On January 17, 2001, during the impeachment trial of
Philippine President Joseph Estrada, loyalists in the Philippine Congress voted
to set aside key evidence against him. Less than two hours after the decision
was announced, thousands of Filipinos, angry that their corrupt president might
be let off the hook, converged on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, a major
crossroads in Manila. The protest was arranged, in part, by forwarded text
messages reading, "Go 2 EDSA. Wear blk." The crowd quickly swelled,
and in the next few days, over a million people arrived, choking traffic in
downtown Manila.
The public's ability to coordinate such a massive and
rapid response -- close to seven million text messages were sent that week --
so alarmed the country's legislators that they reversed course and allowed the
evidence to be presented. Estrada's fate was sealed; by January 20, he was
gone. The event marked the first time that social media had helped force out a
national leader. Estrada himself blamed "the text-messaging
generation" for his downfall.
Since the rise of the Internet in the early 1990s, the
world's networked population has grown from the low millions to the low
billions. Over the same period, social media have become a fact of life for
civil society worldwide, involving many actors -- regular citizens, activists,
nongovernmental organizations, telecommunications firms, software providers,
governments. This raises an obvious question for the U.S. government: How does
the ubiquity of social media affect U.S. interests, and how should U.S. policy
respond to it?
As the communications landscape gets denser, more
complex, and more participatory, the networked population is gaining greater
access to information, more opportunities to engage in public speech, and an
enhanced ability to undertake collective action. In the political arena, as the
protests in Manila demonstrated, these increased freedoms can help loosely
coordinated publics demand change.
The Philippine strategy has been adopted many times
since. In some cases, the protesters ultimately succeeded, as in Spain in 2004,
when demonstrations organized by text messaging led to the quick ouster of
Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar, who had inaccurately blamed the Madrid
transit bombings on Basque separatists. The Communist Party lost power in
Moldova in 2009 when massive protests coordinated in part by text message,
Facebook, and Twitter broke out after an obviously fraudulent election. Around
the world, the Catholic Church has faced lawsuits over its harboring of child
rapists, a process that started when The Boston Globe's 2002 exposé of sexual
abuse in the church went viral online in a matter of hours.
There are, however, many examples of the activists
failing, as in Belarus in March 2006, when street protests (arranged in part by
e-mail) against President Aleksandr Lukashenko's alleged vote rigging swelled,
then faltered, leaving Lukashenko more determined than ever to control social
media. During the June 2009 uprising of the Green Movement in Iran, activists
used every possible technological coordinating tool to protest the miscount of
votes for Mir Hossein Mousavi but were ultimately brought to heel by a violent
crackdown. The Red Shirt uprising in Thailand in 2010 followed a similar but
quicker path: protesters savvy with social media occupied downtown Bangkok
until the Thai government dispersed the protesters, killing dozens.
The use of social media tools -- text messaging, e-mail,
photo sharing, social networking, and the like -- does not have a single
preordained outcome. Therefore, attempts to outline their effects on political
action are too often reduced to dueling anecdotes. If you regard the failure of
the Belarusian protests to oust Lukashenko as paradigmatic, you will regard the
Moldovan experience as an outlier, and vice versa. Empirical work on the
subject is also hard to come by, in part because these tools are so new and in
part because relevant examples are so rare. The safest characterization of
recent quantitative attempts to answer the question, Do digital tools enhance
democracy? (such as those by Jacob Groshek and Philip Howard) is that these
tools probably do not hurt in the short run and might help in the long run --
and that they have the most dramatic effects in states where a public sphere
already constrains the actions of the government.
Despite this mixed record, social media have become
coordinating tools for nearly all of the world's political movements, just as
most of the world's authoritarian governments (and, alarmingly, an increasing
number of democratic ones) are trying to limit access to it. In response, the
U.S. State Department has committed itself to "Internet freedom" as a
specific policy aim. Arguing for the right of people to use the Internet freely
is an appropriate policy for the United States, both because it aligns with the
strategic goal of strengthening civil society worldwide and because it
resonates with American beliefs about freedom of expression. But attempts to
yoke the idea of Internet freedom to short-term goals -- particularly ones that
are country-specific or are intended to help particular dissident groups or
encourage regime change -- are likely to be ineffective on average. And when
they fail, the consequences can be serious.
