The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [111]
Just because the Internet allows everyone to lead doesn’t mean that nobody should follow. It’s not so hard to imagine how any protest movement might be overstretched by the ease of communications. When everyone can send a tweet or a Facebook message, it’s safe to assume that they will. That those numerous messages would only increase the communication overload and may slow down everyone who receives them seems to be lost on those touting the virtues of online organizing.
Dissidents Without Dissent
The problem with most dominant interpretations of digital activism is that they are too utilitarian in spirit—asking questions like “how many more clicks / eyeballs / signatures on Facebook can I garner if I invest more money, time, staff?”—and often overlook a softer cultural side of activism. The fact that Facebook allows us to achieve a certain objective X looks less impressive if achieving that objective by means of Facebook also displaces an activity Y that may be more important—depending on the context—in the longer run. For example, even though microwaves and frozen foods can help minimize the time spent on cooking food, few of us rush to this solution when we entertain a dinner party, not least because there are other more important qualities to cooking, eating, and socializing than just time or cost savings. The calculus of measuring quality of life demands a few more steps than simply adding all the efficiencies and subtracting all the inefficiencies; it also requires a good understanding of what particular values are important in a particular context of human relations.
If an authoritarian regime can crumble under the pressure of a Facebook group, whether its members are protesting online or in the streets, it’s not much of an authoritarian regime. The real effects of digital activism would thus most likely be felt only in the long term rather than immediately. Over the long haul, the availability of such mobilization opportunities begins to influence deeply rooted political structures and established political processes of a particular society, authoritarian or not. The challenge for anyone analyzing how the Internet may affect the overall effectiveness of political activism is, first, to determine the kind of qualities and activities that are essential to the success of the democratic struggle in a particular country or context and, second, to understand how a particular medium of campaigning or facilitating collective action affects those qualities and activities.
For example, it’s safe to assume that in most countries toppling a powerful authoritarian regime would demand dissidents who are strategic, well-organized, but above all brave and ready to die or go to prison if the circumstances so require. Obviously, only a small share of any country’s population would be eager to make such sacrifices; this is why there is still such a heroic aura around the word “dissident.” Such people may not be terrifically successful in undermining the power of the regime, but they might (one thinks of Gandhi) be setting an important moral example that could nudge the rest of their fellow citizens.
Significant political change requires an embrace not only of conventional politics but of its most hyperactive and brutal elements: arrests, intimidation, torture, and expulsions from universities. Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov may have been more effective communicators if they had access to the Internet, but it’s not certain they would have been more effective dissidents. It was not what they said (or, for that matter, how they said it) that awoke Russians from seven decades of a political coma, but rather what they did—bravely defied the authorities, spoke their minds, and faced the consequences. Dissidents