Gladwell Won't Get It: The Real Role of Twitter in Global Protest
There was a lot wrong with Malcolm Gladwell's super-ballyhooed piece, "Small Change," in the New Yorker last October. In it, he suggested that the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. took place without Twitter or Facebook, because they hadn't been invented yet. Now that the same questions have come up again with respect to recent events in Egypt, Gladwell hopped right onto the New Yorker blog to complain some more about how not-important Twitter is.
But surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another. Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along. Barely anyone in East Germany in the nineteen-eighties had a phone—and they ended up with hundreds of thousands of people in central Leipzig and brought down a regime that we all thought would last another hundred years—and in the French Revolution the crowd in the streets spoke to one another with that strange, today largely unknown instrument known as the human voice. People with a grievance will always find ways to communicate with each other. How they choose to do it is less interesting, in the end, than why they were driven to do it in the first place.
We are free to disagree with Gladwell over what is more or less "interesting" about the Egyptian uprising. But he has continued in one crucial misapprehension that is worth correcting: the Egyptian protesters are not just "using some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another." They are using Twitter to take their case outside Egypt; to document their own experiences truthfully and fairly, themselves, before governments and big media can get a chance to put their spin on everything.
Gladwell, from the original piece:
"It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right," Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. "Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran." The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. "Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection," she wrote. "Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi."
Except that the significance of Twitter's role in the Iranian uprising had nothing to do with coordinating the protests; it's more efficient to arrange phone trees and email lists and go door-to-door for that sort of thing, I imagine, in Iran or anywhere else. Inexplicably, Esfandiari, and Gladwell after her, failed to note that the point of twittering the Green Movement was to get the word out to the broader world about what was going on in Iran. Despots may have free rein in their own backyards, but even they are capable of being exposed and shamed in the world outside. So it made sense for Iranians to tweet in English, the lingua franca of the Internet—and not only in order to expose their government's behavior to the world.
It is really hard to believe that a famous communicator like Malcolm Gladwell wouldn't understand instinctively what it means to people simply to be heard. That goes double for people who are suffering in a just cause. It is strengthening to speak and be heard, and most strengthening of all to hear words of support in return, even (and maybe in this case, especially) from very far away.
Which brings us to another glaring difference between pre- and post-Internet revolutionary movements: the decreased ability of would-be despots to do their cracking down anything like as efficiently as they did before. Before one had heard the slightest word from official circles or news organizations of any kind, on Sunday night in the U.S., there were tweets out of Egypt from the protesters themselves claiming that two of the "looters" caught in Alexandria were found to have had state police identification on them. The same story kept right on emerging, too, from that point forward, from ordinary Egyptians who managed to get their views onto Twitter, all explaining how Mubarak's forces had gone into state-owned factories and offered payment to anybody who would get on a bus to Tahrir Square and crack some heads for them. This is evidently a practice already familiar to Egyptians from other times of unrest, like the recent sham elections there.
Three nights later, on Wednesday night, I heard the same things reported on Warren Olney's To the Point radio program.
This is why it has become necessary for today's despot to shut the Internet down entirely and get rid of all the journalists, if possible, a feat which is becoming progressively more and more difficult, as recent events in Cairo have shown. In times past, men like Mubarak would have been able to crank up a spin machine pretty effectively in three days, a machine which could cook up a counter-narrative claiming that their "supporters" were the real thing and not bought-and-paid-for operatives, and then blow that narrative all over CNN and the BBC and the rest of the world press—if they were paying much attention at all. Just think how much easier to succeed in hoodwinking not just the foreign press but their own citizenry, too, in the complete absence of any readily available information to the contrary. We in the U.S. wouldn't have heard a thing from any of the protesters themselves beforehand.
As matters stand, Omar Suleiman, the first Vice-President ever appointed by Mubarak in three decades, stands to inherit what amounts to the throne, so it would seem to benefit him to cool it, appear to be sane and moderate while still taking no steps to make the army protect the protesters. It could be argued that having to turn the Internet back on is worth a lot of Egyptian lives right now. Suleiman is the chief military spook, as Paul Amar, a UCSB professor, explained in a densely informative and worthwhile blog post yesterday.
