Until very recently, in the field I work in – social media – there was an orthodoxy. It went like this: If somebody follows you on Twitter, follow them back. Leading the charge were social media luminaries like Chris Brogan and Darren Rowse (better known as ProBlogger). Even veteran tech bloggers like Robert Scoble were you-follow-me-I follow-you-back kinda guys.

Now, many of these social media gurus don’t themselves know where this orthodoxy comes from. Many unto this day confuse it with some form of politeness. Odd though, if you think about it. It’s true that Twitter is not a strong-tie social network where Dunbar’s number – which claims that most people average about 150 strong relationships – would typically apply.

Even in Twitter’s more promiscuous interest graph (where you follow people because of what they have to say, rather than because you know them), no person can seriously pay full attention to more than a couple of hundred people. Let alone can we when we’re following 70,000 or more. People that study and immerse themselves in media should surely know that human attention is finite?

Recently Darren Rowse, who blogs about blogging, tried to articulate – just before he unfollowed everybody to start afresh –  why he was following nearly 80,000 people.

“1. to reciprocate – I’ve always felt strange about having people follow me and not following them back. Perhaps this is my ‘people pleaser’ trait in action on the web.

2. to open up DM conversations – I used to use Direct Messaging as much (if not more than) as ‘Replies’ on Twitter. Following people in large numbers opened up the opportunity for this.”

Not very convincing reasons, I have to say, but not uncommon either. To quote Slovenian intellectual Slavoj Žižek, I suspect Rowse and many others had, when deciding to follow so many people, fallen prey to not knowing what they know. Which is to Žižek exactly what ideology is: The inability to realise that we have a belief and that what we believe in, shapes our actions.

Is there a ideology at work even when deciding who to follow on Twitter? Very much so.

So what exactly is this ideology? The Word Wide Web was barely two years old when Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron recognised it and gave it a name. The Californian Ideology was coined by them in the summer of 1995. An ideology which Barbrook and Cameron claimed was a heady and odd mix of 60’s inspired libertarianism and counter-culture on the one hand and a dogmatic belief it hitched from the Reaginite 80’s on the other. The latter being the pervasive belief of the last two decades that government should not interfere in markets or business.

“This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley… This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich.”

The part of the ideology that made people follow thousands and which we will interrogate here was rather commendable. It was the belief that through the Internet we would make for a more egalitarian world.

So this little essay is about lots of things. But primarily it’s an essay on how some of the great hopes placed on the shoulders of our new media are becoming unstuck. And in particular it’s about the credo that digital media will remake our societies to be hierarchy free. That dream may not be as default a setting as we thought it was.

So where does this belief system come from? Barbrook and Cameron points out that the roots of this ideology can be found also in the writing of the sage of modern media, Marshall McLuhan.

McLuhan claimed that new technologies would empower individuals at the expense of established hierarchies like big business and big government. We were moving into the age of the cosy global village:

‘By electricity, we everywhere resume person-to-person relations as if on the smallest village scale. It is a relation in depth, and without delegation of functions or powers… Dialogue supersedes the lecture.’

Already in McLuhan’s writing can we see some of today’s recurring themes in digital and social media take shape, ideas such as:

1. 1. Person-to-person vs One-to-many (broadcast)
   2. Small scale (think village or community) vs Big
   3. Dialogue (conversation, anyone?) vs Lecture

Many of the generation of theorists after McLuhan were, if not singing from the same sheet, at least remixing his thoughts explicitly and combining it with elements of others’ theories.

The hippie ethos of freedom, independence, respect and connectedness that rested on a foundation of a profound dislike of straight regimented society and its large and cold ossified hierarchies, these were also the values of the Internet’s first theorists and ideologues. It’s no coincidence. These pioneering thinkers of the Internet were a tight-knit community themselves who knew each other well. Often not only from their shared interest and work in computing and media, but also from the first counter-cultural hippie happenings.

One of these institutions were The WELL, a pioneering online community and arguably one of the most influential online communities in shaping ideas about what the Internet should be. The founder of The WELL was one Stewart Brand, a fascinating man who managed to combine a love for mind-altering substances with sharp business instincts. Brand was fascinated by do-it-yourself culture, and published counter-cultural magazines which were read widely by people that mattered. The best known, The Whole Earth Catalogue, tried to provide people with all the information and tools they needed to live life outside of the mainstream. Steve Jobs was later to describe it as:

“…one of the bibles of my generation…. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.”

Kevin Kelly, a contributor to Brand’s Catalogue, member of The WELL and friend of Brand, said in 2008 that the Catalogue had been an Internet prototype. Media made by people for themselves. It was a precursor of social media:

“The Whole Earth Catalogue was a great example of user-generated content, without advertising, before the Internet…. No topic was too esoteric, no degree of enthusiasm too ardent, no amateur expertise too uncertified to be included… This I am sure about: it is no coincidence that the Whole Earth Catalogues disappeared as soon as the web and blogs arrived. Everything the Whole Earth Catalogues did, the web does better.”

But already there were indications of inherent tension in Brand’s ideas. On the one hand Brand was writing that “a realm of intimate, personal power” was developing. That was obvious. But increasingly through his environmental activism it became clear that he thought environmental solutions would have had to be communal. Neither Brand nor his fellow travellers ever explicitly addressed the fact that there might be a tension between the personal freedom he espoused and the we-are-all-in this-together solutions he sought.

Be that as it may, cherished establishment concepts, like copyright, were not safe any longer. Brand’s writing became a rally cry of the open-source software movement and beyond – “information wants to be free…”.

Other denizens of Brand’s The WELL included John Perry Barlow, lyricist of the psychedelic band The Grateful Dead, but also libertarian, anarchist and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

In 1996 Barlow wrote a dramatic document titled A Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace, modelled in the assertive style of the United States’ own Independence Declaration. It remains today a very good snapshot of the world view of the Californian ideologues: Technologically determinist, anti-government and Utopian.

Where McLuhan had talked about “dialogue”, a word that would later become social media jargon like few others – “conversations” – was now in evidence when he warned governments to butt out of Cyberspace:

“You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces.”

The use of  “conversation” was no gimmick; for Barlow, like McLuhan, this term was used in opposition to one-way, top-down broadcast media (or ‘lectures’ as McLuhan called them).

The Internet was not only different, said Barlow, it was a better, more egalitarian world. A world where everybody would be heard regardless of our status in meat space:

“We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.”

Brand’s Catalogue contributor Keven Kelly, who was also the first editor of Wired Magazine and a futurist who has had a more profound influence than most, deserves a closer look.

His book Out of Control: The new biology of machines has not only shaped many techies’ ideas on software development, but also the thoughts of those in business and even brand management.

An end to hierarchy was clear to Kelly. He railies against governments’ and corporations’ large mainframe computers, and believes the coming personal computing age would herald unprecedented freedom from these old authorities.

Echoing the thoughts of others like McLuhan, Kelly believes every medium had intrinsic features with wider social consequences.

“A blackboard encourages repeated modification, erasure, casual thinking, spontaneity. A quill pen on writing paper demands care, attention to grammar, tidiness, controlled thinking. A printed page solicits rewritten drafts, proofing, introspection, editing.”

The new intrinsic features of hypertext, where one text links to another, he thought, was that of cooperation. But this was not the harbinger of a intimate global village. The vision was way more radical than that.

You see, the other key metaphor for Kelly was the network. We came from a world where we were atomised individuals, but through the network, ‘the icon of the 21st century’, we were changing and literally coming together to become one being. Just like a swarm of bees acting together as if they are one organism in a collective intelligence or ‘hive mind’.

Under Kelly’s auspices Wired Magazine published many articles pushing ideas such as how the Internet advances and James’s Lovelock’s Gaia theories of the earth as an organism. And that the Internet is in fact the Earth clothing itself with a brain.

If we are constituent parts of one being, one organism, where does that leave “me”? Kelly intimated that in the post-industrial age even egos would be put on the back burner:

‘The industrial icon of a grand central or a hidden “I am” becomes hollow. Distributed, headless, emergent wholeness becomes the social ideal.’

We were a networked organism, and egos along with hierarchy and authority were things of the past.

We can now add a few more familiar concepts to the canon of digital dogma:

1. Out of control vs Control
2. Networks (leaderless) vs Hierarchy
3. Everybody vs Central Authority
4. The Whole vs Me, me, me

Openess, equality, freedom in its architecture

This wasn’t just idle talk. These Utopian ideas had already found its way into the very fabric of the Internet, into the technical architecture of how the Internet transferred information (the protocols TCP/IP) and even its user-interface design (UX).

