Mass media, including interactive social-networking tools, make you passive, can sap your initiative, and leave you content to watch the spectacle of life from your couch or smartphone.
Apparently, even during a revolution. That is the provocative thesis of a new paper by Navid Hassanpour, a political science graduate student at Yale, titled ‘Media disruption exacerbates revolutionary unrest’.
Using complex calculations and vectors representing decision-making by potential protesters, Hassanpour, who already has a doctoral degree in electrical engineering from Stanford, studied the recent uprising in Egypt. His question was, how smart was the decision by the government of President Hosni Mubarak to completely shut down the internet and cellphone service on January 28, in the middle of the crucial protests in Tahrir Square?
His conclusion was, not so smart, but not for the reasons you might think. “Full connectivity in a social network sometimes can hinder collective action,” he writes. To put it differently, all the Twitter posting, texting and Facebook wall-posting is great for organising and spreading a message of protest, but it can also spread a message of caution, delay, confusion or, ‘I don’t have time for all this politics, did you see what Lady Gaga is wearing?’
It is a conclusion that counters the widely-held belief that the social media helped spur the protests. Hassanpour used press accounts of outbreaks of unrest in Egypt to show that after January 28, the protests became more spread around Cairo and the country. There were not necessarily more protesters, but the movement spread to more parts of the population.
He called this a “localisation process.” “You can say it would be hard to measure that,” he added, talking about his research, “but you can test it, what happens when a disruption goes into effect.” “The disruption of cellphone coverage and internet on the 28th exacerbated the unrest in at least three major ways,” he writes. “It implicated many apolitical citizens unaware of or uninterested in the unrest; it forced more face-to-face communication, that is, more physical presence in streets; and finally it effectively decentralised the rebellion on the 28th through new hybrid communication tactics, producing a quagmire much harder to control and repress than one massive gathering in Tahrir.”
In an interview, he described “the strange darkness” that takes place in a society deprived of media outlets. “We become more normal when we actually know what is going on — we are more unpredictable when we don’t — on a mass scale that has interesting implications,” he said.
Jim Cowie, the chief technology officer of Renesys, a company that assesses the way the internet is operating across the world, believes another besieged leader, Muammar el-Qaddafi, may have taken note of the Egyptian experience. Libya’s leaders “faced this same decision in the run-up to civil war,” he wrote, “and each time, perhaps learning from the Egyptian example, they backed down from implementing a multiday all-routes blackout.”
©2011 The New York
Times News Service