The Vice President, Omar Soleiman, named on 29 January, was formerly the head of the Intelligence Services (al-mukhabarat). This is also a branch of the military (and not of the police). Intelligence is in charge of externally oriented secret operations, detentions and interrogations (and, thus, torture and renditions of non-Egyptians). Although since Soleiman’s mukhabarat did not detain and torture as many Egyptian dissidents in the domestic context, they are less hated than the mubahith. The Intelligence Services (mukhabarat) are in a particularly decisive position as a “swing vote.” As I understand it, the Intelligence Services loathed Gamal Mubarak and the “crony capitalist” faction, but are obsessed with stability and have long, intimate relationships with the CIA and the American military. The rise of the military, and within it, the Intelligence Services, explains why all of Gamal Mubarak’s business cronies were thrown out of the cabinet on Friday 28 January, and why Soleiman was made interim VP (and functions in fact as Acting President).
Amar explains that the different branches of the military and police have different historical affiliations and loyalties, the military is split, with some factions somewhat closer to the Mubarak regime than others. The outcome of revolutions is almost invariably dependent on which faction the army supports; one of history's oldest lessons, unpleasant as it is to have to recall that here. Robert Springborg gave a gloomy assessment in Foreign Policy.
The threat to the military's control of the Egyptian political system is passing. Millions of demonstrators in the street have not broken the chain of command over which President Mubarak presides. Paradoxically the popular uprising has even ensured that the presidential succession will not only be engineered by the military, but that an officer will succeed Mubarak. The only possible civilian candidate, Gamal Mubarak, has been chased into exile, thereby clearing the path for the new vice president, Gen. Omar Suleiman. The military high command, which under no circumstances would submit to rule by civilians rooted in a representative system, can now breathe much more easily than a few days ago. It can neutralize any further political pressure from below by organizing Hosni Mubarak's exile, but that may well be unnecessary.
This is not a universally held view, though, which brings us to a final word on the potential value of Twitter and the Internet in general to the Egyptian revolutionaries' cause. There is, to take one example, still the matter of over a billion dollars in American aid to think about. Because the protesters are taking their case not to governments or the press but to their fellow citizens of the world, there is hope that we can pressure our own governments to advance their aims.
This is a huge change in how global politics is beginning to be conducted and might be conducted in the future, if the world's citizens are prepared to move in a concerted way on information provided. If the Egyptian protesters are tweeting and broadcasting photos and video to the U.S., proving that the Mubarak regime is killing them in Tahrir Square, isn't it fair to argue that the Obama administration will become more reluctant to continue sending that regime our money? Because if many, many Americans are seeing such proof, it can, at the very least, reverberate in our next elections as well.
Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.
Pieces like this infuriate me. If every single person on earth knew and understood what was happening in Egypt, it still wouldn't make one iota of difference if the Egyptian people weren't willing to risk lives, jobs, family etc to stand up to one of the most insulting and degrading police states on earth. They are the only ones who have the ability to change the situation and to suggest that vital assistance can or should come from the outside is insulting. And I say that as someone who has been living by twitter and FB updates from friends and strangers who have been there for the last 10 days.
Suggesting that things would be different "if only the outside world knew about this" insults the bravery of people who risk EVERYTHING to fight it. ONLY they can do it. It also gives the people who allow grievous policies like the US's toward Egypt a huge pass.
Americans shouldn't need twitter and FB to tell them that 1.3 billion of their tax dollars are being used to support dictators like Mubarak or all the others who provide us with our cheap oil. It's all right there in the budget, every other year (don't lose any sleep over the stuff that's even not in the budget. There's plenty of fuel for outrage in the public record). The problem is Americans don't give a shit. There is no excuse for us to claim ignorance of our country's policies — there are no secrets. Yes, it's nice to see the impact of our policies in real time, but you know, AJE did a pretty good of job of that too, even when the tubes were cut off.
If twitter could do something about American laziness and ignorance, then I might agree that it's more than a tactic that can be used for both good and evil.