As many readers of this essay will already know, the absence of a central control system was the very raison d’etre of the Internet. It was built in such a way that it would not have to rely on a command-and-control hierarchy. Unlike the old telecommunications network, it was supposed to withstand parts of it taken out or going down in the event of a nuclear war.

Other tools and services built on top of the Internet protocols would follow the open, interactive, peer-to-peer, non-hierarchical design.

Email, the first Internet communications tool to become ubiquitous, was always designed to allow two-way communication. Once you sent somebody a message, they had the means to send a message back.

For those not lucky enough to be part of The WELL, the first sense of Internet community most early adopters experienced was on the service called Usenet. Usenet was a distributed discussion system, a hybrid between email and a web forum. Once you subscribed and posted, everybody else in that group would see your message. Many communities were established and nourished on this architecture.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a group chat tool still popular with hacker groups like Anonymous, to this day does not require users to register, thus making it open to all and hard to identify users.

Early instant messaging systems (the precursor to AOL’s AIM, Microsoft’s MSN Messenger and Skype), almost always required reciprocal agreement between users to become each other’s ‘contacts’ or ‘buddies’, allowing ‘contacts’ to be able to exchange instant two-way messages. This symmetrical mechanism was the forefather of the now familiar ‘friending’, widely adopted by early social networking sites, from Friends Reunited and MySpace to Orkut and later, of course, the behemoth that is Facebook.

These are profoundly trusting and open technologies, where everybody had access to everybody. These services were designed for our better selves. ‘Real’ identities were not required, and where it did go wrong exclusion of anti-social users was difficult. As such trolls were tolerated as a necessary evil and good norms of behaviour – ‘Nettiquette’ – reigned supreme.

But the open and non hierarchical tools and services were not inevitable outcomes based on the inherent nature of technologies. No. They were result of the often benign design decisions by techies beholden to the Utopian Californian Ideology.

But nobody noticed when things started to change. One important new communications service, did not have this mutual peer-to-peer feature: web-logs. With their relatively understated start as mere online diaries, few realised the power of blogs until the turn of the last century.

Blogs were different to what had gone before, in an important way. They were primarily designed for one person to share their thoughts with an audience of unlimited potential. This and complementary technologies, like RSS which allowed people to subscribe to a feed of blog updates, set in motion a chain of events. Broadcasting possibilities were now built into the functionality and UX of web services. All that was needed was talent and graft to build a following. Because of this, the Internet was set to take a different course.

Funny, because in the year 1999 when blogs started to get noticed, early bloggers like Doc Searls, supported by the likes of Dave Winer (the inventor of RSS), came up with The Cluetrain Manifesto. If blogs were to herald a change in the way we saw the net, Cluetrain was the apogee of the original way we viewed the Net. Here was the evidence of a clear link between earlier digital thinkers and today’s social media marketers. The Manifesto starts with the phrase:

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter – and getting smarter faster than most companies.

It continued…

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

Much of the buzzwords and articles of faith we recognise in social media can be found in Cluetrain: Authenticity, openness, conversations, community, trust (and loss of control), markets and, of course, one new one – sharing. Line number seven simply proclaims:

Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.

One of the first and most visible hierarchies to be subverted was the mainstream professional media. But until quite recently it seemed like mainstream media was oblivious to Cluetrain and the massive changes it claimed was occurring online.

Exasperated by the ignorance, Jay Rosen, a journalism professor that got the import of social media, published a bolshie essay on his blog in 2006. The People formerly known as the Audience proclaimed the arrival of everybody as media, hailed people connecting directly with each other bypassing professional gatekeepers, and asserted that the many new voices were not a problem:

“The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve all heard about.

Think of passengers on your ship who got a boat of their own. The writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak – to the world, as it were.

Now we understand that met with ringing statements like these many media people want to cry out in the name of reason herself: If all would speak who shall be left to listen? Can you at least tell us that?

The people formerly known as the audience do not believe this problem – too many speakers! – is our problem.

The essay was an instant hit, and was shared widely on other blogs. Dave Winer enthused:

The brains are in what we used to call the audience. No more looking up to the ivory tower for all fulfillment. Thank god we don’t all have to be as beautiful as Farah Fawcett and Christopher Reeve. Everyone gets to sing. Users and developers party together.

Forward to (parts of) the past

More than 10 years after Cluetrain, from the glamorous Rumi Neely of Fashion Toast to pugnacious Michael Arrington (founder of TechCrunch), it’s obvious that some bloggers have become megastars.

It’s important at this juncture to point out that the very point of breaking the hierarchy was not a nihilistic hatred of authority. The very promise of the Internet was exactly that: That talented people and meritorious businesses would stand out and shine regardless of whether they were operating out of garages or did not have multimillion dollar advertising budgets.

So when Google claims its PageRank algorithm is a democratic system where hyperlinks from one page to another is taken as a vote for that page’s quality, the underlying idea is that the best content and services will float to the top of search rankings. A meritocracy par excellence. The same goes for services like Twitter. It has liberated the meritorious. Twittering writer Mat Johnson says it levels the playing field:

“I’ve never had a single ad for any of my novels, had a movie made or been given a big budget push by a publisher… Usually, they just throw my book out to reviewers and hope it floats. Twitter lets me hijack the promotion plane, sidestep the literary establishment and connect directly to my current and potential audience… It’s a meritocracy; if you’re interesting, you get followed.”

So a talented blogger like Arrington was bound to make a name for himself and beat mainstream publishers at their own game.

So far, so good.

But what many have been slow to realise is that this meritocracy is not only subverting the old hierarchies. The digital utopia is in fact borrowing some traits from the world the pioneering thinkers wanted us to leave behind. Is it really still true that too many speakers are not a problem as Jay Rosen said?

@wildebees A very interesting essay. Thanks. But I didn’t say too many speakers could never be a problem. It’s just not TPFKATA’s problem.

— Jay Rosen(@jayrosen_nyu) January 15, 2012

Note I added this response from Jay Rosen.

Blogs were the first symptom. But it was only with the appearance of Twitter with its affordance to have people follow you without you having to follow back, that the fact that social status had gained a bridgehead online was thrown in sharp relief.

The following/follower counts sit prominently in Twitter user interfaces, impossible to ignore. And they are often the first thing people look at. In a flash, celebrities and bloggers outside the tech and social media bubble had amassed audiences of thousands while following almost no-one. These relationships weren’t peer to peer. They looked more like audiences than communities.

It was only the true believers of Cluetrain that held out.

Until 2010, when the dam wall cracked, and then middle 2011, when it burst. Ever smart and genuinely media savvy Robert Scoble was one of the first believers to realise he had been drinking the cool aid and using Twitter wrongly. He had been following over 100,000 people but had a Damascus road like conversion. Scoble realised his experience of Twitter was awful, with more spam, and many more messages in which he was simply not interested.

So he developed a new exclusive following philosophy: Only follow better people to get more (and better quality) followers.

It’s a big job to unfollow that many people on Twitter and Scoble had a script written to do it for him. So impressed was he with the result and his new experience of Twitter that he told Chris Brogan in a blog post that he was doing Twitter wrong.

Brogan famously spent 80% of his time replying to every Tweet he got because it was, he said – with reference to the Zulu greeting Sawubona (literally: I see you) – “a way of recognising or seeing” another person. Brogan countered Scoble with the standard social media dogma: in this “seeing” of a person, social media was magically different to one-way top-down mainstream media and very different from traditional advertising (See video below). But Scoble did not let up; the “conversations” where getting in the way:

“I can’t find his [Brogan´s] good blogs and videos. Why? Because he does so many conversations. Look at his Twitter home page. All you see is @replies. This is what makes Brogan Brogan, because he’s going to answer you no matter how popular he gets.”

Not for long, though. After a couple of months, Brogan shocked many when he announced Operation Unfollow. Many of those following him reacted emotionally. Others like the Sales Lion – who had been dumped by Brogan himself – blogged a half-hearted defence:

“Excuse me? At what point does a blogger/social media icon lose his/her rights to be normal, experiment, and possibly be wrong on occasion? If ‘John the Farmer’ unfollows 20 people to shake up his stream, does anyone say anything? Nope, nada. But let an ‘A-lister’ hurt a few feelings and then everyone wants to make a judgement.”

