Tweeting Toward Bethlehem

With social media fueling changes both trivial and seismic, we need to think about a new public ethic for the Internet age.

I hope the reader will pardon a cliché. For too long, references to William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” have been the erudite, tired way of expressing one’s discomfort with world affairs. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” bewails the poet. When Yeats was writing, the embers of World War I were still flickering across the continent. With “the Second Coming…at hand,” what “rough beast” was approaching?

I don’t think I’ve been alone in recent months as I’ve found myself turning these words over in my mind. The furious democratic energy pouring out of the Arab world, followed by the catastrophe in Japan, led Newsweek to stamp “Apocalypse Now” on its cover. Of course, that was hyperbole. But it was not entirely off-key. What has unfolded across the Greater Middle East produces two seemingly conflicted responses. On the one hand, we obviously cheer the toppling of dictators and the demands for democracy. Yet in the face of all that has become unsettled, it is only natural for us to be unsettled, too. Something genuinely new is announcing itself. We are living on the edge of, and in the midst of, sweeping global change. To think in Yeats’s terms: What is the rough beast of the present moment? How will it reveal itself, and how might it be tamed?

Central to the complexities of this moment is the power of the Internet. As Yeats and his contemporaries were grappling with a grand shift in technological capacity, so are we. It was only 20 years ago that the World Wide Web was mostly just a novel idea than a tool; now it is inescapable, as much a part of everyday life in America as the television or automobile. In the decade just completed, the developing world, while still lagging behind the developed, began to catch up. Measures of Internet penetration replaced measures of electrification as a basic barometer of modernity.

Without the Internet, optimism about the current situation would not exist. Indeed, the revolutions themselves would not exist. In Egypt, while opponents of the regime had coordinated behind the scenes for years, it was the Internet that allowed them to unfurl their rebel flag in public—to mobilize enormous numbers of people in organized political action. It was only fitting that a Google executive, Wael Ghonim, was one of the leaders of the revolutions. And it was completely understandable that, in the ecstasy following Hosni Mubarak’s departure, a father named his newborn daughter Facebook, in honor of the website that had been so important to the movement.

Over the past few months, the democratic character of the Internet, and social networking in particular, has been confirmed. By design, Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk are conducive to people coming together. In the American context, oftentimes this means only for celebrity gossip, the selling of tchotchkes, or perhaps a citywide snowball fight. Other times, for something more: A ballot initiative or even a presidential campaign can gain steam because of its Facebook page. But when the stakes are extraordinary—democracy, life, death—the power of the tool is amplified accordingly. And not just in one part of the world, but many; the piffles that often dominate Twitter’s list of “trending topics” are toppled, as #JustinBieber is replaced with #GreenRevolution or #February11. That old protest proclamation, “The whole world is watching,” is truer now than it ever was.

Because of social networking, the efforts of activists living under oppressive regimes, who once worked in secret out of necessity, are wrenched into the public square. This is a different medium from television. Interactivity is not an add-on or bonus feature; it is the feature. Perhaps because of the limitations of this interactivity—Twitter restricts users to 140-character comments, and Facebook is only slightly less restraining—the goals of the protestors have been strikingly straightforward. No grand manifestos or universal philosophical creeds are to be found. Instead, calls abound for merely adequate public goods and services, access to food and water, and the end of shameless corruption among government officials. (Even offline, in paper documents only now being translated by tahrirdocuments.org, the stated goals of the Egyptian revolution seem equally concrete.)

These are goals, elementary and essential, that most people can get behind. As such, they are useful for group formation, especially when broadcast online. The result is, yes, free association of a kind not possible under tyranny, but also something more affirmative—a democratic organism, linking disparate individuals together and practically bursting with political possibility. For evidence, only take a glance at video of the Libyan city of Benghazi shortly after it was liberated by protesters. An ocean of people as far and wide as the eye can see has taken possession of the streets and is rejoicing in song. They are, hand-in-hand, celebrating their groupness, and the power that it has given them. Working together, they have achieved—peacefully and democratically—what Moammar Gadhafi had denied them for decades.

Here is where the picture turns gray. As the group becomes easier to harness, those who remain outside it, or those in other groups, become easier to identify, and perhaps even target. They are different, and because they are different, they are unwelcome; difference becomes more vulnerable as the group grows stronger. Thinking of the Greeks, Hannah Arendt once wrote, “Large numbers of people, crowded together, develop an almost irresistible inclination toward despotism.” That this is an ancient problem makes it no less relevant today.

• 1
• 2
• 3

Post a Comment

Name

Email

Comments (you may use HTML tags for style)

Verification

Note: Several minutes will pass while the system is processing and posting your comment. Do not resubmit during this time or your comment will post multiple times.