Did social media win the revolution? (week 11 blog)

The Arab Spring is a recent event as far as historical occasions go (aren't all times when governments are overthrown historical?) which refers to the recent revolutions that have recently been occurring in the MENA region with one of the prominent features being the use of the internet amongst members as a means of communication. However some state that without the internet these revolutions would not have occurred.

I am hesitant to attribute the success of anything to a single element, as doing so belittles other important aspects of revolutions such as the civil unrest that had slowly been building in these areas but at the same time I can’t clearly state that the revolution would have gone ahead without the internet.

Not all revolutions needed the internet, but would it have sped things up if they had it?

Part of the reason behind this is that I think there are two elements in revolutions that determine ultimately determine the winner.  The first is the organisation, as an unorganised group can be easily controlled by the authorities and the second is the number of people, as no matter how poorly organised a force is if it has enough people it becomes unstoppable. So the question then becomes whether the Internet was the key difference in either of these issues which is difficult to do.

In terms of technology that has been used in revolutions, unsurprisingly it seems to be whatever form of communication is dominant and available to the people at the time. Radio, fax machines, telephones and many others were used as forms of both organising people and also as attempts to incite people against the standing regime. While it can argued that without the internet people wouldn’t have been able to communicate, they may have just defaulted to an older form of technology (such as what happened in Egypt when the Internet shut down). However this doesn’t tell us whether these forms of communication would have reached as many people.

Opponents of the theory of the Internet being behind the revolution have stated things like “but Facebook is just where people were”, but they fail to take into account that this statement suggests that the reason that enough people heard about the protests, poor conditions and the likes is because of things such as Facebook and Twitter which allowed news and discontent to spread like fire. Despite this however I am again drawn to admit that although it addressed a lot of people rapidly this does not mean that it was the key difference between success and failure.

In fact, no matter what way you look at it the only conclusion you can draw from the use of the Internet in terms of revolutions is that it is a better technology then what happened before, but given we cannot have two revolutions occurring, one with Internet and one without, we are unable to tell with absolute certainty whether the Internet served as the ignition point for the fire of revolution, or was instead just added fuel which hastened the outcome.