As the storm raged, Brogan, seemingly oblivious to his previous pronouncements on “seeing” people, tried to make sense of the furore:

“I think it’s because they somehow see me following them as some kind of endorsement. I don’t know. Maybe a validation? “If @chrisbrogan thinks my tweets are worth following…” but that’s just it. When you follow 131,000 people, you don’t see any tweets.”

Too many voices had become a problem.

After Brogan’s Operation Unfollow, Darren Rowse and many more social media big shots followed suit and mass-unfollowed people on their networks. Interestingly though, none of them suffered a significant drop in their follower numbers. What was obvious for some time was now reflected in the follow/follower numbers. There was a new hierarchy in town.

So is this the end of the story? A merely amusing tale of how our beliefs blind even smart people to obvious truths?

No, it goes deeper than that. Digital media is genuinely disruptive. It is different from media that has gone before. It has lowered barriers to entry, and it is incontrovertible that everybody can now be a publisher.

Leaderless revolutions and hierarchies of the future

Much have been made about the leaderless nature of 2011’s uprisings across the world. Intellectuals and pundits from the BBC’s Paul Mason to former diplomats like Carne Ross, to John Perry Barlow himself, have commented on how this success was partly due to the networked non-hierarchical nature of social media. This made it harder to combat protestors by taking out their leaders.

Famously and fiercely leaderless, from Tunisia to San Francisco the hacker group Anonymous was in on the action all over the globe.

Even the mighty News Corp was bought to heel when people used social media to vent and to agitate against it’s advertisers. Something politicians on their own had been unable to do. Said Paul Mason:

“Six months ago, in the context of Tunisia and Egypt, I wrote that the social media networks had made “all propaganda instantly flammable”. It was an understatement: complex and multifaceted media empires that do much more than propaganda, and which command the respect and loyalty of millions of readers, are now also flammable…

But the most important fact is: not for the first time in 2011, the network has defeated the hierarchy.”

So is this not proof that McLuhan, Brand,  Barlow and Kelly were right? Partly I think the answer is yes. But it’s more complicated than that.

Earlier this year in response to the Egyptian revolt, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci had written a piece where she warned against over-optimism and simplistic Utopian wishful thinking. It does not follow that because of the use of digital media in the revolt, hierarchy is a thing of the past for the Egyptian revolutionaries.

“A fact little understood but pertinent to this discussion, however, is that relatively flat networks can quickly generate hierarchical structures even without any attempt at a power grab by emergent leaders or by any organizational, coordinated action. In fact, this often occurs through a perfectly natural process, known as preferential attachment, which is very common to social and other kinds of networks...”

Tufekci goes on to explain with reference to Twitter how the meritocratic nature of social media is actually the basis of new hierarchies:

“Meritorious growth: In this model, the better, the more relevant, the more informative your tweets, the more followers you get. Surely, there is a lot of this going on. While this sounds good, it brings us to the next question: how will people know your tweets are so good? One mechanism, of course, is retweets. The number of retweets, however, may depend on how many followers you have to catch and retweet your posts in the first place. This means that those who have a large number of followers end up with an advantage even in terms of being recognized as meritorious.”

In other words it is possible that even those without merit could get higher follower numbers if they already have an installed base.

“In almost all human processes, already having a high status makes it easier to claim and re-entrench that high status. Thus, not only will more people see your tweets, they will see you as having the mark of approval of the community as expressed in your follower count.”

The Egyptian Influence Network just after the February uprising. Notice that the larger dots, users with more followers, even then were generally grouped closer together. A new elite.

Interestingly, Robert Scoble recently complained of preferential attachment framed in a different way – the Unearned Follow. Since the rise of Twitter, a plethora of services (Soundcloud, Instagram, Quora) has sprung up allowing users to publish media easily to an audience who follows them without having to follow back.

Importantly, these services are also using existing networks like Twitter as a basis to recommend whom a user should follow, often based on popularity on Twitter and, in some cases, even do it for you, building preferential attachment into the very fabric of our new user experiences. And Scoble laments the passing of meritocracy with it.

“Did I really earn your follow on these new services like I did on the older services like Twitter or Facebook? Yeah, you could say that I didn’t earn them there, either, since I had hundreds of thousands of readers on my blog before I started tweeting, but on Twitter you needed to manually “follow” me and other people on the system. On the newer systems they automatically follow people based on their Twitter popularity.

This presents a distorted picture of who is putting the most effort into the system.

Do you see the problems this causes?”

Do you?

The future is what we make it

Hierarchy was not part of the original vision for the Net. If there is a new hierarchy forming, then how many of the other dearly held beliefs of the digital set are on less sure ground? So to conclude a few thoughts from me on shibboleths that are now on less firmer ground:

Person to person

Broadcasting is not going away. In fact stats show that social media is boosting in particular live TV viewing. Services like Klout that purport to measure influence in media are flourishing. It makes sense. If some people are more equal than others, knowing who they are is a valuable resource. This week social media thought leader Brian Solis wrote in a post titled - 2012: The Year for Digital Darwinism:

Digital influence is becoming prominent in social networks, turning everyday consumers into new influentials. As a result, a new customer hierarchy is developing forcing businesses to identify and engage to those who rank higher than others.

Small is limited. Brands have realised they still need massive reach (a large audience) to flog their products. So in social media new techniques are developing in the marketing playbook that are not person to person. Techniques like getting celebrities to market your wares: So called marketing to an audience with an audience.

And some old techniques are migrating to social networks. Facebook advertising is widely popular and successful.

Openness and Out of Control

Not only is the wildly popular iOS a closed platform, Google negotiated a particularly pernicious deal killing off mobile Net Neutrality in the US – whereby mobile networks can exclude services, usually competitors traffic across their networks. Similarly mobile users in Europe cant access services like Skype. As mobile networks strain to cope with the increase in data watch these networks increasingly campaign against Net Neutrality as a way to protect profit margins.

People like Cory Doctorow cry that there’s a war on general purpose computing coming – without which he thinks we loose the DIY freedom and power Brand spoke of. And Cloud based services are contributing to the shift in power from us to service providers, making it easier for central authorities to control the Net. And let’s not even mention China.

Copyright

The entertainment industry are doing their utmost to introduce laws that will make Internet companies liable to police the Internet for any copyright infringement. Clay Shirkey warns that this requirement to police will push up the price for providing user generating content services to the extent that they will become uneconomical.

Community and Conversation

While it would be an oversimplification to call what businesses are doing in social media to be just broadcasting, it’s not for the most part, community either. Some are spotting trends where brands and bloggers are switching off the comments on websites due to the volume and quality of what they have to deal with. Big is in fact the death of community, even for individuals. As Gina Trapini points out in an excellent post. A large following creates all kinds of problems not least of which is remembering to share with the people you care about. For brands selling fast moving consumer goods (like toothpaste), and business to business brands, creating real communities using social media is very hard. Repeated studies show that most people Like brands on Facebook in order to get discounts.

Authenticity and Meritocracy

Once some people and brands have huge audiences, the pressure not only to promote good stuff will fade. Watch for people to promote things not because they are best, but because they are close to them, or worse, have received money for it. Watch for social media services promoting mediocre celebrities to follow in order to attract users. With the development of Personalised Search Results preferential attachment could migrate even into Google Search results. There are already signs of this.

And how’s this for a thought experiment. Should you employ a SEO expert or a person – who might be clueless about SEO – but is followed by thousands on Google Plus? Bear in mind that every page this person Plus Ones, will feature higher in Google search rankings for their thousands of followers.

Identity

In John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace he assertively claims that online we choose our own identities and implies that they are probably different to our ‘real’ identity. The idea that who we are in the nooks and crannies of the Net is not tied to our ‘real world’ identity and that we may have a few of them is indeed yet another article of faith of the Californian Ideologues.  Yet more and more services are turning to Facebook as an identity service provider. That’s because Facebook’s insistence on the use of real identities combat anti-social behaviour. Not only that but Zeynep Tufekci has argued convincingly that people using their everyday identities on Facebook was a powerful force in helping revolutions against autocrats last year. And that it would not be so if they stayed anonymous. The idea of a bunch of ordinary people together, in the open, being more effective than the lone anonymous hacker is not only a bitter pill to swallow, but should make us rethink many assumptions.

The wisdom of markets

Our Californian Ideologues always seemed to forget one simple fact. The Internet was founded on tax payers money. The explosion of information technology and deregulation of the 80’s has not lead to massive improvements in productivity in the US or high quality jobs. In fact the US has experienced relative decline. And inequality is at unprecedented levels.

