[-empyre-] New Media and the Middle East

[Eliot Bates]

Ulises,
Thanks for posting your analysis of the role of social media in the current revolutions. It quickly was swept under the rug, but the first media reaction to the first demonstration in Tunisia was that this was the first revolution to result from Cablegate, from the leaked cables that provided proof that apparently Tunisians had never had all these years, that they were living under an overtly corrupt regime, that the country's funds were siphoned out of the country by their autocratic leader. I had a very hard time believing that story when it surfaced; the first batch of Tunisia cables was leaked on December 7, quite a bit before the revolution began, and of course, Mohamed Bouazizi setting himself on fire 10 days later was an important event that neither implicates proxy servers, twitter, facebook profiles, nor any other aspect of social media networks. Of course, that news of Mohamed was able to spread and spread so quickly internationally is evidence that media forms did play a role, but ostensibly a newspaper could have done nearly as efficient a job as a youtube video or 10000 tweets. And in Egypt, it's notable that the revolution didn't die when they "unplugged" the internet.

Another point I want to add into your discussion concerns the "democratic" part of the picture - both in terms of how technology is described in relation to conceptualizations of "democracy," and the value associations placed on the term democracy itself. Apparently, technology can be "democratizing," a thoroughly technological-determinist way of theorizing what technology is and does. It would logically follow, then, that the structure of the technology itself is imbricated with democratic principles, whatever those might be, and that such effects might be unavoidable. If twitter brings democracy to Egypt, it would/could bring it to anywhere in the world. So where is twitter used the most in the world? In today's Alexa rankings  (averaged over the previous month), twitter.com is one of the top 10 most accessed domains in: South Africa, Nigeria, the US, Philippines, Pakistan, India, Spain, Canada, Netherlands, Malaysia, and Columbia. One would assume that such a democratizing technology would be inciting revolutions in Malaysia, Pakistan and Columbia. In none of the countries where the "revolutions are televised" is twitter even among the top 20 sites; in Egypt and Tunisia, among the top-20 accessed sites are file hosting sites such as hotfile, several music/video sites (other than youtube), and facebook+google+youtube. It's noteworthy that in the midst of the revolution, illegal download site myegy.com is receiving several orders of magnitude more visits than twitter, which doesn't even make the top-100 in Tunisia.

The other conceptual problem I routinely see is the use of the term democracy in relation to "access to technology," always implying that increased use of and access to technology is both good and inherently democratic. You mention Cory Doctorow's writing on technology - he's perhaps the worst offender in that camp, as his conceptualization of democracy purports an ethics where the sole measurement of good and thereby the ultimate form of democracy is unrestricted access to all information/media, all the time and at no cost. This concept gets amplified with Mubarak's action in calling the ISPs to turn off DNS broadcasting within Egypt - what less democratic action could exist than blocking access to media and information, particularly seeing as much of the most frequently accessed forms of media and information are illegal downloads of video games like Test Drive Unlimited, obviously revolutionary movies including "Megamind 2010" and "Little Fockers," and the latest albums by Tamer Ashour and Yanni? (A side note: the latest music videos of Tamer Ashour, Egypt's newest pop star with a "degree in commerce," are a spectacular voyage through product endorsements: Cadillac, Adidas, some watch company (Tag Heuer? I don't know my watch logos well enough)).

The transnational corporations that stand most to benefit from this all-access vision of information/media are hard drive manufacturers, file hosting websites, and search engine+advertising conglomerates. Increased participation directly equals more products sold or more ads served, but the content or purpose of the participation is immaterial. And ultimately I think it's here that the problem lies - with a conceptualization of democracy that focuses more on outward evidence of widespread participation (which could be measured through "internet penetration," I'll let others have a field day with that phrase) than on the specific ideological and structural changes that such participation brings about, we become unable to differentiate between participation that is democratic and that which is not.

-eliot

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Dr. Eliot Bates
ACLS New Faculty Fellow in Music, Adjunct Fellow in the Society for Humanities
http://www.eliotbates.com
________________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-bounces at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Ulises Mejias [ulises.mejias at oswego.edu]
Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2011 9:19 AM
To: empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Subject: [-empyre-] New Media and the Middle East

I'm looking forward to learning more about the work this month's guests are doing.

In light of how the demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt (and Iran, earlier) are being labeled Twitter or Facebook Revolutions, I'm interested in the ways in which these Web 2.0 tools are incorporated into artistic practices, and the tension this creates between the interests of the public, the artist, and the corporations that own and control these tools.

To clarify where I am coming from, I would like to share the following statement, which I think is pertinent to our discussion. For hyperlink citations and images, see http://blog.ulisesmejias.com/2011/01/30/the-twitter-revolution-must-die/

THE TWITTER REVOLUTION MUST DIE

Have you ever heard of the Leica Revolution? No?

That’s probably because folks who don’t know anything about “branding” insist on calling it the Mexican Revolution. An estimated two million people died in the long struggle (1910-1920) to overthrow a despotic government and bring about reform. But why shouldn’t we re-name the revolution not after a nation or its people, but after the “social media” that had such a great impact in making the struggle known all over the world: the photographic camera? Even better, let’s name the revolution not after the medium itself, but after the manufacturer of the cameras that were carried by people like Hugo Brehme to document the atrocities of war. Viva Leica, cabrones!

