So there's this debate going on whether social media have played a critical role in the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions and in the broader wave of social unrest sweeping North Africa and the Middle East. The mainstream media uncritically latched onto the idea from the first, slavishly repeating the old trope of sophisticated Western innovation making culture and progressive change accessible to inferior and impoverished brown people all around the world. Tunisia was made possible, we were told, by educated youth using twitter and facebook to coordinate their protests, and the Egyptians found out about the Tunisian revolution through their facebook accounts and promptly went out and did the same thing.
That early reporting never bothered to ask specifically about the mechanisms that could have allowed social media to have this revolutionary impact, and without that critical discussion it was easy to simply assume that technology in and of itself was the driving force behind the movements. Replace twitter with radio, or moving pictures, and the story could have been written in the 1920s.
Now, however, a homegrown twitter/facebook revolution seems to be taking root in Wisconsin and Ohio, as working peoples in both states mobilize mass protests against vicious assaults on their collective bargaining rights and, ultimately, their standard of living and job security. In the absence of significant national reporting on the protests, it seems clear that social media is a driving force allowing activists to connect and to coordinate their activities.
How does it work? Terry Gross yesterday interviewed Twitter founder Biz Stone specifically on the question of how Twitter has been employed by revolutionary movements in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and his comments strike me as being fairly insightful. See excerpts on the flip....