Hurling Tweets at Dictators: Digital Utopianism Without Digital Utopians

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.

When Censorship Backfires (and When It Doesn’t)

This short article about a Mexican documentary from The Economist reminded me of some of the issues of censorship we’ve been talking about in the context of Middle Eastern regimes in the past few weeks. “Presumed Guilty” is specifically the story of Antonio Zuniga, a Mexico City computer repairman who is astonishingly convicted of a murder for which he has an alibi, no connection to the forensic evidence and only highly suspect eyewitness testimony counting against him.

The film is as damning of the Mexican criminal justice system as anything could be, depicting a farce of a mistrial and twenty to a cell prisons. Two weeks after “Presumed Guilty” opened it was abruptly banned through court order, ostensibly because of a “dubious complaint” of privacy invasion by a prosecution witness. The ban appears to all to be politically motivated, however, and represents a feeble attempt at marginalizing a potentially politically powerful piece of cinema. In this case, that proved nearly impossible, in large part due to new media and new technology (during the ban, the film was widely sold as a pirated DVD and succeeded in making it onto YouTube). When the ban was finally overturned recently, the underground chatter that the ban had caused led to a million tickets sold.

This is no doubt an example of the feebleness of a legally imposed censorship regime, particularly censorship of film in the YouTube era, but could this story have happened the same way in the context of an authoritarian Middle Eastern regime? Quite possibly, but in the case of Syria, as we’ve been studying it this week, I think it would not be likely. Presumed Guilty‘s runaway fame seems to have been made possible by a democratic, if commonly corrupt, society in which cultural production is mediated by the courts or government only after the fact. The success of Syrian censorship is that everyone knows where the line is between innocent education or entertainment and what is adjudged to be politically incendiary- critiques of specific policies or government officials will be met with the full measure of punishment from the state, while more anonymous settings or characters allow for some critique of government- and everyone self-censors along these lines.

The political power of this documentary seems to stem so much from the specific images of officials behaving terribly- from the uncaring mistrial judge to Antonio’s girlfriend being harassed by prison guards. Mexicans can see specific proof of what needs to change in their criminal justice system, and the belief that the ban was politically motivated only served to double the film’s indictment of Mexican courts. When Syrians look to their public sphere, however, they are only allowed to see metaphor and vague insinuation, and don’t have an opportunity to challenge what their government allows them to see, read and hear. In fact, they likely don’t even know when censorship of a potentially incendiary work happens, because that’s exactly how the regime needs it to be.