But this is not what I am saying; I'm saying that those who are risking their lives understandably want everyone in the world to be aware of what is going on, and broad exposure is more easily achieved using these tools. Are you suggesting that the fear of exposure in the world's media isn't a powerful curb against oppression? Are you suggesting that we in the US should NOT call our elected representatives and demand better from them?
I think carpetblogger is suggesting (quite fairly) the same thing that Gladwell is suggesting: that in the grand scheme the way people find out about these protests is much less important than why the protests are happening.
NPR had a segment where they interviewed people in Cairo and all the people tweeting what was going on. One person said that, after a while, it almost seemed irrelevant "to be tweeting while someone is dying in front of you".
That seems about right. Though tweeting protesters have given us insight into this movement that we might not have received otherwise, the movement would be no less significant than if no one tweeted anything.
The point of movements needing broad exposure is a good one: American Civil Rights leaders and Gandhi both were well served by how television broadcast their struggles world wide. But while everyone was accessing information and building emotional ties with protesters on the other side of the world because of the new format that is television, the fact that protests were televised wasn't the main story: it was what people were protesting.
The rush to credit or discredit twitter with any number of accomplishments and to decipher its role in this is to miss a larger point. Furthermore, with television cameras on the ground and journalists being arrested, we don't need 140 character statements from Egyptians at the scene to know that Cairo is a volatile place right now.
Twitter may provide an outlet for protesters and a way for the rest of the world to keep up with daily events, but to focus on it (or even, say, Anderson Cooper being assaulted) diminishes a regime-changing uprising and the people behind it.
The point remains the same: the people in Egypt (or Iran or Jordan or France or ANYWHERE) who are protesting would be there regardless of twitter's existence. Traditional media (television, print and radio) guarantees that stories and images of protesters in the streets and their clashes with the government will reach us and everyone else around the world instantly.
In the end, the images and video of people protesting, of undercover police instigating fights and of dead and people lying wounded or dead in the streets — images you'd get on any news station — are the most important medium for the world to establish an emotional connection with the Egyptian people. What everyone tweets about it is just excess.
Shoot. I am not making this sufficiently plain, somehow. Not just Twitter but any social medium whereby individuals can contact one another freely and quickly are providing an important curb against political and media spin. The fact that individuals can get the word out en masse and so quickly. This provides insurance, if you like, against being lied to, both inside an unstable place and outside it.
As to the why … seeing how difficult it has been for the former Soviet countries, for Iran and Latin America and Africa and so many other places to eradicate corruption, those of us who are far off can only try to lend such support as we can.
Right. I think there are valid critiques to be made of folks who are overblowing the role of Facebook/Twitter/social media as a driver of revolution, but I just don't see this piece as overblowing the role of Facebook/Twitter/social media as a driver of revolution. Maria's point is a good one: where before there were relatively few outlets for information coming out of protest movements abroad (and those that did exist could be manipulated by oppressive authorities), today there are many outlets. That some of them come directly from the people and are a means of countering government spin is, I think we can agree, a good thing.
I appreciate your passion on the subject, carpetblogger, and I agree with most of what you say, but I don't think the piece is saying that Twitter is more important than people putting their lives on the line in the streets of Cairo. I don't think it says that what we in America think is more important than what the Egyptians think. But what Twitter and social media in general are helping to do is inform of things that we might have been ignorant of before. Whether that spurs us to action or not is up to us (and the actions that we can take are sort of limited), but I don't think it's a bad thing to think a little bit about how new forms of media are informing our views of what's happening.
I am a person who – as much as I love using tumblr / twitter – would like to be all "oh, but they are fun, not important." And I do not know enough about Egypt to know that the point I am about to make is real, so let us abstract it.
Imagine there is a country w/ a repressive government. US Aid to this country is crucial to the day-to-day survival of the regime, especially to the regime's military. The people begin to protest in the streets, maybe w/ the internets help, maybe not. But they do post. And blog. And tweet.
And the citizenry of the US actually starts to care, because regular people are telling stories, and we respond to regular people better than even the best news coverage. And now, supporting that regime becomes distasteful in the eyes of American voters.