In a startling post just this week Rick Bookstaber points out why the middle-classes are disappearing and inequality increasing, not because their are no jobs. The jobs are being outsourced – to us! But we are not being paid for them:

“The jobs are moving from the producer to the consumer side of the ledger. And some of that work comes as the guise of entertainment. How much of your work is being done as you do your e-mails and surf the web, keep yourselves busy with your apps as you commute to work? So it is not only that computers are replacing workers, they are turning consumers into unpaid workers.”

We sure are not all hip and rich in the digital Utopia.

So all of these digital credos have to be more critically re-examined. They don’t all currently apply, or apply evenly in all circumstances. So what to do?

We need to realise that these ideals and norms won’t necessarily result from technology by themselves. If we indeed think some of these are preferable to how our industrial age worked, we will need to argue, design, program and perhaps even fight for them.

No related posts.

Much of Adriaan’s argument turns on one point. Afrikaners might be a numerical minority, but they are not minority in the sense that they are potential victims that need protecting or special treatment from the state. That is because they are well to do Adriaan argues. Lets for the moment forget about the fact that a significant number of Afrikaners live in poverty. Is Adriaan’s a good point?

No. Adriaan’s argument is too simplistic. It does not take into account the things that make most people truly happy in life. At its essence his is a right wing argument. One I am sure he does not intend.

One line of argument is easily dispatched for six. Adriaan quotes the UN in support, “In most instances, a minority group will be a numerical minority, but in others, a numerical majority may also find itself in a minority-like or non-dominant position, such as blacks under the apartheid regime in South Africa.”

But apartheid is no more. Many progressives like John Pilger like to claim that apartheid is still alive, but Ferial Haffagee, Adriaan’s own editor, does a grand job of dismantling this argument herself: ‘Its only harvest is to keep us from the honest answers and the hardest analyses. It is sound-bite activism, good to raise a “Viva!”.

She continues to list many of the problems the country faces but says:

Awful, all of it. The reasons for this are more complex than a simple
pretence that the change of power did not happen in 1994. ‘

That many Afrikaners are relatively wealthy vis-a-vis the majority of South Africans is true. In fact the new South African government (not intentionally, but by way of non government) has provided them with ample opportunity to become more wealthy. And many of them have.

But are we to judge the sense of happiness and well-being of a group of people in terms of the money they are making? A growing body of evidence suggest that what people want in life is not only money, but a sense of fulfillment, recognition and belonging. A sense of inclusion in a society, a sense that your skills are put to good use and valued and a sense of security (which I will deal with later). There comes a point in life where more wealth does not make people more happy. And happy societies are not societies where inequality is the norm.

Adriaan argues that events like the Klein Karoo Kunste Fees is a sign of the vitality of Afrikaans. But the reverse is true, the strength of Afrikaans festivals in the country is precisely because of its demotion in public life. It’s the privatisation of a previous public identity. In the words of sociologist and lead singer of the Brixton Moor en Roof Orkes, Andries Bezuidenhout, we are giving the language “a beautiful funeral”.

The impact of the loss of Afrikaans in the public sphere can not have but been and is no less than an experience of collective existential trauma for Afrikaners. One could argue that this process was unavoidable in a country with so many competing languages. One could argue that the ascendancy of English as the language of the public sphere is not only normal, it is desirable.

However one can not argue that it has not been at the cost of Afrikaner’s sense of being or belonging. Arguing that Afrikaans still plays a massive roll outside the public sphere is to discount the importance of identity to you and me. Identity must have a public component.

It also completely ignores the nature of Afrikaner identity in particular: Unfortunately the history of Afrikaans and Afrikanerdom is tied to the language, and its acceptance as a language in the public sphere is tied to Afrikaners sense of self, and self worth. Professor Melissa Steyn points out with respect to Afrikaners and their responsibility for apartheid:

…ironically, it would be a mistake to read the racial domination thus entrenched as emanating from a group that felt secure in their power. Afrikaners contended with the more powerful forces of the British empire throughout a history that was experienced as a long and bitter struggle for freedom from white-on-white overlordship. The self- esteem, indeed the very self-image, of Afrikaner nationhood was forged within a mythology that celebrated the courage of a people who refused to be subordinated to the British empire on more than one occasion in their history.

This is not an argument on my part for the recognition of Afrikaans alongside English. This is me pointing out that there is severe collective pain being felt that is not recognized by the South African community at large. Steyn analised letters to the editor at the Rapport newspaper, she concludes:

“Deep-seated anxieties about identity and loss of self are discemable in the letters. Unlike English South Africans, however, whose in-group has an international ideological center which gives the “we/us” a stable continuity, Afrikaners are contending with a profound existential crisis (De Klerk, 2000; De Lange, 2001; Louw, 2001; Slabbert, 1999), grappling with the question “Who are we?”… The answer would have to reassure the deep fear that activates the soul searching: “Will we—our language, our religion, our identity—disappear?”"

In a fantastic article that I recommend every south African read, Rustum Kozain makes the point even better. Kozain surfed many an Afrikaner right wing website and his conclusion will surprise:

…if one looks past the racist language and past the sensationalism, the emotional tones of many of the posts and comments of white dissatisfaction are hard to ignore. There is rage, yes, but also heartbreak. In a culture that has in its history a strong agricultural connection with the land and a strong literary celebration of landscape and belonging, it is not difficult to see and understand this rage as a product of heartbreak, among other things. An easy, cynical and unsympathetic analysis would be that this heartbreak and rage is simply the product of a loss of power; that all of this are the hysterical fulminations of a segment of South Africa struggling to come to terms with a loss of political power. It certainly is this, but it is also more than this. And it is heartbreaking.

The argument that the well to do can’t be an opressed minority is bogus. The jews in Germany suffered a terrible fate largely because of their perceived superiority and wealth and in Africa similar thing happened to the the Tutsi’s in Rwanda.

Each time I visit South Africa I am surprised by the levels of fear and anxiety amongst South Africans of all races and cultures. Amongst whites however this fear is often irrational and qualitatively different. It is however not even remotely without basis. I would like to use two examples to explain how violence against whites are not only perceived as a threat, but driving them from public spaces.

A few years ago, on a crowded day in the town of Zeerust, Constand Viljoen and his wife, who was deep in his seventies was attacked as they went shopping. He managed to fight off his attackers after a struggle, but what is important is that none of the many onlookers came to his rescue. That an elderly couple can be attacked in a busy town without anybody helping is very odd and not normal societal behaviour I’m sure you would agree.

A similar thing happened to my dad, who used to be a doctor in Krugersdorp and was attacked when he was in his 70′s. He always went to that bank machine, but when he was mugged in front of many people, yet nobody helped. The community just looked on.

I know this is odd even in the South African context because I have spent many hours in South African townships and in predominantly black places like Yeoville. I know the crooks and skabangas dont ply their trade in broad daylight or where many people are. The community won’t allow them. Their revenge can be swift.

The reason is I suspect it happened here was because the community see Viljoen and my dad as “other”. They see them as being part of a privileged group, and the attackers part of a group that are the real victims, just like Adriaan describes. So why intervene? The result is that white South African faces are disappearing behind walls.

So what bothers most is not actual violence against whites, but what it means. The fact that whites by and large can not move in public spaces in South Africa’s cities any longer, without becoming a target of crime is delegitimizing them as citizens. Their whiteness marks them as wealthy targets and removes the protection one would normally find in a society at large. The result is that they are confined to a life spent behind high walls, shopping malls, and cars.

To the Afrikaner identity this loss of being able to move around in public, to go to the park, to walk in the city center, to become non citizens, but getting in turn an ever bigger fancy house, is a grand Faustian bargain. And my anecdotal experience says that they hate it.

Recently, as part of an exhibition of South African photographers in London, Roelof van Wyk explained why he thought his pictures of Afrikaners were a more up to date and sympathetic take on them than earlier, often non sympathetic pictures taken by non Afrikaners of Afrikaners, like that of Rodger Ballen and David Goldblatt.

Van Wyk’s pictures show their subjects without any context, even without clothes, he wanted to play with the idea of the oppressive hand of the colonial ethnography. Afrikaners being objectified, analyzed like natives of yore. But he claims, they are natives, and whats more, Afrikaners are now free to do what they want, they can for exmaple sleep with who they choose he said.

