On Location

In her latest speech on internet freedom, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared the internet the “town square” of the 21st cen­tury. Clinton seized on the wide­spread atten­tion for Facebook during the Egyptian rev­o­lu­tion and used the oppor­tu­nity to reit­erate internet-oriented US for­eign policy. Just days ear­lier the Egyptian people had ousted Hosni Mubarak, their dic­tator of 30 years. Cairo’s Tahrir Square had been occu­pied by pro­testers, stained with the blood of the revolution’s mar­tyrs, and gained iconic status as the center of the 21st century’s most pop­u­lous rev­o­lu­tionary move­ment. Soon after, pro­testers in Libya named the Northern Court in Benghazi “Tahrir Square Two.” If these events show us any­thing, it is that the town square of the 21st cen­tury is still, simply, the town square.

Internet Hyperbolae

It is not the first time Clinton’s lan­guage has hyper­bolized the role of the internet, thus making her appear sev­ered from reality. Author and scholar, Eyvgeny Morozov, skill­fully rebutted her first major speech on internet freedom given in January 2010 on these very grounds, expressing unease at the Cold War imagery she evoked in warn­ings that “a new infor­ma­tion cur­tain is descending.” Clinton’s latest speech reminds us that the power struggle over new tech­nolo­gies is not lim­ited to the bat­tles over who uses and con­trols the internet and how. It includes the bat­tles over who gets to define and frame the internet through dom­i­nant nar­ra­tives, and who chal­lenges them.

Perhaps the most wide­spread and heated con­tes­ta­tion of an internet nar­ra­tive is that of the “Twitter Revolution.” Although it was first used with ref­er­ence to Moldova, this term enjoyed its peak during the tumul­tuous after­math of the Iranian pres­i­den­tial elec­tions of June 2009. With his piece, The Revolution will be Tweeted, Andrew Sullivan was quickly estab­lished as a leading pro­po­nent of the hype. He eagerly com­pared the power of the Iranian pro­testers to the elec­toral suc­cess of President Barack Obama the year prior. The only link seemed to be some broad asso­ci­a­tions with demo­c­ratic change and pop­ular asso­ci­a­tions with social media appli­ca­tions such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, but it cer­tainly caught on.

Down with the “Twitter Revolution”!

Unfortunately, Sullivan not only jumped the gun on Iran, his per­spec­tive also obscured the ways the Obama cam­paign had effec­tively hijacked users’ online social net­works, rather than building them, as doc­u­mented in Eric Boehlert’s Bloggers on the Bus. Even though Iran’s case was still devel­oping at the time, tech jour­nal­ists, blog­gers, activists, and independent/public news media imme­di­ately poked the “Twitter Revolution” nar­ra­tive full of holes. These skep­tics chal­lenged the notion that tech­nolo­gies rather than people are deci­sive for social move­ments, and con­tinue to argue for placing new media impacts within wider, offline (socio-economic and polit­ical) con­texts, stressing that the new tech­nolo­gies are “tools” that are used for oppres­sion as well as liberation.

Although Iran’s case car­ried the Twitter Revolution nar­ra­tive to new heights, it also played a part in main­streaming its counter-narratives. Sullivan him­self was soon among those “cured” of the “Twitter obses­sion,” as Morozov put it. And notwith­standing the unfor­tu­nate irony about the “town square” metaphor, Clinton’s latest speech reflected ele­ments of this more bal­anced counter-narrative when she said of Egypt and Tunisia:

"People protested because of deep frus­tra­tions with the polit­ical and eco­nomic con­di­tions of their lives. They stood and marched and chanted and the author­i­ties tracked and blocked and arrested them. The internet did not do any of those things; people did. In both of these coun­tries, the ways that cit­i­zens and the author­i­ties used the internet reflected the power of con­nec­tion tech­nolo­gies on the one hand as an accel­erant of polit­ical, social, and eco­nomic change, and on the other hand as a means to stifle or extin­guish that change… We realize that in order to be mean­ingful, online free­doms must carry over into real-world activism.”

Gone is the empow­er­ment of tech­nolo­gies over people. Despite the con­tested “Twitter rev­o­lu­tion” narrative’s par­tial revival through these recent rev­o­lu­tions, we all seem to be sobering up more and more from the new media cel­e­bra­tions. It looks like the counter-narrative has per­me­ated the main­stream, bal­anced the scales, and even pro­nounced the debate around the “Twitter Revolution” dead.