The US Government, which had been cautiously ambiguous in its response to the protests, sees voters in the US siding more and more with the people in the streets protesting. Through back-channels, it informs the military of this regime, which relies on US guns & money – are voters are not willing to support you unless the regime changes.
The military of this regime realizes that it needs the guns & money. So it sides with the people in the street. It is something like a coup, but so much more of it behind closed doors. Maybe things stay the same but with new/different people the military has appointed, but maybe – just maybe – things actually do improve.
Who is responsible for the good change, if it happens? It seems to me that any one "The THISTHING Revolution" label is going to be a kind of fatuous argument, and saying that any of the things which did not help were not crucial is akin to saying "If the lineman did not hold on that play, the Raiders would have had a touchdown".
Sure, maybe they would have. But maybe the runningback only made it to the endzone BECAUSE of the hold. The world is complicated, and I do not need someone as completely unscientific and in love with his own opinion as Malcolm Gladwell attempting to explain it. He really is the Joe Buck of people who write about the world.
Well then just say "social media" and get on with it.
The whole argument that twitter has changed the game in terms of getting unfiltered information from Egypt to the rest of the world is undermined when sites like YouTube are broadcasting live coverage of the protesters (which carries no media filter or government spin) and that many media outlets have allowed the images of tear gas cannons being shot into crowds speak for themselves (not for too long, seeing as how well payed talking heads on, but enough that you can digest the video for a few moments before being told why it matters).
RE: One person said that, after a while, it almost seemed irrelevant "to be tweeting while someone is dying in front of you".
My gosh! Aside from literally saving the life of that person (obviously), what could possibly be more relevant than alerting the world, in real time, that such atrocities were occurring?
Is it the silliness of the word "tweet" that trivializes this activity?
No reporting on the atrocities would have mattered if the protesters gave up. Fighting to hold Tahrir Square in the face of atrocities, not just reporting on such atrocities, is what matters first and foremost.
The problem with alerting the world and all that is that, by and large, the world doesn't care. In any case, the ordinary people of countries like the United States don't affect policy anyway. They would need to have a revolution themselves before that could happen.
If the corporate social media made much of a difference they'd quickly be brought under control. The U.S. government has already been observed manipulating Twitter to affect events in Iran. You would have to have some kind of non-corporate, distributed set of social media to get away from that control, and although such things are possible technologically, most people appear to be willing corpsuckers.
I couldn't agree more with you here, and it's nice to see that Gladwell piece taken down a few notches. Information is, and always has been, a powerful tool against oppression. So it just stands to reason that the more free and accurate information there is, the less chance the oppressors have to modify the narrative. This is one of those arguments that is starting to feel very much like a straw man to me. I really don't see anyone trying to paint social media as the sole or predominant driver of these events, just as a powerful conduit of information the likes of which the world's oppressed masses have never had access to before. How that isn't plainly obvious to people baffles me.
Can't we all just agree that Gladwell was less insufferable when he wasn't too famous to be edited or factchecked?
DISAGREE. What Americans think and feel about what's happening in Egypt is completely irrelevent, unless they are voting against people who support spending $1.3b/year supporting dictatorships, which they absolutely are not and never, ever will.
Egyptian are 100% aware of how shitty their situation is and how the regime manipulates the narrative. To suggest they need social media or twitter from abroad to learn this is utterly insulting and vaguely post-colonial.
We can lend all the support we want but that is NOT GOING TO CHANGE the situation in the country. Only the people who live their can do it — at enormous risk to themselves. It is narcissistic to suggest otherwise.
There is plenty of information out there about oppression in the world. NO SHORTAGE. People are just too lazy or disinterested to find out about about it or demand that their news outlets cover it, instead of trucks that have fallen into rivers or snowstorms or whether the President is a US citizen. If you didn't know how crappy things were in Egypt or how US policy and your tax money have supported it for 30 years prior to reading about it on Twitter, you have only yourself to blame. NO EXCUSE.