Although the story of Estrada's ouster and other similar
events have led observers to focus on the power of mass protests to topple
governments, the potential of social media lies mainly in their support of
civil society and the public sphere -- change measured in years and decades
rather than weeks or months. The U.S. government should maintain Internet
freedom as a goal to be pursued in a principled and regime-neutral fashion, not
as a tool for effecting immediate policy aims country by country. It should
likewise assume that progress will be incremental and, unsurprisingly, slowest
in the most authoritarian regimes.
THE PERILS OF INTERNET FREEDOM
In January 2010, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
outlined how the United States would promote Internet freedom abroad. She
emphasized several kinds of freedom, including the freedom to access
information (such as the ability to use Wikipedia and Google inside Iran), the freedom
of ordinary citizens to produce their own public media (such as the rights of
Burmese activists to blog), and the freedom of citizens to converse with one
another (such as the Chinese public's capacity to use instant messaging without
interference).
Most notably, Clinton announced funding for the
development of tools designed to reopen access to the Internet in countries
that restrict it. This "instrumental" approach to Internet freedom
concentrates on preventing states from censoring outside Web sites, such as
Google, YouTube, or that of The New York Times. It focuses only secondarily on
public speech by citizens and least of all on private or social uses of digital
media. According to this vision, Washington can and should deliver rapid,
directed responses to censorship by authoritarian regimes.
The instrumental view is politically appealing,
action-oriented, and almost certainly wrong. It overestimates the value of
broadcast media while underestimating the value of media that allow citizens to
communicate privately among themselves. It overestimates the value of access to
information, particularly information hosted in the West, while underestimating
the value of tools for local coordination. And it overestimates the importance
of computers while underestimating the importance of simpler tools, such as
cell phones.
The instrumental approach can also be dangerous. Consider
the debacle around the proposed censorship-circumvention software known as
Haystack, which, according to its developer, was meant to be a "one-to-one
match for how the [Iranian] regime implements censorship." The tool was
widely praised in Washington; the U.S. government even granted it an export
license. But the program was never carefully vetted, and when security experts
examined it, it turned out that it not only failed at its goal of hiding
messages from governments but also made it, in the words of one analyst,
"possible for an adversary to specifically pinpoint individual
users." In contrast, one of the most successful anti-censorship software
programs, Freegate, has received little support from the United States, partly
because of ordinary bureaucratic delays and partly because the U.S. government
is wary of damaging U.S.-Chinese relations: the tool was originally created by
Falun Gong, the spiritual movement that the Chinese government has called
"an evil cult." The challenges of Freegate and Haystack demonstrate
how difficult it is to weaponize social media to pursue country-specific and
near-term policy goals.
New media conducive to fostering participation can indeed
increase the freedoms Clinton outlined, just as the printing press, the postal
service, the telegraph, and the telephone did before. One complaint about the
idea of new media as a political force is that most people simply use these
tools for commerce, social life, or self-distraction, but this is common to all
forms of media. Far more people in the 1500s were reading erotic novels than
Martin Luther's "Ninety-five Theses," and far more people before the
American Revolution were reading Poor Richard's Almanack than the work of the
Committees of Correspondence. But those political works still had an enormous
political effect.
Just as Luther adopted the newly practical printing press
to protest against the Catholic Church, and the American revolutionaries
synchronized their beliefs using the postal service that Benjamin Franklin had
designed, today's dissident movements will use any means possible to frame
their views and coordinate their actions; it would be impossible to describe
the Moldovan Communist Party's loss of Parliament after the 2009 elections
without discussing the use of cell phones and online tools by its opponents to
mobilize. Authoritarian governments stifle communication among their citizens
because they fear, correctly, that a better-coordinated populace would
constrain their ability to act without oversight.
Despite this basic truth -- that communicative freedom is
good for political freedom -- the instrumental mode of Internet statecraft is
still problematic. It is difficult for outsiders to understand the local
conditions of dissent. External support runs the risk of tainting even peaceful
opposition as being directed by foreign elements. Dissidents can be exposed by
the unintended effects of novel tools. A government's demands for Internet
freedom abroad can vary from country to country, depending on the importance of
the relationship, leading to cynicism about its motives.
