No one knows if the uprisings that have spread to Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain will be as successful, but governments everywhere appear to be watching their backs, asking themselves: Could a simple text message, sent by enough people, depose dictators everywhere? They seemed naive for believing that even "Tweets heard round the world" would bring democracy with them.īut when Tunisia's and Egypt's corrupt autocrats fell earlier this year, the cyber-topian dream was resurrected. When the uprising was crushed, the "cyber-topians," as one writer calls the digital revolution enthusiasts, were chagrined. In a country with so few foreign journalists on the ground, and where information was so tightly managed, the Green Revolution was quickly dubbed "the Twitter revolution." Two years ago, Iranian pro-democracy activists protested against the re-election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as the world watched its Twitter feeds. If this all sounds a bit familiar, it should. Social media is really a catalytic part," says Peter Hirshberg, a senior fellow at the Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "These technologies collectively – everything from cellphone cameras to Twitter – are disruptive not just of other technologies like landlines or newspapers, which the military could shut down, but the whole social construct.
Protesters mapped their uprisings, and the violence that followed, adapting their online cartography in real time to reports gathered by text message and Facebook updates.Īfter only a few weeks watching the events in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, it seemed conclusive: This was the global revolution that Twitter built – that, maybe, only Twitter and other technologies could have built.
Photographs were uploaded to Flickr, a photo-sharing website, and video clips were hoisted onto YouTube.
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