I can't wait for Egyptians and Burmese and Chinese and Kazakhs and Azerbaijanis to start tweeting about how FOX and CNN are not telling Americans the truth about how corrupt our country is and how US elections are stolen and how the "democratic" process is manipulated by corporate interests and the narrative is manipulated by the corporate-controlled media. Social media can, obviously, help oppressed Americans fight back. I live for this day.
(I have strong feelings about this topic)
O! And let me ask this: Does America need twitter to ask why Al-Jazeera English, which is pretty much the only English language news outlet with a clue about what's happening in the Muslim world is not available in most cable packages across the US?
Who, again, needs to become aware of the narrative?
Twitter, indeed. Phhht.
What I am trying to draw attention to is in no way a matter of Americans becoming aware of any "narratives". It's about (ONLY about) individual Egyptians who want their own facts known having a way to make them known–not to Americans, but to any other individuals who may be interested. Twitter, Facebook, whatever, it doesn't matter except insofar as the testimony of many thousands of Egyptian individuals very much reduces the power of the Mubarak regime to rewrite the story for their own purposes.
Carpetblogger, you are missing the point. It goes without saying that the heroes to date are the protestors whose bravery have inspired all of humanity. The value of Twitter is that mainstream media is less likely to push propaganda about the protesters being radical Islamists when the Global Tweet Deck behind the announcer's head is saying something else entirely.
Social media is not liberating Egypt, but it is critical to keeping the US media and government somewhat honest.
I would agree if anything changes in US policy toward the region, dictators, war on terror etc as a results of this. I am confident it will not. See: Omar Suleiman
Great debate.
Two things bother me about the faith in twitter's revolutionary powers.
First, use of twitter is mostly limited to westernized, educated, middle class reformers. So we only hear from a tiny minority of those involved. Think about Iran in 2009: we heard the calls for reform by the bloggers in north teheran, but your average rural, goat-herding Ahmadinejad-supporter is left voiceless. It tends to be the people with views we don't like (conservative poor people) who get left out. We've established that Twitter's real skill is communicating with the outside world, but is its voice at all representative?
But there's something more upsetting, which is the way the faith in twitter involves patting our own culture on the back. Rather than really studying the situation in Cairo, we can laud the abilities of this device with which we are intimately familiar. Its a typically American approach, finding the little bit of us in a very foreign situation, and obsessing about it. It's naval-gazing on an international scale. Like crediting rock music for the fall of the berlin wall.
Tell me why I'm wrong…
I do not think you are wrong. In fact, you brought up another important point — the elitist nature of social media and its propensity to encourage educated urban activists to continue talk only to each other, which is a huge problem societies like egypt, Iran etc.
I tried — and failed — to edit this to include America in that list of places where elitist activists use twitter to talk primarily to each other while believing they are actually broadening their message.
Here's how we deal with Twittists in the home of the free, etc.: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/nyregion/05txt.html
It's weird to watch commenters arguing at such total cross-purposes. One side says, "Social media is a valuable tool for the heroic people on the ground!" while the other says, "The people on the ground don't need social media to do heroic things!" These two viewpoints are not mutually exclusive, and it's weird to see some people pretend that they are.
No one is saying that Twitter is indispensable to the protesters. What people who find Gladwell's argument insufferable are trying to say is that it is valuable to the protesters because it gets their story out in front of the world before corporate or state-run media machines can impose their narrative on it. Gladwell's wearisome bitching every time Twitter plays a role in a major world event is actually distracting people from the more important narrative which is happening IN EGYPT and is playing out, in fact, ON TWITTER.
Here's the reasoning: the protesters want their story told. This is the entire point of non-violent protest. The people in Egypt are not taking up arms and trying to stage a coup; they're marching and chanting slogans. The actions they are taking have one overriding purpose: to express to as many people as possible how many Egyptians are angry and disgusted with Mubarak's regime.
So how does it make sense to argue that a platform that gives that expression of dissent instantaneous global reach has no value?
I am waiting for Evgeny Morozov to tell us how many people in Egypt had twitter accounts, and how many of them were able to use it when the internet was shut off for several days. Inconsequential.
I hate Frank Rich but he is right today.