Big Win in Cairo: Shirky 6, Morozov 0

Wael Ghonim

The day after Hosni Mubarak left the capital, a CNN anchor voiced the conventional wisdom on why this persistent conglomeration of street protests had succeeded against the odds in toppling a tyrant. “The revolution in Egypt could not have happened without Facebook,” she said.

Wael Ghonim, the 30-year-old Google marketing exec who became the public face of the protesters, backed this up. “This revolution started on Facebook,” he told Wolf Blitzer. It’s true that throughout the 18 days of protest at Tahrir Square the activists made use of social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to get out their messages, and that the world’s traditional media picked up on these messages for much of their reporting on the events in Egypt.

The Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker nicely summarizes the battle between the old power structure and the Twitter-empowered generation:

Rarely has a generational schism been so vivid. The guns and old hardware of Mubarak’s regime versus the new software and nebulous nature of a digitally inspired revolt. Even speculating on what might happen next was beyond our primitive ken. Who knew what the next tweet might suggest or what wave of human movement it might inspire?

Much as I hate to agree with the conventional wisdom, this time the exultant commentators are right. What’s interesting is that Cairo served as a test-tube match-up for the two biggest big-foot theorists on the interplay of social media and democracy. The issue in a nutshell: are social media, on balance,  a force for freedom, or one more tool that dictatorships can use to oppress the people as they organize?

New media guru Clay Shirky

In one corner, we have Clay Shirky, an NYU professor, new media consultant, and author of Here Comes Everybody, the definitive playbook for social activists in the age of the Internet. In the other stands the challenger, Evgeny Morozov, a Belarussian by birth, author of the recent book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, and a profound skeptic about Facebook/Twitter revolutions.

Shirky argues that the new social media tools aid the revolutionaries in three ways. First, there’s the vital matter of coordination. Twitter and other tools help dissidents plan the time and place for protests, call meetings, stay in touch in real time, and adjust tactics even as the police roll in. Second, there’s the more subtle matter of what Shirky calls “shared awareness”:

the sense in a group not only that each member understands what is going on, but also that the understanding is similar among all, and, critically, each member understands this as well. Shared awareness is a useful precursor to coordinated action, and the ability to create shared awareness improves with real-time media and with mobile media.

In other words, it took Egyptians talking to each other for a while on their Facebook pages and Twitter to realize that there was a critical mass of people willing to go into the streets. Much of the power of tyrants rests on their ability to inspire fear, to keep the dissidents whispering among tiny circles of friends. The new forms of social media, if not tightly controlled and monitored by authorities (the case in Egypt), offer dissidents the possibility of breaking out their voices in public, first on the social media pages, then on the streets.

Shirky’s third point about social media is that as a revolution develops in the streets, new media offer a pipeline to the outside world and the images of revolution get passed on and amplified. Generally speaking, only the most isolated and benighted dictator states are willing to be seen in the world’s lenses as supressing what looks like the will of the people. And clearly, the street protesters in Tunis who managed to drive out  a longtime unelected ruler inspired the masses in Egypt to dream that they might have a chance at deposing Mubarak.

Internet skeptic Evgeny Morozov

Morozov is a worthy opponent for Shirky. He’s a very smart fellow who has an Eastern European cynic’s view of exultant rhetoric, a realistic notion of how steadfastly the old regimes cling to power, and a disdain for the naivete of what he calls the “cyber-utopians.” The simple truth that Morozov keeps reminding us of is that new media are the proverbial two-edged sword. The Internet, in Morozov’s phrase, is “a vacuum” that will be filled by the strongest, most ruthless, most clever users of the technology. He’s fond of pointing out how in the much-hyped Twitter revolution in Iran after the disputed 2009 elections, the street protesters did not succeed in overturning the regime and, in fact, that many activists were identified by the regime through their Facebook pages and wound up in jail.

Over the last year or so, the Shirky camp and the Morozov camp have waged public debates in the form of articles, books, blog posts, and face-offs at conferences or on TV. Morosov picked up a famous ally in the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell, who last fall lent the weight of the Gladwell brand to an article subtitled “Why the revolution will not be tweeted.” Jay Rosen, a media critic and NYU professor, has collected a more recent batch of what he calls the “Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators” article, and he breaks down the conventions of the genre in this post.

My take is that the world is big enough and complex enough that both the Shirky and Morozov camps can find plenty of evidence for their point of view. About the same time the revolutionaries in Cairo were heading into the streets, an online campaign against the regime in Syria was fizzling. And the Chinese authorities have managed to lock out Facebook and Twitter while making the equivalent  social media sites that have sprung up inside China responsible for monitoring dissidents.

So while the basic issue of how social media are shaping the world’s future remains far from resolved, but it’s hard to see Egypt, this time, as anything but a big win for the views of Clay Shirky.

Full disclosure note: the U.S. State Department’s  policy of 21st Century Statecraft embraces the Shirky model, and Morozov enjoys taking potshots at this policy. I am currently employed as a consultant to the State Department, though as far as I can see, that status has no effect on my views in this post.

Cairo protesters