all at onceâ. Technology, social change, institutional decay had unleashed something bigger than teenage angst.
If this sounds like an eighteenth-century version of the âdeath of deferenceâ complaint, well, it was. A deep social crisis was under way, then as now. But with one big difference: today, in every garret there is a laptop.
The Jacobin with a laptop
There has been high prominence given to technology and social media in explanations of the global unrestâand for good reason. Social media and new technology were crucial in shaping the revolutions of 2011, just as they shaped industry, finance and mass culture in the preceding decade. Whatâs important is not that the Egyptian youth used Facebook, or that the British students used Twitter and the Greek rioters organized via Indymedia, but what they used these media forâand what such technology does to hierarchies, ideas and actions.
Here, the crucial concept is the networkâwhose impact on politics has been a long time coming. The networkâs basic law was explained by Bell Telephone boss Theodore Vail as early as 1908: the more people who use the network, the more useful it becomes to each user. This is known as the ânetwork effectâ: what it describes is the creation, out of two peopleâs interaction, of a âthird thingâ which comes for free. Because network theory originated in the boardroom, this âthird thingâ has tended to be identified in terms of economic value. But, in recent years, it has become clear it can provide much more than that.
Thereâs another difference: when it was first theorized by Vailâs technologists, the ânetwork effectâ seemed like a by-product, a happy accident. Today we are conscious users and promoters of the network effect. Everyone who uses information technology understands that they areâwhether at work, on Facebook, on eBay or in a multiplayer gameâa ânodeâ on a network: not a foot-soldier, not a bystander, not a leader, but a multitasking version of all three.
Vailâs customers probably had no idea that, by buying and using telephones, they were enhancing the technologyâs value for others and creating spin-off effects for Bellâs other businesses (what are now termed ânetwork externalitiesâ). Nowadays, many of us have a very clear understanding of all this. The result is that, in the past ten years, the ânetwork effectâ has blasted its way out of corporate economics and into sociology.
The most obvious impact has been on the media and ideology. Long before people started using Twitter to foment social unrest, mainstream journalists noticedâto their dismayâthat the size of oneâs public persona or pay cheque carried no guarantee of popularity online. Peopleâs status rises and falls with the reliability and truthfulness of what they contribute. This is a classic network effectâbut it is not measurable as profit and loss.
If you look at the full suite of information tools that were employed to spread the revolutions of 2009â11, it goes like this: Facebook is used to form groups, covert and overtâin order to establish those strong but flexible connections. Twitter is used for real-time organization and news dissemination, bypassing the cumbersome ânewsgatheringâ operations of the mainstream media. YouTube and the Twitter-linked photographic sitesâYfrog, Flickr and Twitpicâare used to provide instant evidence of the claims being made. Link-shorteners like bit.ly are used to disseminate key articles via Twitter.
And the democracy of retweeting (or sharing on Facebook) filters out the trash. In this way, key contributions to the dialogue thatâs going on around the action get promoted as if by acclaim, as happened to the original âTwenty Reasonsâ blog post. Activists describe this process as âmemeticâ, drawing on Richard
Allen McGill
Cynthia Leitich Smith
Kevin Hazzard
Joann Durgin
L. A. Witt
Andre Norton
Gennita Low
Graham Masterton
Michael Innes
Melanie Jackson