Grandiose claims for new media forms were only to be expected, Gladwell concluded. "Innovators tend to be solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model." But there was something else at work, as well: "in the outsized enthusiasm for social media"we seem to have forgotten what activism is."
In reaction to the spate of claims that the protests in Tunisia and Egypt were also Twitter or alternately, Facebook-inspired, Evgeny Morozov decried "cyber-utopians" who believe "the Arab spring has been driven by social networks." In a post for the UK Guardian, Morozov argued that they "ignore the real-world activism underpinning them."
Like Gladwell, Morozov is convinced, "The current fascination with technology-driven accounts of political change in the Middle East is likely to subside, for a number of reasons." Accounts of the revolutions that emphasize the liberating role of social media tools function mostly to "make Americans feel proud of their own contribution to events in the Middle East. After all, the argument goes, such a spontaneous uprising wouldn't have succeeded before Facebook was around -- so Silicon Valley deserves a lion's share of the credit." He then added, "Perhaps the outsize revolutionary claims for social media now circulating throughout the west are only a manifestation of western guilt for wasting so much time on social media: after all, if it helps to spread democracy in the Middle East, it can't be all that bad to while away the hours "poking' your friends and playing FarmVille."
Social networks, these naysayers claim, are ill-suited to real-world activism and high-risk strategies such as those employed during Arab Spring -- "boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations" -- because they are messy, non-hierarchical, and cannot provide the necessary discipline and strategy. When taking on a powerful and organized establishment, Gladwell declared, "You have to be a hierarchy."
The explanation for the fury of change, however, is more nuanced than either of the dueling cyber-camps is willing to admit, as a closer examination of the protests seems to suggest. In the North Africa/Middle East region, a pan-Arab collaboration of young activists skilled in the use of technology did in fact given birth to a new movement dedicated to spreading democracy. They were strategic and disciplined, even as they shied from hierarchy. They relied not only on tactics of nonviolent resistance but also those of marketing borrowed from Silicon Valley. Tunisians and Egyptians did share expertise and experiences with similar youth movements in Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Iran. "Tunis is the force that pushed Egypt, but what Egypt did will be the force that will push the world," Walid Rachid, one of the members of the April 6 Youth Movement, which helped organize the protests that set off the Arab Spring, explained to the New York Times.
That being said, it is also true that both the Tunisian and Egyptian revolts were literally decades in the making. Speaking in June 2011 at the eight annual Personal Democracy Forum, a procession of young Arab activists who had all been intimately involved in the spring revolts, explained the process of how they and millions of supporters were "weaving a network for change" in their countries, and what role the emerging media played in making that happen. From Riadh Guerfali to Dr. Rasha Abdulla to Mona Eltahawy to Alaa Abdel Fattah, they noted the Arab Spring actions were emphatically not "Twitter" or "Facebook" revolutions that had coalesced online, but were instead the outcome of decades of networked resistance offline .
At the same time, they said, the revolts were clearly facilitated, and to some extent accelerated, by the decentralized organizing power of the new social media. The results of this offline/online action mashup were surprisingly successful revolutions that overthrew long-entrenched political forces. As Alaa Abdel Fattah pointed out, the roots of the revolution in Egypt went back as far as 1972 and efforts made by his parents' generation. Ultimately, he explained, they had been stymied by a clever power structure that painstakingly divided and thus conquered the protesters, marginalizing some and buying others off with favor and access. Decades later, Fattah pointed out, the emerging social media suddenly made it possible "to make noises louder online, to build local movements with one narrative and then build them online to a mass movement." As another speaker at the forum, Omoyele Sowore, explained, "The Internet has helped revolution; but the Internet is not revolution."
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