The more promising way to think about social media is as
long-term tools that can strengthen civil society and the public sphere. In
contrast to the instrumental view of Internet freedom, this can be called the
"environmental" view. According to this conception, positive changes
in the life of a country, including pro-democratic regime change, follow,
rather than precede, the development of a strong public sphere. This is not to
say that popular movements will not successfully use these tools to discipline
or even oust their governments, but rather that U.S. attempts to direct such
uses are likely to do more harm than good. Considered in this light, Internet
freedom is a long game, to be conceived of and supported not as a separate
agenda but merely as an important input to the more fundamental political
freedoms.
THE THEATER OF COLLAPSE
Any discussion of political action in repressive regimes
must take into account the astonishing fall of communism in 1989 in eastern
Europe and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Throughout the
Cold War, the United States invested in a variety of communications tools,
including broadcasting the Voice of America radio station, hosting an American
pavilion in Moscow (home of the famous Nixon-Khrushchev "kitchen
debate"), and smuggling Xerox machines behind the Iron Curtain to aid the
underground press, or samizdat. Yet despite this emphasis on communications,
the end of the Cold War was triggered not by a defiant uprising of Voice of
America listeners but by economic change. As the price of oil fell while that
of wheat spiked, the Soviet model of selling expensive oil to buy cheap wheat
stopped working. As a result, the Kremlin was forced to secure loans from the
West, loans that would have been put at risk had the government intervened
militarily in the affairs of non-Russian states. In 1989, one could argue, the
ability of citizens to communicate, considered against the background of
macroeconomic forces, was largely irrelevant.
But why, then, did the states behind the Iron Curtain not
just let their people starve? After all, the old saying that every country is
three meals away from revolution turned out to be sadly incorrect in the
twentieth century; it is possible for leaders to survive even when millions
die. Stalin did it in the 1930s, Mao did it in the 1960s, and Kim Jong Il has
done it more than once in the last two decades. But the difference between
those cases and the 1989 revolutions was that the leaders of East Germany,
Czechoslovakia, and the rest faced civil societies strong enough to resist. The
weekly demonstrations in East Germany, the Charter 77 civic movement in
Czechoslovakia, and the Solidarity movement in Poland all provided visible
governments in waiting.
The ability of these groups to create and disseminate
literature and political documents, even with simple photocopiers, provided a
visible alternative to the communist regimes. For large groups of citizens in
these countries, the political and, even more important, economic bankruptcy of
the government was no longer an open secret but a public fact. This made it
difficult and then impossible for the regimes to order their troops to take on
such large groups.
Thus, it was a shift in the balance of power between the
state and civil society that led to the largely peaceful collapse of communist
control. The state's ability to use violence had been weakened, and the civil
society that would have borne the brunt of its violence had grown stronger.
When civil society triumphed, many of the people who had articulated opposition
to the communist regimes -- such as Tadeusz Mazowiecki in Poland and Václav
Havel in Czechoslovakia -- became the new political leaders of those countries.
Communications tools during the Cold War did not cause governments to collapse,
but they helped the people take power from the state when it was weak.
The idea that media, from the Voice of America to
samizdat, play a supporting role in social change by strengthening the public
sphere echoes the historical role of the printing press. As the German
philosopher Jürgen Habermas argued in his 1962 book, The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere, the printing press helped democratize
Europe by providing space for discussion and agreement among politically
engaged citizens, often before the state had fully democratized, an argument
extended by later scholars, such as Asa Briggs, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Paul
Starr.
Political freedom has to be accompanied by a civil
society literate enough and densely connected enough to discuss the issues
presented to the public. In a famous study of political opinion after the 1948
U.S. presidential election, the sociologists Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld
discovered that mass media alone do not change people's minds; instead, there
is a two-step process. Opinions are first transmitted by the media, and then
they get echoed by friends, family members, and colleagues. It is in this
second, social step that political opinions are formed. This is the step in
which the Internet in general, and social media in particular, can make a
difference. As with the printing press, the Internet spreads not just media
consumption but media production as well -- it allows people to privately and
publicly articulate and debate a welter of conflicting views.