What he achieved is something entirely different. And the contrast with what Goldblatt did is instructive. Goldblatt says of his work on Afrikaners:

“Travelling through vast, sparsely populated parts of the country with my camera became a major part of my life at that time. I think that our landscape is an essential ingredient in any attempt at understanding not just the Afrikaner but all of us here. We have shaped the land and the land has shaped us. Often the land was unforgivingly harsh. Yet, the harsher the landscape the stronger the Afrikaners’ sense of belonging seemed to be.”

Van Wyk’s pictures are completely devoid of any link to place, or to any attachments of culture. If he had chosen to show context, he would have had to show Afrikaners in their big houses behind their big walls, or their 4 by 4′s, or in a shopping malls and perhaps one or two in a squatter camps.

Afrikaners don’t belong anywhere except in a glitzy anglo world that could be anywhere, but considering who they are, it is hell.

Related deployments:

1. So what’s the relationship between the Dutch & Afrikaners?
2. Making sense of South African corruption

Related deployments:

1. South Africans want to discuss race
2. No regulation please – we’re Netizens

But on what basis could this be? If rights are basic and inalienable, how can we suddenly get a new one? As someone I follow on Twitter – Grondwerk – asked:

“What is it about the internet that every human should have?”

Indeed, we have the right information, the right to free speech, the right of free association. That cover’s it no? If I was a Constitutional Justice in a state that recognized a bill of rights, and that state cut off or restricted part of the Internet, I would probably rule it a breach of rights in terms of the aforementioned rights. Done.

Or is it? To answer question properly it might be necessary to consider how the internet is different – if at all – from previous communications technologies. The internet is of course the child of the marriage, no the menage a trois, of the convergence of telecommunications with two other industries, namely media and computing. The result of this union is I would argue different from anything that has come before it, and not merely a sum of those industries’ parts.

In what way is it different? While we previously relied on a free press to disseminate information, anybody can now publish and potentially have a global audience. This is such an incredible thing that we struggle to fully appreciate it. In fact our very speech (Tweets for example) can become published in such a way.

In South Africa at present the government is trying to push a Secrecy Bill through parliament. Any state agency, government department, even a parastatal and your local municipality, would be able to classify public information as secret. Over 1000 institutions would be granted this power. Big sanctions will fall on anybody revealing classified information.

A campaign has been launched – The Right 2 Know Campaign – to counter the Bill. A campaign I support (see the previous link). Except the name is a bit of a misnomer to me. The campaign should have been called the Right to Know and Speak. This law is aimed as much against ordinary whistle blowers, bloggers and citizens – an ever growing threat to states’ ability to control information – as against the media.

Alan Rusbriger, editor of the Guardian, has talked about how the equilibrium of power between states and citizens with regards to information has shifted. This is evidenced by net tools like Wikileaks he says. I agree.

Thus, I’d argue that the right to freedom of speech has become something altogether different. It is now something more powerful – the freedom of the individual to publish.

Some have taken this further and argued that this new world of internet speech is a type of a true Habermasian Public Sphere. From Wikipedia:

The public sphere is an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. It is “a discursive space in which individuals and groups congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment.” The public sphere can be seen as “a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk” and “a realm of social life in which public opinion can be formed”.

This claim that online is the public sphere alludes to one other attribute of the internet that is missing from our original conception of rights – discussion and action working together in tandem. In his book Cognitive Surplus Clay Shirkey catalogues the many ways in which the internet allows people to interact, collaborate and create things together. Often things that were impossible to do – because of economic costs – previously. Wikipedia, Ushahidi, Flickr, Couchsurfing and Lol Cats are but a few examples.

This activity is I think more wide reaching than a right to freely associate. There are many countries where one could freely associate and form groups for a long time, but lacking the net, could not produce ‘public’ goods like Linux, WordPress, Kickstarter, Bribe Spot or Ride Share. And even organising, discussion and action does not describe what we as humans put into and get out of the Internet fully. Often it driven by and is a form of self expression and collective creation, sometimes rolled into one. Do we perhaps need a new right, a right to creation to be added to existing ones?

I am not sure we know yet exactly what it is that the internet is doing to our society and we won’t get a handle for time to come. What we do know is that it is the most significant and empowering force for society, perhaps since the advent of the printing press. It is not only worth protecting. It is worth nurturing.

Related deployments:

1. Impressions from SA – no alien human interspecies sex

The DA has run a thoughtful multi-racial campaign that should make every South African feel proud.

Yes, the DA has a legacy. Some of which, as a progressive you might find objectionable. Some of which, if you are an Afrikaner might bring memories of a painful past, and the hints of the relegation of Afrikaans. But we need to move forward. There are bigger things at stake.

Furthermore, the fact that the party has not one but three principled and strong female leaders are – excuse the pun – the cherry on the cake. Patricia de Lille is the politician that exposed THE cancer of the arms deal. the sharp Lindiwe Mazibuko might just become South Africa’s first female president in a decade from now.

The goal today is to try and wrest control from the ANC of one of the big cities, and then to govern it well for all South Africans. There’s no better way to give the ANC the kick up its arse it deserves. Zille has made a deep impression on us. It’s time we showed it. Alutta continua!

Zille write up in Wikipedia:

Zille began her career as a political correspondent for the Rand Daily Mail in 1974.^[13] During September 1977, Minister of Justice and the Police J.T. Kruger announced that anti-apartheid activistSteve Biko had died in prison as the result of an extended hunger strike. Zille and her editor Allister Sparks were convinced Kruger’s story was a cover-up, and Zille obtained concrete proof of this after tracking down and interviewing various doctors involved in the case.^[6]

The Rand Daily Mail’s lead story, headlined “No sign of hunger strike – Biko doctors”, sent shockwaves through South Africa, and Kruger immediately threatened to ban the paper, while Zille received death threats.^[6] Zille and Sparks were represented at the subsequent quasi-judicial Press Council by leading defence lawyer Sydney Kentridge, but the two were nonetheless found guilty of “tendentious reporting”, and the paper was forced to issue a “correction”. Kentridge later helped confirm the accuracy of Zille’s account when he represented the Biko family at the inquest into his death. That inquest found Biko’s death had been the result of a serious head injury, but failed to find any individual responsible.^[14]

Zille resigned from the Rand Daily Mail along with editor Allister Sparks, after the paper’s owner, Anglo American, demanded that Sparks tone down the paper’s equal rights rhetoric.^[15]

Anti-apartheid movement

Zille was heavily involved in the Black Sash movement during the 1980s. She served on the regional and national executives of the organisation, and was also vice-chair of the End Conscription Campaign in the Western Cape. During this time she was arrested for being in a “group area” without a permit, and received a suspended prison sentence. Zille and her husband later offered their home as a safe house for political activists during the 1986 State of Emergency, and she was temporarily forced into hiding with their two-year-old son.^[7] She knew and was mentored by anti-apartheid figurehead Harry Schwarz since she was a child.^[16]

Zille was also actively involved in the South Africa Beyond Apartheid Project and the Cape Town Peace Committee. She later gathered evidence for the Goldstone Commission which investigated attempts to destabilise the Western Cape before the elections in 1994.

The Rand Daily Mail story, authored by Zille, that exposed the cover-up of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko‘s death in police custody.

No related posts.

The SA police shot a protestor at a very close range directly with what appears to be a rubber bullet (see second 16 and 17 of the clip) and then set upon him. The man called Andries Tatane died at the scene in the Free State town of Ficksburg yesterday. Here is a report from The Times.

In the mean time violence flared again today in the town.

Business Day has a very good opinion piece on the incident:

In a country in which nearly 50% of the people live in poverty and where nearly 50% of black people are unemployed — most of them without the prospect of ever finding a job — he died because he wanted a better deal for his community.

In a country in which miscellaneous items worth hundreds of millions of rand are consumed each year by politicians, where people become instant multimillionaires supposedly providing public goods, goods that rarely materialise, this man died because he wanted his government to do its job.

And I would like to highlight the following:

This is not simply about police brutality. This is about national brutality. The police are simply a reflection of the society we are. It begins with the acceptance of the brutality of poverty and economic injustice.

Unfortunately, this is nothing new in South Africa.

The Mail and Guardian reports on the excessive figures of people dying in police custody.

The Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD), according to its 2010 annual report, investigated 1 769 cases of people dying in police custody or as a result of police action.

That is considerably higher than the UK’s total homicide rate per year.

Related deployments:

1. How violent is the South African police?
2. South African police accused of gross abuse of power

At the end he had an impromptu outburst and called for a revolution in Angola. And I heard he was arrested this morning.

Today is supposed to be a day of rage in Angola, similar to Egypt and Tunisia. Good luck to you Angolans.

