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By Root 1752 0

that gays in Nigeria can now form an online Bible study class, as the Economist approvingly reported in one of its recent issues, for they might be beaten up if they showed up at homophobic Nigerian churches instead. But let’s be honest: We simply don’t know if the availability of such virtual meeting space is going to help the long-term prospects of gay rights in Nigeria. After all, changing social attitudes on such charged issues would require a series of painful political, legal, and social reforms and sacrifices, which may or may not have been made easier by the Internet. Sometimes the best way to launch an effective social movement is to put an oppressed group into a corner that leaves no other option but dissent and civil disobedience. The danger is that the temporary false comfort of the digital world may result in that group never quite feeling the corner as forcefully.

No Such Thing as Virtual Politics

The danger that “slacktivism” poses in the context of authoritarian states is that it may give young people living there the wrong impression that another kind of politics—digital in nature but leading to real-world political change and the one underpinned entirely by virtual campaigns, online petitions, funny Photoshopped political cartoons, and angry tweets—is not only feasible but actually preferable to the ineffective, boring, risky, and, in most cases, outdated kind of politics practiced by the conventional oppositional movements in their countries. But despite one or two exceptions, this is hardly the case at all. If anything, the entertainment void filled by the Internet—the ability to escape the gruesome and boring political reality of authoritarianism—would make the next generation of protesters less likely to become part of traditional oppositional politics. The urge to leave the old ways of doing politics behind is particularly strong in countries that have weak, ineffectual, and disorganized opposition movements; often the impotence of such movements in their fight against the governments generates more anger among the young people than the governments’ misdeeds. But whether we like it or not, such movements are often the only hope that such societies have. Young people have no other choice but to join in and try to improve them. Denouncing their governments and applying for permanent residence in Twitter-land is not an option likely to reinvigorate the moribund political process in many of these countries.

“In terms of their impact [on the Arab world, new media] seem more like a stress reliever than a mechanism for political change,” writes Rami Khouri, editor-at-large of Lebanon’s the Daily Star, who fears that the overall impact of such technologies on political dissent in the Middle East might be negative. “Blogging, reading politically racy Websites, or passing around provocative text messages by cellphone is ... satisfying for many youth. Such activities, though, essentially shift the individual from the realm of participant to the realm of spectator, and transform what would otherwise be an act of political activism, mobilizing, demonstrating or voting into an act of passive, harmless personal entertainment.” Mr. Khouri may be slightly overstating the case—digital activists in the Middle East can boast of quite a few accomplishments, particularly when it comes to documenting police brutality—but his overall concern about the long-term effects of digital activism on politics at large is well-justified.

Seeing how the worlds of offline and online politics collide in the case of Belarus, my home country, I do detect a certain triumphalism about online politics among the younger generation. Many young people, frustrated by the inability of the opposition to mount a challenge to the country’s tough ruler, are beginning to wonder why they should even bother with poorly attended town halls, rigged elections, exorbitant fines, and inevitable jail time if the Internet allows doing politics remotely, anonymously, and on the cheap. But this has proved no more than utopian dreaming: No angry tweets