A slowly developing public sphere, where public opinion
relies on both media and conversation, is the core of the environmental view of
Internet freedom. As opposed to the self-aggrandizing view that the West holds
the source code for democracy -- and if it were only made accessible, the
remaining autocratic states would crumble -- the environmental view assumes
that little political change happens without the dissemination and adoption of
ideas and opinions in the public sphere. Access to information is far less
important, politically, than access to conversation. Moreover, a public sphere
is more likely to emerge in a society as a result of people's dissatisfaction
with matters of economics or day-to-day governance than from their embrace of
abstract political ideals.
To take a contemporary example, the Chinese government
today is in more danger of being forced to adopt democratic norms by
middle-class members of the ethnic Han majority demanding less corrupt local
governments than it is by Uighurs or Tibetans demanding autonomy. Similarly,
the One Million Signatures Campaign, an Iranian women's rights movement that
focuses on the repeal of laws inimical to women, has been more successful in
liberalizing the behavior of the Iranian government than the more
confrontational Green Movement.
For optimistic observers of public demonstrations, this
is weak tea, but both the empirical and the theoretical work suggest that
protests, when effective, are the end of a long process, rather than a
replacement for it. Any real commitment by the United States to improving
political freedom worldwide should concentrate on that process -- which can
only occur when there is a strong public sphere.
THE CONSERVATIVE DILEMMA
Disciplined and coordinated groups, whether businesses or
governments, have always had an advantage over undisciplined ones: they have an
easier time engaging in collective action because they have an orderly way of
directing the action of their members. Social media can compensate for the
disadvantages of undisciplined groups by reducing the costs of coordination.
The anti-Estrada movement in the Philippines used the ease of sending and
forwarding text messages to organize a massive group with no need (and no time)
for standard managerial control. As a result, larger, looser groups can now
take on some kinds of coordinated action, such as protest movements and public
media campaigns, that were previously reserved for formal organizations. For
political movements, one of the main forms of coordination is what the military
calls "shared awareness," the ability of each member of a group to
not only understand the situation at hand but also understand that everyone
else does, too. Social media increase shared awareness by propagating messages
through social networks. The anti-Aznar protests in Spain gained momentum so
quickly precisely because the millions of people spreading the message were not
part of a hierarchical organization.
The Chinese anticorruption protests that broke out in the
aftermath of the devastating May 2008 earthquake in Sichuan are another example
of such ad hoc synchronization. The protesters were parents, particularly
mothers, who had lost their only children in the collapse of shoddily built
schools, the result of collusion between construction firms and the local
government. Before the earthquake, corruption in the country's construction
industry was an open secret. But when the schools collapsed, citizens began
sharing documentation of the damage and of their protests through social media
tools. The consequences of government corruption were made broadly visible, and
it went from being an open secret to a public truth.
The Chinese government originally allowed reporting on
the post-earthquake protests, but abruptly reversed itself in June. Security
forces began arresting protesters and threatening journalists when it became
clear that the protesters were demanding real local reform and not merely state
reparations. From the government's perspective, the threat was not that
citizens were aware of the corruption, which the state could do nothing about
in the short run. Beijing was afraid of the possible effects if this awareness
became shared: it would have to either enact reforms or respond in a way that would
alarm more citizens. After all, the prevalence of camera phones has made it
harder to carry out a widespread but undocumented crackdown.
This condition of shared awareness -- which is
increasingly evident in all modern states -- creates what is commonly called
"the dictator's dilemma" but that might more accurately be described
by the phrase coined by the media theorist Briggs: "the conservative
dilemma," so named because it applies not only to autocrats but also to
democratic governments and to religious and business leaders. The dilemma is
created by new media that increase public access to speech or assembly; with
the spread of such media, whether photocopiers or Web browsers, a state
accustomed to having a monopoly on public speech finds itself called to account
for anomalies between its view of events and the public's. The two responses to
the conservative dilemma are censorship and propaganda. But neither of these is
as effective a source of control as the enforced silence of the citizens. The
state will censor critics or produce propaganda as it needs to, but both of
those actions have higher costs than simply not having any critics to silence
or reply to in the first place. But if a government were to shut down Internet
access or ban cell phones, it would risk radicalizing otherwise pro-regime
citizens or harming the economy.
The conservative dilemma exists in part because political
speech and apolitical speech are not mutually exclusive. Many of the South
Korean teenage girls who turned out in Seoul's Cheonggyecheon Park in 2008 to
protest U.S. beef imports were radicalized in the discussion section of a Web
site dedicated to Dong Bang Shin Ki, a South Korean boy band. DBSK is not a
political group, and the protesters were not typical political actors. But that
online community, with around 800,000 active members, amplified the second step
of Katz and Lazarsfeld's two-step process by allowing members to form political
opinions through conversation.
