[iDC] Iran & the "Twitter Revolution"
David Golumbia
dgolumbia at virginia.edu
Thu Jun 25 14:23:16 UTC 2009
I was just asked to post this on the Harvard UP blog, and hope some will
find it relevant to the current conversations:
http://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2009/06/revolutions-and-the-politics-of-networks.html
"Revolutions" and the Politics of Networks
/... with special reference to the role played by the internet during
the recent developments in Iran./
----------
Few words have been heard more often lately than revolution. The word
occurs in two ways, but the connection between them is at best fuzzy.
First, commentators wonder if Iran is going through a political
revolution. Second, they speculate about an "internet revolution"---not
merely a change in communications technologies, but something more
significant for democracy, for political organization.
Jeff Jarvis calls it "the API revolution"
<http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/06/17/the-api-revolution/> (referring
to the ability, via software called an API, to for third-parties to
"use" other applications---for mobile phone providers, for example, to
route messages onto Twitter). Clay Shirky calls it "the big one"
<http://blog.ted.com/2009/06/qa_with_clay_sh.php>:
... this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been
catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I've
been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they
chanted "the whole world is watching." Really, that wasn't true then.
But this time it's true ... and people throughout the world are not only
listening but responding. They're engaging with individual participants,
they're passing on their messages to their friends, and they're even
providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet
access that the authorities can't immediately censor. That kind of
participation is really extraordinary.
When Shirky said this it was still plausible that the revolution in Iran
would "take." It didn't. And what Shirky says about the benefits of "the
big one" are odd: "people ... are engaging with individual participants,
they're passing on messages to their friends." I am absolutely positive
that these have been critical aspects of every political revolution,
regardless of technology. So what does Twitter change? "The whole world
is watching." Well, we outside Iran can watch in much more detail than
we could before. But since when is external observation an important
part of revolution? It can help. But "we" have watched many failed
revolutions from the outside. Does "our" knowing more of the details of
the failure really change the situation?
At the very least, the failure of the Iranian revolution shows that the
thesis that "network openness" leads automatically or directly to
democracy is false---we have plenty of network openness, we keep
celebrating it, and yet all we saw in practice was a near-revolution
very similar to hundreds we have seen in the past. Other than the
evidence we see on computer screens---other than the Twitter feeds and
Neda YouTube videos---what actually changed in the process of or
progress toward revolution in any substantive fashion?
The point I hope to make here, and one that I make at greater length in
my book /*The Cultural Logic of Computation
<http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/GOLCUL.html>*/, is that so many of
our commentators appear to live in a world where the equation between
positive political change and network openness, or technological
evolution, is so obvious as to be transparent. The hidden and most
dangerous underside of this is that the only politics such people want
most to examine are the liberatory potentials they have already decided
are there.
As Chris Rhoads and Loretta Chao discuss in an article this week
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124562668777335653.html> in the Wall
Street Journal, though---raising issues that are well known to those of
us who pay close attention to what governments and businesses do with
computer networks---the fact is that the Iranian government is using the
network to surveil its citizens, to anticipate their plans, to identify
dissidents, and to counter them. In an interview on NPR
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105775075&ft=1&f=1004>,
Rhoads explained what seems never to occur to the techno-evangelists:
Iran has kept the internet open because it provides them with much
richer information to spy on its citizens.
I am not suggesting and not hoping that we see a new generation of Clay
Shirkys and Jeff Jarvises who blog exclusively about the advent of a
new, real Big Brother. But there is a reason that it was a former Bush
national security advisor who suggested
<http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/22/former-deputy-national-security-advisor-twitter-founders-should-get-nobel-peace-prize/>,
amidst the revolution-that-failed, that the Twitter developers deserve
the Nobel Peace Prize, when in fact Twitter is being used to control and
monitor dissidence. We have to find a way to explore in a sober way the
political consequences of all parts of the computerization of the world,
whether they fit or do not fit with our own hopes, and even to resist
those parts of computerization that ultimately do not serve democratic ends.
--
David Golumbia
Assistant Professor
Media Studies, English, and Linguistics
University of Virginia
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