such as Twitter) automatically leads to revolution or a radical change in the responsiveness and accountability of government. Deen Freelon identifies a group who see social media as inherently to “the dissident’s advantage.” Cory Doctorow, Nate Anderson, and Stephen Balkam all see the platforms of Twitter and Facebook as of, in Doctorow’s words, “disproportionate benefit to dissidents and outsiders,” but stop short of describing those platforms as inherently revolutionary in places not already primed for revolution. It seems that no individual, no matter how bullish on the long term liberalizing effects of blogs and social media, is willing to attribute the bulk of the credit for Egypt and Tunisia primarily on social networks to the exclusion of civil society networks, satellite television, and a collective sense of outrage based on various kinds of dispossession. No one’s putting Biz Stone up for the Nobel Peace Prize, then, which is good to know.
So who is going too far? It’s not just visual images such as the above cartoon and the one at the top of my blog, in fact, which communicate the message of digital utopiansm. It seems to me that for Western broadcasters, particularly cable news “commentators” to whom Freelon refers, invoking the Twitter Revolution trope as a way of escaping reporting on both the complicated reasons that an individual revolution comes about and bringing viewers background on Middle Eastern societies, and reporting on the (even in the cases of Egypt and Tunisia) experiences of protesters organizing “on the ground.” My fear is that an important opportunity for exploring in more depth the experiences of those putting their lives on the line for democratic reform is somehow missed by those fed the Internet Revolution narrative. Like the “western, secular” vs. “religious, conservative” dichotomy, it only functions to distance and simplify the experiences of Middle Easterners for Westerners.
middleeastaidan 