A friend of mine made this translation of the video.

BRIGADEIRO MATA FRAKUZX (Ikonoklasta) – DIA 7 DE MARÇO – Angola
Government mother fucker
I´m a kamikaze
why this has to be like that?
Why speaking about them has to be life threat?

Mr Danilo, if you are here, run and tell daddy (Dos Santos),
tell him please, that we don´t want him anymore here
32 years is to much… a lot!

Until when that shit!? Of intimidatory policy
you say, I´m going to shut up you at home
see right, your brother, your uncle, your father, think right
attention, i do know where you live,
why??
the other gave the opinion of him saying Zé Du must die
is censoring the sound, it´s the opinion of a frustrated
he is frustrated with the situation
Mr Dino Matross, Mr Virgílio De Fontes Pereira, every you, suck!!
Paulo Flores said that “oppressor of the oppressed” get out!! no??
The first Dino Matross is threatening the population
“oppressor of the oppressed” get out!!
Mr Dino Matross, Mr Virgílio De Fontes Pereira Out!!!!
Attention, I want to see on 7th
who is the pure REVU, on 7th
everybody already know
if we live till there, let´s see if I show everything so you can read
calm down, put clear Edu, put it clear:
YOU ZÉ TRHOW THE FEET, YOUR TIME IS OVER…. IN BWÉ
Independence square 7 this our day, Libya is achieving, Kadafi is going to fall
Zé Dú isn´t going to be anymore a friend, we don´t want more, we don´t want more
Bring only pans and spoons, we don´t want aggression
don´t bring party flags…please
to make noise with vuvuzelas and kitchen things
nobody wants party
Thank you very much
Join to the fight for total independence of Angola from the Dictator Jose Eduardo Dos
Santos and all his comitive !

Translation by comrade Paulo of Galicia

Related deployments:

1. Angola & the fight for Afrikaner acceptance

Wael, who was just released this afternoon, gave an emotional interview – it even had me in tears & I was getting it second hand from Twitter – to Egyptian TV a few minutes ago. An interview which is sure to galvanise the Egyptian opposition.

Back story:

According to Newsweek:

Said, a young businessman from Alexandria, was reportedly beaten to death by local police this summer – well before rumblings of the country’s current unrest. But a Facebook page that bears his name has been one of the driving forces behind the upheaval that started last week.

The anonymous Facebook page administrator who goes by the handle ElShaheed, meaning martyr, has played a crucial role in organizing the demonstrations, the largest Egypt has seen since the 1970s, that now threaten the country’s authoritarian regime.
Yet even Egypt’s most active activists have no idea who the anonymous organizer is.

Esraa Abdel Fatah, who earned the nickname “Facebook Girl” when she organized a nationwide strike through her page in 2008, said she and her activist colleagues were in constant communication with ElShaheed as they worked to coordinate the protest push, but still didn’t know his or her identity. “No one knows” who it is, she said.

Ghonim had helped and supported the leaders of the earlier April 6 movement, and his Facebook page grew to massive proportion gaining 300,000 followers in a few weeks.

He faced many obstacles – even from Facebook, says Gawker:

Everybody’s talking about the massive Facebook groups that helped spark the uprising, but few remember the headaches Facebook has given these groups. Just four months ago, for example, one of the most popular Egyptian Facebook protest groups, We Are All Khaled Said, was deactivated abruptly because its administrators had registered their accounts under pseudonyms to protect themselves from the Mubarak regime. After much (virtual) protest, the 300,000-member group was reinstated, and its young members helped form the vanguard of the current uprising.

Newsweek again:

ElShaheed’s Facebook page, simply named “We Are All Khaled Said,” began as a campaign against torture and police brutality. But this month, shortly after the Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was brought down following weeks of grassroots protests inspired by Bouazizi’s self-immolation, a post appeared on the Facebook page, announcing a day of protest in Egypt: Tuesday, Jan. 25.
At home in Cairo, Wael Khalil, a democracy activist since 2004, saw the post and scoffed. “Come on,” he remembers thinking. “We can’t have a Facebook revolution. Revolution has no time and hour.”

Ghonim was abducted after he got into a taxi from the home of a friend on the 27th of January, just earlier he had sent a poignant Tweet.

He claimed to have been treated well by his captors but added that he had been blindfolded for 12 days.

He had talked to the young Ahmed Maher, a leader of the April 6 movement, but even they they did not know who he was.

Breaking down repeatedly Ghonim was conciliatory but filled with steely determination. It was he said, not a time for retaliation, but the ruling party had to go.

Referring to the fact that Dr. Hosam Badrawy, the new secretary general of the National Democratic party had told him that the bad people in the party had gone, Ghonim said that the whole party had to go. He accepted to be driven home by the secretary general but refused to be driven home in a car with the NDP logo.

He stressed that none of the organisers of the protests were from the Muslim Brotherhood. It was the youth he said.

In a harrowing moment the TV presenter had shown him the pictures of young people that had died, at which point he apologised, and left the studio.

Tom Gara, based in the UAE pointed out how a new Wael Ghonim Facebook page was growing now at about 50 members per second.

Influential Egyptian bloggers like Sandmonkey claimed tonights speech would be the end of the regime, and predicted a turn out of millions on the street tomorrow.

Rather incredibly BBC Radio still have nothing on this story. It is safe to say that if a Muslim Brotherhood leader had been released it would have gotten some airtime, never-mind if he was a lynchpin of the protests that have taken place.

Below a list of the Tweets and comments of people as it happened last night (Full list here):

Related deployments:

1. Tunisia was hit by a Facebook Tsunami

…a news agency for stuff nobody wants to know. “Dave is playing on Facebook. Dave is a bit annoyed. Dave is going for a drink. Dave has found a toothsome bit of cheese under the nail on his big toe.”

What readers might find odd is that this is perhaps simultaneously a fitting description, and at the same time could point to why Facebook is so useful as a tool for organising dissent.

In case you don’t know, last week Malcolm Gladwell once again entered the fray about the role of social media in fundamental and high stakes social activism. The much shorter piece titled, Does Egypt need Twitter is much weaker than his original piece.

A protestor on Tahrir square, Cairo

As sociology prof Zeynep Tufekci (remember that name, you will still hear allot about her) points out, shamelessly contradictory.

The case of Gafsa

Prof Tufeckci makes many salient points about how a movement organising through a tool like Facebook would operate and what impact it could have – which I would highly recommend you read – but for the purpose of this post I would just like to focus on her synthesis – a what if, what if the revolutionaries did not organize using social media?

Thus, our word-of-mouth movement would struggle to grow person-by-person and would be easily outmatched by the state security apparatus. It might be able to put together brave and small demonstrations here and there—the news of which would likely never travel beyond the lonely corner in which they were staged. Even if they managed to get some critical traction in a locality, the state could more easily counter, encircle and repress because unlike the current protests in Egypt and Tunisia, which started rapidly and emerged through a broad-base all at once, authoritarian regimes have a pretty advanced-arsenal against old-fashioned political organizing.

She proposes to compare what has happened now to what happened before – the riots in the Gafsa region from April to June 2008. If you do a Google search, you will find very little information on these riots. Here is one of the few reports in the English:

Tunisian police opened fire against rioters on Friday (June 6th) in Redeyef, 350km from Tunis, leaving a 22-year-old man dead and some 22 wounded, local press reported. Unrest in the phosphate mining region of Gafsa has continued for two months, with hundreds of youths rioting over unemployment and rising living costs in the region.

Note the lone desperate comment underneath it.

Tufeckci asks the key question -

In 2008, protests led by the local trade-union broke out in the Tunisian mining-town of Gafsa over corruption, unemployment and nepotism. Did you know about them? Neither did I, until recently. However, the story is familiar. Tunisian government forces encircled the town, brought in the army when the police proved unable to contain the unrest, kicked out and jailed the journalists trying to cover the story. Isolated and censored, the protests dissipated.

Is the spread and integration of social media into everyday rhythms of Tunisian (and global) populace between 2008 and 2011 a factor in why the world has barely heard of Gafsa while Sidi Bouzid is nearly a household name around the globe? Obviously, there cannot be a definitive answer. However, this is surely worth exploring and a striking example of the “how” of social movements has such profound consequences beyond being fodder for contrarian missives about their irrelevance.

We can answer her. Thanks to the founder of RWW France Fabrice Epelboin who sent me this link on Quora, we know that although Tunisia had almost two million internet users in September 2008, it only had 28,000 Facebook users.

