I’ve tried to remain neutral in the great “social media is-or-isn’t having a role in democratic revolutions” debate. I’ve seen some good arguments on both sides, have often chuckled at the impossible fantasies of freedom technologists, while shaking my head at the obstinate refuseniks who can’t see what’s happening right before their eyes. There are so many problems with the debate – namely the expectation that a dictatorship must be shattered in order to say that social media makes a difference, as well as the basic issue of causation: of course these movements aren’t happening because of social media, they are just using it efficiently. At any rate, here Erik Sass fires a few shots across the bow of Malcolm Gladwell’s pessimistic perspective:
Once again, Gladwell tries to use historical analogies to make an embarrassingly simpleminded argument: basically, because revolutions happened in the past without social media, social media didn’t play a role in the current Middle East revolutions.
No, really, that’s what he’s saying: “The lesson here is just because innovations in communications technology happen does not mean that they matter… What evidence is there that social revolutions in the pre-Internet era suffered from a lack of cutting-edge communications and organizational tools?”
Presuming Gladwell isn’t joking, I would offer this response: no one ever said that social revolutions in the pre-Internet era suffered from such a lack. Indeed, that’s kind of the whole point: every successful revolution has made use of the most advanced communications available at the time, which often (but not always) allowed rebels to outwit sclerotic governments which were behind the technological times.