My sarcasm is, of course, a thinly veiled attempt to point out how absurd it is to refer to events in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere as the Twitter Revolution, the Facebook Revolution, and so on. What we call things, the names we use to identify them, has incredible symbolic power, and I, for one, refuse to associate corporate brands with struggles for human dignity. I agree with Jillian York when she says:

“… I am glad that Tunisians were able to utilize social media to bring attention to their plight.  But I will not dishonor the memory of Mohamed Bouazizi–or the 65 others that died on the streets for their cause–by dubbing this anything but a human revolution.”

Granted, as Joss Hands points out, there appears to be more skepticism than support for the idea that tools like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are primarily responsible for igniting the uprisings in question. But that hasn’t stopped the internet intelligentsia from engaging in lengthy arguments about the role that technology is playing in these historic developments. One camp, comprised of people like Clay Shirky, seem to make allowances for what Cory Doctorow calls the “internet’s special power to connect and liberate.” On the other side, authors like Ethan Zuckerman, Malcolm Gladwell and Evgeny Morozov have proposed that while digital media can play a role in organizing social movements, it cannot be counted on to build lasting alliances, or even protect net activists once authorities start using the same tools to crack down on dissent.

Both sides are, perhaps, engaging in a bit of technological determinism–one by embellishing the agency of technology, the other by diminishing it. The truth, as always, is somewhere in between, and philosophers of technology settled the dispute of whether technology shapes society (technological determinism) or society shapes technology (cultural materialism) a while ago: the fact is that technology and society mutually and continually determine each other.

So why does the image of a revolution enabled by social media continue to grab headlines and spark the interest of Western audiences, and what are the dangers of employing such imagery? My fear is that the hype about a Twitter/Facebook/YouTube revolution performs two functions: first, it depoliticizes our understanding of the conflicts, and second, it whitewashes the role of capitalism in suppressing democracy.

To elaborate, the discourse of a social media revolution is a form of self-focused empathy in which we imagine the other (in this case, a Muslim other) to be nothing more than a projection of our own desires, a depoliticized instant in our own becoming. What a strong affirmation of ourselves it is to believe that people engaged in a desperate struggle for human dignity are using the same Web 2.0 products we are using! That we are able to form this empathy largely on the basis of consumerism demonstrates the extent to which we have bought into the notion that democracy is a by-product of media products for self-expression, and that the corporations that create such media products would never side with governments against their own people.

It is time to abandon this fantasy, and to realize that although the internet’s original architecture encouraged openness, it is becoming increasingly privatized and centralized. While it is true that an internet controlled by a handful of media conglomerates can still be used to promote democracy (as people are doing in Tunisia, Egypt, and all over the world), we need to reconsider the role that social media corporations like Facebook and Twitter will play in these struggles.

The clearest way to understand this role is to simply look at the past and current role that corporations have played in “facilitating” democracy elsewhere. Consider the above image of the tear gas canister fired against Egyptians demanding democracy. The can is labeled Made in U.S.A.

But surely it would be a gross calumny to suggest that ICT are on the same level as tear gas, right? Well, perhaps not. Today, our exports encompass not only weapons of war and riot control used to keep in power corrupt leaders, but tools of internet surveillance like Narusinsight, produced by a subsidiary of Boeing and used by the Egyptian government to track down and “disappear” dissidents.

Even without citing examples of specific Web companies that have aided governments in the surveillance and persecution of their citizens (Jillian York documents some of these examples), my point is simply that the emerging market structure of the internet is threatening its potential to be used by people as a tool for democracy. The more monopolies (a market structure characterized by a single seller) control access and infrastructure, and the more monopsonies (a market structure characterized by a single buyer) control aggregation and distribution of user-generated content, the easier it is going to be for authorities to pull the plug, as just happened in Egypt.

I’m reminded of the first so-called Internet Revolution. Almost a hundred years after the original Mexican Revolution, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation launched an uprising in southern Mexico to try to address some of the injustices that the first revolution didn’t fix, and that remain unsolved to this day. But back in 1994, Subcomandante Marcos and the rest of the EZLN didn’t have Facebook profiles, or use Twitter to communicate or organize. Maybe their movement would have been more effective if they had. Or maybe it managed to stay alive because of the decentralized nature of the networks the EZLN and their supporters used.

My point is this: as digital networks grow and become more centralized and privatized, they increase opportunities for participation, but they also increase inequality, and make it easier for authorities to control them.

Thus, the real challenge is going to be figuring out how to continue the struggle after the network has been shut off. In fact, the struggle is going to be against those who own and control the network. If the fight can’t continue without Facebook and Twitter, then it is doomed. But I suspect the people of Iran, Tunisia and Egypt (unlike us) already know this, out of sheer necessity.

[Ulises A. Mejias is assistant professor at the State University of New York, College at Oswego. His book, The Limits of Nodes: Unmapping the Digital Network, is under review by publishers.]