Blogs and Bullets: Breaking Down Social Media

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Contents

1. Time to Stop Talking About Social Media?

The debates continue about the role of digital technologies and social media in the Arab/North African uprisings. I was lucky enough to be invited to a workshop last week on Blogs and Bullets: Social Media and the Struggle for Political Change and this post is prompted by some of the fascinating things I heard there.

Time was when we were trapped in what Henry Farrell describes as "a seemingly never-ending debate which seemed to have a lot of very grand claims – The Internet Is Leading To Sliced Freedom and Democracy! Noes! It It is The Autocrat’s Best Friend and so on – combined with a near-total dearth of reliable evidence." But some say such arguments are now obsolete; that we all know the real questions are more complicated than that.1

Still, after the pleas for "nuance" have been made,2 … Continue reading

More Egypt, More Facebook

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More sceptical, speculative notes on Facebook's role (warning: 4,000 words. If you're really keen but don't like reading online, here is a PDF). 

1 Yes, they used Facebook

I continue to think that the role of digital technologies in the Egyptian rebellion has been overplayed for the reasons I gave a few days ago, but it does look like there is an element of truth to the "Facebook Revolution" story.

Digital technologies get used for many things, but the key job they played in Egypt, at least, seems to be social media. Facebook was clearly the big story;

  • Facebook owned "Fully 42% of the country's Web surfing on January 27, the day before Egypt's main ISPs abruptly severed ties to the Internet." - Threatpost.
  • Facebook was explicitly singled out by leading activist Wael Ghonim:

Egypt: Debunking the Twitter-debunker-debunkers

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Ryan Shaw, in the comments, points to Aaron Bady, who points to Jay Rosen.

Jay Rosen and Aaron Bady dislike simplistic "debunking" articles that caricature claims about the role of the Internet and social media in Egypt and Tunisia. Jay Rosen identifies a genre of "Twitter Can't Topple Dictators" articles, and says they have six qualities:

  • Nameless fools are staking maximalist claims.
  • No links we can use to check the context of those claims.
  • The masses of deluded people make an appearance so they can be ridiculed.
  • Bizarre ideas get refuted with a straight face.
  • Spurious historicity.
  • The really hard questions are skirted

    • Aaron Bady's version of Rosen’s argument is this: "it is a fantasy of a particular kind of credulousness, which is then so soberly refuted (by sober debunkers) that the overriding impression left for the audience is only of the performance of seriousness itself, and of the credulous enthusiasm which has been dismissed."

    Both have written much better stuff (well, Aaron Bady at least – I confess I'm no fan of Jay Rosen's style) so here's a suggestion to get them back on the wagon: If you are going to start a … Continue reading

    Egypt’s “Facebook Revolution”: Looking Under the Lamp Post?

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    The "Facebook Revolution" narrative of the Egyptian rebellion is everywhere. A few examples: Jared Cohen calls digital media an "accelerant" (>>); Don Tapscott (>>) writes that the protests are "Enabled by social media"; Fox News says that Facebook has "Turned Our Entire World Upside Down: Right before our eyes we see Facebook's effects" (>>); Micah Sifry writes at CNN that "Without the relatively free arena of online social networking sites and tools like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, young Egyptians like Ghonim could not have built the resilient and creative force that finally toppled Hosni Mubarak." (>>)

    Most compellingly, here is high profile Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim:

    I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him… I'm talking on behalf of Egypt. This revolution started online. This revolution started on Facebook. This revolution started in June 2010 when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians started collaborating content. We would post a video on Facebook that would be shared by 60,000 people on their walls within a few hours. I always said that if you want to liberate a society just give them the Internet. If you want to have a free society just give them … Continue reading

    Late-Night Thoughts Against Reductionism

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    I just read Cosma Shalizi's Must Macroeconomic Theories Have Microfoundations? Like most good scientists, he is obviously partial to reductionism: the idea that you understand a complex thing in terms of its constituent parts. Big things are made of little things, and those little things are simpler and more basic than the big. So he says: "Obviously, macroeconomic phenomena are the aggregated (or, if you like, the emergent) consequences of microeconomic interactions. What else could they be? Analogously, the macroscopic physical properties of condensed matter all ultimately emerge from molecular interactions."

    Up until a couple of years ago I would have agreed with Cosma, but now I don't. I am not sure I can articulate why, but let's have a go at it anyway.

    Materialism and Reductionism

    Let's get a couple of things out of the way. First, I've not gone all mystical. I'm as strict a materialist as anyone. I think I am anyway. But materialism is not the same as reductionism.

    And second, I have no problem with reductionism in the physical sciences. I'll happily put my hand on my heart and recite after Dirac that, with the discovery of quantum mechanics "the underlying physical laws necessary for … Continue reading

    The Closing of Generation X

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    Digital and local culture, with the beat of Hiawatha.
    On December twenty-eighth I heard that Generation X will close its doors and that, beginning New Year's Day they would be selling off their films. The old and mainstream, horror and alternative and more will go until the doors are shut for good on Valen-tine's Day. Rental shops are on the way out, but this exit has been met with disappointment and dismay that is surprising for a small and local video store. Which makes me think I do not get the way that culture works. So maybe you can help me out perhaps? + + + When I read of culture and its changes, mostly I am reading algo-rithmic-ally based thoughts written by the digerati, based on abstract concepts such as filters, networks, and gate-keepers. Coasian transaction costs and read/write culture fill the pages. Yet these concepts miss the very things that Generation X brought to the town of Waterloo for sixteen years of offbeat culture. If you read the digerati you will read of publishers and outlets (video and book and music too) as "gatekeepers" whose job it is to filter  …  Continue reading