Popular culture also heightens the conservative dilemma
by providing cover for more political uses of social media. Tools specifically
designed for dissident use are politically easy for the state to shut down,
whereas tools in broad use become much harder to censor without risking
politicizing the larger group of otherwise apolitical actors. Ethan Zuckerman
of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society calls this "the cute
cat theory of digital activism." Specific tools designed to defeat state
censorship (such as proxy servers) can be shut down with little political
penalty, but broader tools that the larger population uses to, say, share
pictures of cute cats are harder to shut down.
For these reasons, it makes more sense to invest in
social media as general, rather than specifically political, tools to promote
self-governance. The norm of free speech is inherently political and far from
universally shared. To the degree that the United States makes free speech a
first-order goal, it should expect that goal to work relatively well in
democratic countries that are allies, less well in undemocratic countries that
are allies, and least of all in undemocratic countries that are not allies. But
nearly every country in the world desires economic growth. Since governments
jeopardize that growth when they ban technologies that can be used for both
political and economic coordination, the United States should rely on
countries' economic incentives to allow widespread media use. In other words,
the U.S. government should work for conditions that increase the conservative
dilemma, appealing to states' self-interest rather than the contentious virtue
of freedom, as a way to create or strengthen countries' public spheres.
SOCIAL MEDIA SKEPTICISM
There are, broadly speaking, two arguments against the
idea that social media will make a difference in national politics. The first
is that the tools are themselves ineffective, and the second is that they
produce as much harm to democratization as good, because repressive governments
are becoming better at using these tools to suppress dissent.
The critique of ineffectiveness, most recently offered by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker, concentrates on examples of what has
been termed "slacktivism," whereby casual participants seek social
change through low-cost activities, such as joining Facebook's "Save
Darfur" group, that are long on bumper-sticker sentiment and short on any
useful action. The critique is correct but not central to the question of social
media's power; the fact that barely committed actors cannot click their way to
a better world does not mean that committed actors cannot use social media
effectively. Recent protest movements -- including a movement against
fundamentalist vigilantes in India in 2009, the beef protests in South Korea in
2008, and protests against education laws in Chile in 2006 -- have used social
media not as a replacement for real-world action but as a way to coordinate it.
As a result, all of those protests exposed participants to the threat of
violence, and in some cases its actual use. In fact, the adoption of these
tools (especially cell phones) as a way to coordinate and document real-world
action is so ubiquitous that it will probably be a part of all future political
movements.
This obviously does not mean that every political
movement that uses these tools will succeed, because the state has not lost the
power to react. This points to the second, and much more serious, critique of
social media as tools for political improvement -- namely, that the state is
gaining increasingly sophisticated means of monitoring, interdicting, or
co-opting these tools. The use of social media, the scholars Rebecca MacKinnon
of the New America Foundation and Evgeny Morozov of the Open Society Institute
have argued, is just as likely to strengthen authoritarian regimes as it is to
weaken them. The Chinese government has spent considerable effort perfecting
several systems for controlling political threats from social media. The least
important of these is its censorship and surveillance program. Increasingly,
the government recognizes that threats to its legitimacy are coming from inside
the state and that blocking the Web site of The New York Times does little to
prevent grieving mothers from airing their complaints about corruption.
The Chinese system has evolved from a relatively simple
filter of incoming Internet traffic in the mid-1990s to a sophisticated
operation that not only limits outside information but also uses arguments
about nationalism and public morals to encourage operators of Chinese Web
services to censor their users and users to censor themselves. Because its goal
is to prevent information from having politically synchronizing effects, the
state does not need to censor the Internet comprehensively; rather, it just
needs to minimize access to information.
Authoritarian states are increasingly shutting down their
communications grids to deny dissidents the ability to coordinate in real time
and broadcast documentation of an event. This strategy also activates the
conservative dilemma, creating a short-term risk of alerting the population at
large to political conflict. When the government of Bahrain banned Google Earth
after an annotated map of the royal family's annexation of public land began
circulating, the effect was to alert far more Bahrainis to the offending map
than knew about it originally. So widely did the news spread that the
government relented and reopened access after four days.
