[lbo-talk] The role of social media in the Egyptian uprising

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sat Feb 12 15:01:37 PST 2011


On Sat, 12 Feb 2011, Jim Farmelant wrote:


> Me too, but having said that, it seems that new communications
> technologies have played important roles in some of the major uprisings
> of the past thirty years. During the run-up to the Iranian Revolution,
> when Khomeini was still living in exile in Paris, his sermons and
> speeches would be tape recorded and the cassettes would then be smuggled
> into Iran. Those cassettes helped him to get his message into Iran. A
> decade later during the Tiansmen Square protests, student activists were
> making use of faxes to get their word out, both to their fellow
> activists and to Western news media.

Right, but to the extent that Facebook and blogs are serving as functional equivalents for cassettes and faxes, this is actually an argument that "social media" make no difference qua social media -- that they work exactly like every other media that have come before: they get out a message.

The claim that "social media" make a difference rests on the idea that their distinctive quality -- their interactivity -- contributes something that previous media have not.

Michael



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