Dawkinsâ proposal of information âmemesâ: ideas that behave like genes, fighting for survival and mutating in the process.
Underpinning the social media is mobile telephony: in the crush of every crowd we see arms holding cellphones in the air, like small flocks of ostriches, snapping scenes of repression or revolt, offering instant and indelible image-capture to a global audience. Cellphones provide the basic white sliced bread of insurrectionary communications: SMS. SMS allows you to post to Twitter, or to microblogs, even if you donât have Internet access and canât read the results. Texting is traceable, of course. But as all fans of The Wire understand, you can thwart surveillance if you use a cheap, pay-as-you-go handset, which you can throw away if youâre in a tight corner. Whatâs more, for many of the impoverished youth and slum dwellers, pay-as-you-go is all they can afford.
Finally, there is blogging. Though blogging was an early form of social media and has been heavily colonized by the mainstream press, 2011 saw a revival of what was essential about the format: the ability to express your own agenda through montaging stills, movies, words and links to create indelible statements of attitude and contempt. In some countries, residually, bulletin boards have played a role: the Athenian revolt of December 2008 was initially organized through newsflashes on the Indymedia bulletin board.
Blogs have been most influential in the Arab world, where the mainstream press has been subject to various degrees of censorship and self-censorship. But in all the theatres of revolution, blogs have offered that vital resource: somewhere to link to. They have become, like the newspapers of the nineteenth century, journals of record. Their impact can be measured by the fact that, in 2011, 7 per cent of Middle Eastern bloggers surveyed reported theyâd been arrested by their respective security forces. 9
The ability to deploy, without expert knowledge, a whole suite of information tools has allowed protesters across the world to outwit the police, to beam their message into the newsrooms of global media, and above all to assert a cool, cutting-edge identity in the face of what Auden once called âthe elderly rubbish dictators talkâ. It has given todayâs protest movements a massive psychological advantage, one that no revolt has enjoyed since 1968.
Suddenly, the form of todayâs protests seems entirely congruent with the way people live their lives. It is modern; it is immune to charges of âresisting progressâ. Indeed, it utilizes technology that is so essential to modern work and leisure, governments cannot turn it off without harming their national economies. And, as Mubarak, Gaddafi and the Bahraini royals discovered, even turning it off does not work.
Becauseâand here is the technological fact that underpins the social and political aspects of whatâs happenedâa network can usually defeat a hierarchy.
The pioneer of network theory, Walter Powell, summed up the reasons for this as follows: the network is better at adapting to a situation where the quality of information is crucial to success, but where information itself is fluid; a hierarchy is best if you are only transmitting orders and responses, and the surrounding situation is predictable. Above all, âas information passes through a network, it is both freer and richer [than in a hierarchy]; new connections, new meanings are generated, debated and evaluated.â 10
However, the early network theorists were only studying the advantages of, say, collaborative workshops in the textile industry versus big factories. Now we are studying networks with many millions of individual nodes, and they are in conflict with states. Once information networks become âsocialâ, the implications are massive: truth can now travel faster than lies, and all propaganda becomes instantly
Underpinning the social media is mobile telephony: in the crush of every crowd we see arms holding cellphones in the air, like small flocks of ostriches, snapping scenes of repression or revolt, offering instant and indelible image-capture to a global audience. Cellphones provide the basic white sliced bread of insurrectionary communications: SMS. SMS allows you to post to Twitter, or to microblogs, even if you donât have Internet access and canât read the results. Texting is traceable, of course. But as all fans of The Wire understand, you can thwart surveillance if you use a cheap, pay-as-you-go handset, which you can throw away if youâre in a tight corner. Whatâs more, for many of the impoverished youth and slum dwellers, pay-as-you-go is all they can afford.
Finally, there is blogging. Though blogging was an early form of social media and has been heavily colonized by the mainstream press, 2011 saw a revival of what was essential about the format: the ability to express your own agenda through montaging stills, movies, words and links to create indelible statements of attitude and contempt. In some countries, residually, bulletin boards have played a role: the Athenian revolt of December 2008 was initially organized through newsflashes on the Indymedia bulletin board.
Blogs have been most influential in the Arab world, where the mainstream press has been subject to various degrees of censorship and self-censorship. But in all the theatres of revolution, blogs have offered that vital resource: somewhere to link to. They have become, like the newspapers of the nineteenth century, journals of record. Their impact can be measured by the fact that, in 2011, 7 per cent of Middle Eastern bloggers surveyed reported theyâd been arrested by their respective security forces. 9
The ability to deploy, without expert knowledge, a whole suite of information tools has allowed protesters across the world to outwit the police, to beam their message into the newsrooms of global media, and above all to assert a cool, cutting-edge identity in the face of what Auden once called âthe elderly rubbish dictators talkâ. It has given todayâs protest movements a massive psychological advantage, one that no revolt has enjoyed since 1968.
Suddenly, the form of todayâs protests seems entirely congruent with the way people live their lives. It is modern; it is immune to charges of âresisting progressâ. Indeed, it utilizes technology that is so essential to modern work and leisure, governments cannot turn it off without harming their national economies. And, as Mubarak, Gaddafi and the Bahraini royals discovered, even turning it off does not work.
Becauseâand here is the technological fact that underpins the social and political aspects of whatâs happenedâa network can usually defeat a hierarchy.
The pioneer of network theory, Walter Powell, summed up the reasons for this as follows: the network is better at adapting to a situation where the quality of information is crucial to success, but where information itself is fluid; a hierarchy is best if you are only transmitting orders and responses, and the surrounding situation is predictable. Above all, âas information passes through a network, it is both freer and richer [than in a hierarchy]; new connections, new meanings are generated, debated and evaluated.â 10
However, the early network theorists were only studying the advantages of, say, collaborative workshops in the textile industry versus big factories. Now we are studying networks with many millions of individual nodes, and they are in conflict with states. Once information networks become âsocialâ, the implications are massive: truth can now travel faster than lies, and all propaganda becomes instantly
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