The news from Syria is chilling. Despite the presence of monitors from the Arab League, the Assad government continues its violent suppression of the protests with complete impunity. Yesterday the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that security forces used ‘nail bombs’ to disperse thousands of protesters in Douma and the death toll from similar outrages looks set to climb sharply in the immediate future. Since the ‘Syrian revolution’ began in March, more than 5,000 citizens have been killed for little more than assembling in public squares to criticise an oppressive government.
Coverage of the uprising in the Western media has been sporadic and largely dependent on the footage available (there are many cellphone videos of gunfire on unarmed protesters, Facebook photographs of government snipers installing themselves on rooftops and one horrifying video clip that appears to show a protester being executed by security forces in the back of a van). Yet despite the indifference of the wider world, Syria’s protesters have persevered with heroic tenacity.
The gap between our knowledge of what is taking place in Syria and the international community’s actions to date touches on serious questions about the way we gather and consume news in the age of the internet. As a general rule, the new media seem to work best at a local level. Last month, for example, the British police charged a 34-year-old Londoner with “racially aggravated harassment” after cellphone footage broadcast on YouTube showed her freely disparaging racial and ethnic minorities while travelling on public transport. Just a few months earlier, another anonymous woman – a West Indian immigrant living in Hackney – rose to prominence after she was filmed hurling abuse at a group of rioters, demanding that they stop looting and go home. Millions of people watched these clips and were galvanised into action by what they saw. But when the footage is from much further afield – Egypt, Libya, Syria – global public opinion is practically toothless.
Every era is shaped by its information technology. The printing press revolutionised Europe’s religious opinions and set the stage for the rise of Protestantism and all that followed. In an influential book, Professor Benedict Anderson has even claimed that “print-capitalism” overhauled our capacity for social organization and led to the emergence of the modern nation state, an ‘imagined community’ whose members shared strong common ties and interests despite the impossibility of getting to know all the other members of the group.Whether driven by print, radio, fax machines, or the internet every society constructs new ideas of itself around the available media, and many of these these have lasting political consequences. When these ideas begin to travel beyond their immediate context, however, language and geography often slow their progress. In the Tunisian revolution, for example, social media played an important role. Yet despite the worldwide access this theoretically allowed, nearly a month elapsed before the major Western media fully noticed what was happening.
Evgeny Morozov, one of the sharpest analysts of the new technology, has argued that while social media are potentially revolutionary platforms for dissent they can equally well facilitate government surveillance, distract citizens with entertainment, and potentially disembody political dissent by shifting it online. Responding to these insights Zeynep Tufekci, a technology blogger, has remarked that “It’s not the technology that is failing politics but it is our politics that has failed … Street protests don’t work, as shown by the lead-up to the Iraq war, and demonstrated again by the current situation in Europe wherein national governments are destroying public infrastructure to please global finance capital. Letter-writing doesn’t work. Online petitions don’t work. Email campaigns don’t work. Consumer boycotts don’t work…” She argues that while ‘most of the existential problems facing humanity are occurring at a global scale’ our political responses remain stubbornly local. Tufekci suggests the internet is “facilitating the emergence of a global public sphere” that is still in its infancy and has yet to find its full expression in traditional political structures.
What is happening in Syria, Egypt, and Bahrain ought to matter to anyone who believes democracy is worth fighting for, but until the international community develops a capacity to respond to global public opinion, we are fated to remain on the outside of these revolutions, spectating impotently as thousands are killed for defending values that millions of other global citizens notionally share.
