A common theme among the many claims routinely made for digital technology and the efflorescence of social media is the bold idea they are collectively abolishing the traditional constraints of time and distance. In the postmodern ‘real time’ of cyberspace, say the theorists, every place, and perhaps more importantly, every time zone, is equally present. For anyone who has grown up with close relatives in foreign countries – practically everyone in Guyana and a large majority of the wider Caribbean – this has obvious advantages. It has become easier to read news from home, to speak and often to see (via internet video) absent friends who live thousands of miles away; to share photographs, music, email, instant messages, or to facebook and tweet everything from a high school graduation to an ongoing revolution, terrorist attack or earthquake. (Anyone who doubts the significance of these developments should take note of the minutely detailed and compelling reportage which flowed through social media in Iran, Mumbai and Haiti, compared to the predictable fare which traditional broadcasters served up for the same events.) Many of those who can afford the technology have become accustomed to swapping messages on an hourly, sometimes minute-by-minute basis, with friends or colleagues who live, quite literally, on the other side of the world. Consequently, our ways of sharing and consuming information, and relating to each other have started to change noticeably, often in ways that could not have been predicted even a few years ago.
Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab estimates that the average American spends 12 minutes a month gathering news via traditional news sites but more than seven hours engaged with social media. This is not necessarily an unwelcome development. In some ways it has made the so-called ‘netizens’ of the world far more aware of what goes on in other places. Nowhere is this more evident than in the growth of online activism. Four years ago, a handful of activists started an online advocacy group called Avaaz. Today their organisation sends direct appeals to 5 million people, in 14 languages. An Avaaz reader can begin the day by sending an anti-corruption message to an MP in Brazil, followed by a protest against the culling of seals in Canada. On a different day criticism might be aimed at proposals for a conservative television station in Canada (memorably dubbed ‘Fox News North’), political repression in Burma, whale hunts in Japan or conservation in the Indian Ocean. Sceptics often dismiss this peripatetic goodwill as ‘slacktavism’ or ‘clicktavism’ – a series of shallow and transient passions for the sufferings of faraway people – but surely, at the very least, it also means that several million people who would otherwise remain isolated from each other have begun to pay attention, and coordinate their attitudes to problems that lie well beyond their immediate social circle.
The New Yorker journalist Malcolm Gladwell, who does not use social media (although, ironically, an impostor using his name on Twitter currently has more than 60,000 followers) recently drew a damning contrast between the bravery of the civil rights activists who integrated the American south in the 1960s, at risk of life and limb, and the new age of social media activists who think that online disapproval can move governments to behave differently. Gladwell argued that “Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.” Admittedly, this witty dismissal does touch on an obvious flaw that is an inescapable drawback in all virtual communication, but it also unfairly undervalues the fact that in repressive societies, where freedom of information is at a premium, many of the people who are making ‘real’ sacrifices would also have a very limited audience without this technology. When, for example, the death of Neda Agha-Soltan was captured on video during a June 2009 protest in Iran last year the footage quickly went ‘viral,’ in the parlance of YouTube watchers, and crystallized the repression of the Ahmadinejad government for millions of people who hardly knew or cared about what was happening in Tehran. (The government’s sensitivity to the clip can be guessed at by the fact that some of its supporters later desecrated Neda’s grave, by shooting at it, while others tried to force her parents to say she had been shot by fellow protesters.)
In Blogs and Bullets, a sobering short study of the potential for online media to effect lasting political change, researchers at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) point out that “Regimes, such as those in Iran and China, have vast resources of repression with which to control their populations and the media, old and new. Real revolution is usually slow to come, if at all. A year after the ‘Twitter revolution,’ Ahmadinejad is still in power, although his regime has lost considerable legitimacy.” The report warns against the techno-utopian urge to “mistake information for influence” and counsels a robust skepticism towards “sweeping claims about the democratizing power of new media.”
Political action is intimately linked to the here and now, and this is the ultimate source of every repressive government’s resilience to online activism. For as the USIP researchers observe, “The limits of Internet solidarity are [c]lear. The Save Darfur movement mobilized attention and sympathy, but failed to save Darfur. The millions of Twitterers who colored their profiles green in support of the Iranian protesters could not prevent the Iranian regime from attacking its opposition. As one ‘tweet’ cruelly put it, ‘Note to would-be revolutionaries: you can remove the green tint from your pictures now; it didn’t work.’” The bottom line in these stories seems to lie somewhere between the vision of the cyber-utopians and dismissals of the cybersceptics; new technology is very good at making space and time irrelevant for social activities, but, alas, in the political arena, where real people are beaten, shot and imprisoned, it may stir up outrage and mobilize petitions, but it is a poor substitute for real presences in the non-cyberspace realities in which the ‘art of the possible’ must take place.