Wow. So Tunisia went from 28 thousand to nearly two million Facebook users in two years (December 2010) adding more than 2000 users per day for two years. Since Ben Ali has been ousted three weeks ago the number of Facebook users have risen by more than 100,000.

Backstory – during and after the Gafsa protests many Tunisian blogs were blocked, and so was Facebook on the 18th of August 2008. Ben Ali himself intervened to unban Facebook on the 3rd of September, precipitating a rise in the spread of the technology that would be called, in the advertising world – viral – or perhaps – off the charts. In other words it would appear to have been a big mistake. It laid the foundation from where information age gorillas could hide in the digital undergrowth (Unfortunately not my metaphor), inserting their messages into newsfeeds for the population at large.

Unlike Tufeckci’s cautious academic approach – I’d say the role of social media and Facebook in particular as a tool for insurrection has been under-egged.

The fog of insurrection is only now starting to lift over the situation in Egypt, but there too the case for role of Facebook as a tool for activism seems to be becoming more compelling, the more information sees the light of day.

A few more thoughts then.

• Publicness matters – many digital activists are fixated with privacy. But taking risks in public was key. It’s the equivalent of a public protest.
• Language matters – As this blog points out, language translation was key to an adoption spike in Facebook use around 2008. Facebook was translated into French (Tunisia’s colonial language) on the 10th of March 2008. Just before the period of massive growth.
• You need everybody – or at least not just the usual suspects. Blogs and Twitter are important – they are for Thought Leaders – but they wont light a fire by themselves. They need the distribution mechanism into people’s ordinary lives. Tufeckci:
  “These protests were first kindled through Facebook and other social media which are integrated into rhythms of mundane sociality. This means that rather than being directed at first by a well-defined group of activists who were able to reach only other politically-motivated compatriots, the dissent and the protests propagated through ordinary social networks which, in turn, ensures that the movement is broad-based.”
  …
  “Evgeny Morozov repeatedly highlights how social media increases state capacity for state to surveillance. That is certainly worth considering. However, as I argued here, surveillance is not that useful when the opposition activity is completely entangled with everyday sociality of millions of people and when dissent is widespread.”
• With digital tools small design decisions are crucial. UX and functionality decisions by Zuckerburg that has proven to be fundamental. As has been pointed out by many people including Jeff Jarvis, Facebook made two key decisions. The first was that users would use their own names – a real identity. This allowed for Facebook to be more integrated in people’s lives in general. The second was the later innovation of the personal newsfeed, the news of your crowd, or what Sam Leith has dubbed the Reuters of Inanity.

  Never before has the mundane and the everyday been such a ticket for utopian dreams.

  Related deployments:

  1. Tunisia & the technologies of freedom
  2. Wael Ghonim was admin of Khaled Said Facebook page
  ]]> http://mhambi.com/2011/02/tunisia-was-hit-by-a-tsunami-of-the-mundane/feed/ 3 http://mhambi.com/2011/01/tunisia-social-media-uprising/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tunisia-social-media-uprising http://mhambi.com/2011/01/tunisia-social-media-uprising/#comments Sun, 16 Jan 2011 21:13:14 +0000 Kameraad Mhambi http://mhambi.com/?p=1416
• Tunisia was hit by a Facebook Tsunami
]]> “Most movements that are self-described as radical are highly urbanistic, or nationalistic, or oriented to obsolete class structures, or to central bureaucratic planning. The changes that we can see on the horizon are much more drastic than that . . . People who think about social change in traditional political terms cannot begin to imagine the changes that lie ahead. Conventional reformers cast their programs in terms of national policies, or in terms of laws and central planning. But in the end, what will shape the future is a creative potential that inheres in the new technologies . . .”

Ithiel de Sola Pool

The above might strike you as a tad neo-liberal. But bare with me. (De Sola Pool’s anti-statism and corporatism actually also comes from his Trotskyist youth. But we digress.)

Along with science fiction writers like William Gibson, de Sola Pool had an uncanny ability to predict the future. He did not coin the phrase cyberspace, no, but he did describe it.

“Networked computers will be the printing presses of the twenty-first century,” he argued in 1983 in his remarkably prescient chapter on electronic publishing in the book Technologies of Freedom. “Soon most published information will disseminated electronically.”

De Sola Pool, a jew, started making a name for himself as a social scientist when tried to make sense of Nazi propaganda. He wanted to decode the destructive influence of words. And so he became one of the fathers of the quantitative analysis of communications content. He later started the social sciences faculty at MIT, and is credited with the concept of 6 degrees of separation.

But as his career progressed he veered not in the direction of words and content – the message, but rather focused on the medium. To him the medium was indeed the message.

Samir Labidi, Tunisia’s ex communications minister, said the protests had been hijacked by ‘extremists’ [AFP] – now replaced

It is fitting that we keep this in mind now that a debate is raging about the contribution or not, of social media to revolutions. Malcolm Gladwell recently poured cold water on the idea. Social media did not require commitment and its unlikely to have a real impact on the “real world” he said:

Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.

The Tunisian uprising has focussed minds once again on the issue.

But why is it important?

Well for simply for this reason: If social media is playing a role and since it is a relatively new phenomena and growing at an stupendous rate, then we should expect more and more uprisings.

Now its arrogant to presume one could make such a call, that social media did make a significant difference, without being in thick of things. I have only been watching from the sidelines. From social media that is. Because western media – unlike in the Iranian case – have been very late in covering events in Tunisia.

But this is what I have learned thus far, and why I think the role of interactive people media has been significant.

First off its important to define what we mean when we say social media. Social media to me includes letter writing, telephone calls, mobile video and texting or any other media with a low barrier to entry. Ie. not institutional professional media, which is by and large one way broadcast media.

It is of course only recently that these inexpensive forms of people media acquired the ability to reach audiences of thousands.

Of all the Arab countries, Tunisia has the highest penetration of internet users. The BBC reports that more than 34% of Tunisia’s 10 million people are online. Nearly two million people, or more than 18% of the population, use Facebook. Mobile penetration exceeds both these numbers.

I don’t want to sound like a technological determinist. But once that many people have the power to self publish it must have consequences. I concur Zeynep Tufekci when she remarks in an excellent post:

I find it hard to believe that the ability to disseminate news, videos, tidbits, information, links, outside messages that easily, transparently and without censorship reached one in five persons (and thus their immediate social networks) within a country that otherwise suffered from heavy censorship was without a significant impact.

And it would seem the Tunisian regime agrees with us. It went to great lenghts not only to try and cencor and control the mainstream media, but in particular social media.

That brings me to a second piece of evidence. Shortly before the riots began Wikileaks published damning cables of the extent of government corruption in Tunisia. Many commentators have poo poohed this revelation. Surely the Tunisians were well aware of the corruption. I agree. They must have been. But that does not follow that the detailed cables did not contribute to the rage.

For a start. It cast doubt that the governments supposed ally – the US – were firmly behind it.

Secondly, the detail of the revelations might have been news to some. Remember, were talking about a country where no such criticism of government gets published in any official form.

Thirdly, what matters is not only the message, but the authority of the messenger. If an opposition newspaper carries a damning story about government, depending on the partisan nature of the politics of the country and the independence of the media, one could expect various degrees of denial and agreement from different sectors of the political devide.

Tunisia has no independent or opposition papers.

If the US government (or even Amnesty Inyernational) had accused Tunisia outright, it would have had some impact, but it would have been tempered by years of experience and perception of Western colonial dominance.

But Wikileaks’ content has a strange authenticity. Before the Tunisian uprising Ghaddafi was singing its praises. The US government was gunning for Assange. The Arab world was lampooning US hypocrisy.

In short, the detail revelations in the leaks carried authority.

Nawaat, one of the main organizations fighting the regime included a Wikileaks section on their website. Tagged for easy navigation.

One Tunisian blogger opinioned:

“Wikileaks played a major role in fueling the anger / determination of Tunisians. However, the Wikileaks reports only put further light on what we already knew. They confirmed our doubts and detailed the different events.”

The attempted blocking of access to the Wikileaks cables by the Tunisian authorities added more fuel to the fire. And it brought unexpected allies of its own.

Anonymous, the hacking group that had recently sought to attack enemies of Wikileaks trained their resources on the Tunisian regime.

Reports Al Jazeera:

The group’s DDoS attacks, which began on Sunday night, local time, succeeded in taking at least eight websites, including those for the president, prime minister, the ministry of industry, the ministry of foreign affairs, and the stock exchange.

