3
No region, state, or form of government can remain immune to the impact of new
information and communication technologies on social and political movements. While
the political contexts of mass unrest in large parts of the Middle East have important
country and macro-regional specifics, the impact of net-based technologies and social
tools goes beyond that region and will continue to affect developing and developed
countries alike.
At
the same time, their impact is not universal or unconditional. As enthusiasts
seek to project the latest developments in the Middle East into the future and to other
regional contexts where ruling regimes face pressures
of economic and political
modernization, forecasts and parallels are to be made with great caution. The
mobilizing effect of new information and social media networks as catalysts of broad
sociopolitical protest will vary significantly from region to region and from one political
context to another. The presence of multiple underlying causes for sociopolitical protest
will not suffice for new information and communication networks to become a major
catalyst.
For one, Internet access must be available to significant segments of the
population. In the foreseeable future, this condition will exclude
a number of
underdeveloped countries with minimal Internet penetration. For instance, much of the
Near East, with the exception of Iran, cannot be exposed to social media activism by
default owing to underdevelopment and the lack of Internet access (Internet users made
up just 1.1 percent of Iraqis and 3.4 percent of Afghans in 2010, for example, as
compared to over 21 percent in Egypt, 34 percent in Tunisia, and 88 percent in
Bahrain).
‡
Outside the broader Middle East, this is also true for a host of countries from
Myanmar to Somalia.
At the same time, developments in the Middle East in 2011 raise doubts about
decisively linking mass social protest with a proliferation of net-based networks and
social media, whether today or in the short- to mid-term. Across and beyond the region,
no direct regional correlation can be traced between, on the one hand, levels of Internet
penetration and other IT indicators (such as the spread of social media networks) and,
on the other, proclivity for and intensity of social protest. States with some of the
highest levels of internet usage (such as Bahrain with 88 percent of its population
online, a level higher than that of the United States) and states with some of the lowest
levels of Internet exposure (like Yemen and Libya) both experienced mass protests. For
the latter, however, the limited or absent role of major ICT and social media
networks
as direct facilitators in organizing protests did not diminish the role of mainstream
electronic media devices—cell phones, tweets, emails, and video clips—capable of
quickly capturing and broadly transmitting eyewitness accounts of domestic
developments to the rest of the world. Another example is Iran, the regional leader in
terms of combined indicators of ICT development and a country that has shown one of
the highest growth rates in Internet usage over the past decade (with 43.2
percent of
Iranians using the Internet in 2010, compared to just 42.8 percent in Russia and 31.6
‡
Internet World Stats, “Internet World Stats: Usage and Population Statistics,” 2010
4
percent in China). If anti-government net-based social media activism does not become
a qualitative accelerator in the context of present or future protests in Iran, this will be
for reasons unrelated to the overall level of the country’s technological development.
Third, not all types of ICT and related information and social networks have had
the same impact. Nor have they outmatched other means of information and
communication, from satellite television to cell phones, in playing a mobilization or
public information role. While the media utilized the term “Twitter revolutions” for the
developments in the Middle East, identifiable Twitter users in Egypt and Tunisia
numbered just a few thousand, and the mobilization role of micro-blogging as a driver
of protests has been somewhat overemphasized, as compared to other ICTs, including
cell phones, video clip messaging (such as YouTube), and satellite television.
Fourth, a critical constraint on the catalyzing effect
of net-based mobilization
tools is likely not the ability of governments to master social media or to limit or block
Internet access but rather a country’s particular system of governance, especially in
terms of its representativeness and its linkages to the mass public (which could be in a
populist, if not “democratic,” sense). The new ICT networks are likely to have a critical
effect in countries where the governing regime has little or no social base (which was
true of Tunisia and Egypt, but does not fully apply to Syria, Bahrain, or Libya, and is
not the case for populist regimes such as Iran or Venezuela). If a governing regime is
not alienated from the mass public but is at least partially mass-based, there are
significant limits to what even advanced ICT-based social media/protest
networks can
achieve.
Finally, for ICT networks to succeed, the younger, relatively educated
generation, which represents the most active Internet-users, should make up not only
the bulk of activists, but also a sizeable percentage of the population at large. This
effectively excludes, for instance, areas of Eastern Europe and Eurasia where this
segment of the population faces a dramatic decline.
