The political power of social media
Last term, I attended a weekly evening class in a course at central London’s City Literary Institute entitled “International Relations & World Conflict”. This week, I started Part 2 of the course with the same lecturer Dr Dale Mineshima-Lowe.
In this first session with a largely new group of students, we discussed the definition of ‘international relations’ and then went on to consider the role of social media in IR. Our starting point was a paper published in the current issue (Jan/Feb 2011) of the journal “Foreign Affairs”. This was written by Clay Shirky, Professor of New Media at New York University, and entitled “The Political Power Of Social Media”.
In his introduction to his paper, Shirky argues that:
“… the U.S. State Department has committed itself to ‘Internet feedom’ as a specific policy aim. Arguing for the right of people to use the Internet freely is an appropriate policy for the United States, both because it aligns with the strategic goal of strengthening civil society worldwide and because it resonates with American beliefs about freedom of expression.”
In the discussion on our course, it was pointed out that the massive release of State Department papers onto the web through the action of WikiLeaks has probably made the US Government rather less enthusiastic about a totally free Internet.
In the paper, Shirky suggests:
“The U.S. government should maintain Internet freedom as a goal to be pursued in a principled and regime-neutral fashion, not as a tool for effecting immediate policy aims country by country. It should likewise assume that progress will be incremental and, unsurprisingly, slowest in the most authoritarian regimes.”
Really? Tunisia is about as authoritarian as nation states get and the progress of the last few weeks has been far from “incremental”. Of course, this is not down to the Internet: pressure has been building for months, if not years, and the suicide of a young man was arguably a major trigger for the recent demonstrations.
But the Internet has played a part. WikiLeaks revealed that the local US Ambassador had correctly identified the extent of corruption in the regime and the need for President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali to go before there could be meaningful reform [ the full text here]. As a result, some have dubbed the events of the past week “the first WikiLeaks revolution”. And social networking sites and text messaging on mobiles have helped the protesters to organise.
Shirky’s piece seems to have been overtaken by events.