Now this did not register in the West. But inside Tunisia, to its beleaguered middleclasses, this must have seemed a big deal. Anonymous launched Ops Tunisia. Al Jazeera again:

It is hard to generalise the Anons’ diverse range of motivations and ever-changing targets, but most appear to share an outrage over the Tunisian government’s censorship and phishing activities, and a sense of solidarity with Tunisian web users.

Attacking government-linked websites is much more dangerous for those living within Tunisia, they noted, who risk arrest if they are identitied by the authorities.

“Although many Tunisians understandably do not feel comfortable participating in this operation out of precaution, I estimate there [were] about 50 Tunisians participating, to whom we provide the means and knowledge to properly secure their online behaviour from exposure to their government,” one Anon activist wrote via email.

Anonymous’s Ops Tunisia video of 5 January

Rage against the machine

The last and most important reason I think social media has played a huge part is the incredible act of self immolation by a jobless university educated Mohamed Bouaziz.

Street vending is illegal in Tunisia, and city authorities regularly confiscated Mohamed’s small wheelbarrow of fruit. But Mohamed had no other option to try to make a living, and he bought his merchandise by getting into debt. It was a vicious circle.

That Friday morning, he had contracted roughly $200 in debt for his goods. Police spotted him, confiscated his cart and reportedly slapped him in the face in the process.

Mohamed was desperate and angry. So he went to regional government headquarters to try to plead his case with the governor.

Nobody would listen to him and he was thrown out. Mohamed, enraged, bought two bottles of paint thinner and set himself alight in front of the building. He was rushed to hospital, but died Jan. 4.

Local protests erupted as soon as Mohamed was taken away.

Reported Al Jazeera on the 5th of January just before his death.

This act of self-immolation ignited simmering anger at policies that the government’s critics say favour an elite minority. Demonstrations across the country have continued unabated since December 17.

Most video-sharing sites face blanket censorship in Tunisia, as do news websites like Nawaat, Al Jazeera Arabic, and, most recently, Al Jazeera English.

Yet many Tunisians share videos on Facebook, via email or use proxies to break through the media blackout.

A video of his funeral posted on Facebook can be found here.



Social media is not programmed. There is no editor. It is what marketeers calls earned media or word of mouth. It’s the most valuable and effective media because it requires people to take action to spread it. For this reason it’s also the hardest media to create, because it should be remarkable – people don’t share duds.

Anybody that has spent any time on the internet knows that remarkable content finds you. Even when your not looking for it.

Wikipedia says that Mohamed left a message for his mother on his Facebook page asking her to forgive him after losing hope in everything.

Regardless if that is true It has been confirmed. See image below:

Mohammad Bouazizi’s last Status update

Translation “I will be traveling my mom, forgive me, Reproach is not helpful, i am lost in my way it is not in my hand, for give me if disobeyed words of my mom, blame our times and do not blame me, i am going and not coming back, look i did not cry and tears did not fall from my eyes, Reproach is not helpful in time of Treachery in the land of people, i am sick and not in my mind all what happened, i am traveling and i am asking who leads the travel to forget.”

The news of the actions of the young trader undoubtedly shot across the mobile and computer networks of Tunisia. The fact that the government media ignored this event at first would have only heightened the specialness of the message appearing in their personal Newsfeeds. The news would have spread like wildfire.

Going to the capital


Fabrice Epelboin claims (see comments) that then flashmob (below) was instrumental in spreading the insurrection to the capital:

“that flash mob was the event that spread the protest into Tunis (it was limited to small cities before that), it was definitely organized via Facebook.”

A Tunisian Flashmob – not possible without social media and mobile phones

Not a Twitter revolution

Even a cursory digg into the Tunisian social media world shows that there has been considerable information sharing around the uprising (not surprising really). But it wasn’t on Twitter where the main action took place. It was on Facebook.

What is the extent of the information sharing on Facebook? One popular blog by Nawaat, features hundreds of mobile and other videos of protests and fighting. Here’s just one rough comparison of the levels of activity. Nearly every post on this blog has more than 14,000 Facebook Likes. For comparison, Lady Gaga, who has over 25 million followers on her Facebook page gets about 60,000 likes on her updates. If Lady Gaga had as many followers as Tunisia had Facebook users (lets assume all of Tunisia is members of one Facebook fan page), namely two million people, she would be getting less than 5,000 Likes per update. Three times less than the Nawaat blog posts.

This begs the question. Why did the Tunisian government not block Facebook like they did with other sites like YouTube? I posted the question on Quora and here is a reply from Fabrice Epelboin:

They tried to censor Facebook (somewhere in 2008 I think) and some big protest begun, so Ben Ali quickly stopped censoring FB and instead, setup a massive ‘community management’ team to do some police on Facebook, to monitor conversations, filter specific pages, and eventually, during the revolution, block some specific functions like video uploading (the video sharing was a key element in helping spreading the revolution in the country).

They also did phising attack to steal password. As far as we know, two (probably more got unnoticed). First one was outed by Slim Amamou in ReadWriteWeb France in june 2010, second one was outed during the revolution, in early 2011 by TechRepublic.

Details & links


Yip indeed. It was blocked on the 18th of August 2008, but then unblocked after a huge outcry (see some of the comments on this site) and the president Ben Ali’s intervention.

It would seem the social media horse had bolted and Tunisia was struggling to put the Genie back into the bottle.

There are other pointers to the impact of social media. According to an answer on Quora even Foursquare played a role.

When Slim Amamou (newly appointed minister for youth) was arrested on the 6th of january, again the first information about him missing was over the location based social media platform foursquare (It seems this was in fact Google Latitude – see comment below), where he posted his whereabouts (The Ministry of Interiors) so that his friends (and followers) immediately took action and, as he was internationally known, could again be able to put pressure on the national government.

Our blogger again:

Twitter and Facebook played a very important role in our revolution, and I am confident that if we were not using social media we wouldn’t have accomplished our goals.
Social media empowered our communication infrastructure.
It countered the traditional media, the propaganda machine of our government. It allowed us to detect patterns that one would not notice if left alone, such as noticing that all the presidential police cars are rented (rented cars in tunisia have blue license plates). Social media fostered crowdwisdom, by sharing thoughts, feedbacks, and opinions. And finally on the battle field, we even used in the final hours of our government to share snipers’ positions. Then, the final demonstration was an event on facebook that everybody shared.
And now we are using it to find the militias, and share their positions. There are volunteers working on developing web 2.0 applications to place events on maps.”

Meanwhile Reuters reports that returning bloggers are being received as national heros.

“I feel proud to return to Tunisia after the dictator left. The Internet played a big role and was the basic motor in getting rid of the tyrant,” Tarek Mekki told Reuters at the airport where he was received by around 500 fans.

“It’s amazing that we participated via the Internet in ousting him, via uploading videos. What we did on the Internet had credibility and that’s why is was successful.”

Mekki become known for posting himself on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter offering commentaries on Ben Ali’s speeches that ridiculed the leader of 23 years.

…

Another man was holding up a picture of Mekki. “We only knew him through Facebook but now we see him in person. We welcome him and call on him to run in elections,” he said.

A picture taken of Tunisian police looting a shop at night, posted on this blog 68 Twitter mentions, over 10,000 Facebook likes.


One of the most consistent and considered critiques of the power of social media and why it could not deliver a revolution is by Evgeny Morozov:

“I don’t deny that the Internet may have played a role in publicizing the protests in Tunisia; it’s just that the conditions in which the protests took place do not strike me as those where the leaders of the protest movement had to post updates on where to meet and when. Maybe I am wrong, but it all seemed to be somewhat chaotic and decentralized.”

Perhaps echoing the ideas of de Sola Pool that new communications technolgies do not rely on large hierachies John Perry Barlow Tweeted yesterday:

“The most striking thing about the Tunisian Revolution is that, like the Internet, no one’s in charge.”

Perhaps Mr Morozov is right thats its a bit chaotic and decentralised, but wrong to think that the decentralisation could not deliver an uprising. De Sola Pool anyone?

Below is a list of the Tweets I have curated from Twitter thus far re the Tunisian uprising. Find the ones referencing Col Ghadaffi. They are quite a laugh. And he blames Facebook. And Leakyleaks.

Update – OK, so the new Tunisian leadership have just attended Davos, and here is some feedback on the Question of the role of social media:




Related deployments:

1. Tunisia was hit by a Facebook Tsunami
]]> http://mhambi.com/2011/01/tunisia-social-media-uprising/feed/ 10