Such shutdowns become more problematic for governments if
they are long-lived. When antigovernment protesters occupied Bangkok in the
summer of 2010, their physical presence disrupted Bangkok's shopping district,
but the state's reaction, cutting off significant parts of the Thai telecommunications
infrastructure, affected people far from the capital. The approach creates an
additional dilemma for the state -- there can be no modern economy without
working phones -- and so its ability to shut down communications over large
areas or long periods is constrained.
In the most extreme cases, the use of social media tools
is a matter of life and death, as with the proposed death sentence for the
blogger Hossein Derakhshan in Iran (since commuted to 19 and a half years in
prison) or the suspicious hanging death of Oleg Bebenin, the founder of the
Belarusian opposition Web site Charter 97. Indeed, the best practical reason to
think that social media can help bring political change is that both dissidents
and governments think they can. All over the world, activists believe in the
utility of these tools and take steps to use them accordingly. And the
governments they contend with think social media tools are powerful, too, and
are willing to harass, arrest, exile, or kill users in response. One way the United
States can heighten the conservative dilemma without running afoul of as many
political complications is to demand the release of citizens imprisoned for
using media in these ways. Anything that constrains the worst threats of
violence by the state against citizens using these tools also increases the
conservative dilemma.
LOOKING AT THE LONG RUN
To the degree that the United States pursues Internet
freedom as a tool of statecraft, it should de-emphasize anti-censorship tools,
particularly those aimed at specific regimes, and increase its support for
local public speech and assembly more generally. Access to information is not
unimportant, of course, but it is not the primary way social media constrain
autocratic rulers or benefit citizens of a democracy. Direct, U.S.
government-sponsored support for specific tools or campaigns targeted at
specific regimes risk creating backlash that a more patient and global
application of principles will not.
This entails reordering the State Department's Internet
freedom goals. Securing the freedom of personal and social communication among
a state's population should be the highest priority, closely followed by
securing individual citizens' ability to speak in public. This reordering would
reflect the reality that it is a strong civil society -- one in which citizens
have freedom of assembly -- rather than access to Google or YouTube, that does
the most to force governments to serve their citizens.
As a practical example of this, the United States should
be at least as worried about Egypt's recent controls on the mandatory licensing
of group-oriented text-messaging services as it is about Egypt's attempts to
add new restrictions on press freedom. The freedom of assembly that such
text-messaging services support is as central to American democratic ideals as
is freedom of the press. Similarly, South Korea's requirement that citizens
register with their real names for certain Internet services is an attempt to
reduce their ability to surprise the state with the kind of coordinated action
that took place during the 2008 protest in Seoul. If the United States does not
complain as directly about this policy as it does about Chinese censorship, it
risks compromising its ability to argue for Internet freedom as a global ideal.
More difficult, but also essential, will be for the U.S.
government to articulate a policy of engagement with the private companies and
organizations that host the networked public sphere. Services based in the
United States, such as Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and YouTube, and those
based overseas, such as QQ (a Chinese instant-messaging service), WikiLeaks (a
repository of leaked documents whose servers are in Sweden), Tuenti (a Spanish
social network), and Naver (a Korean one), are among the sites used most for
political speech, conversation, and coordination. And the world's wireless
carriers transmit text messages, photos, and videos from cell phones through
those sites. How much can these entities be expected to support freedom of
speech and assembly for their users?
The issue here is analogous to the questions about
freedom of speech in the United States in private but commercial environments,
such as those regarding what kind of protests can be conducted in shopping
malls. For good or ill, the platforms supporting the networked public sphere
are privately held and run; Clinton committed the United States to working with
those companies, but it is unlikely that without some legal framework, as
exists for real-world speech and action, moral suasion will be enough to convince
commercial actors to support freedom of speech and assembly.
It would be nice to have a flexible set of short-term
digital tactics that could be used against different regimes at different
times. But the requirements of real-world statecraft mean that what is
desirable may not be likely. Activists in both repressive and democratic
regimes will use the Internet and related tools to try to effect change in
their countries, but Washington's ability to shape or target these changes is
limited. Instead, Washington should adopt a more general approach, promoting
freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly everywhere.
And it should understand that progress will be slow. Only by switching from an
instrumental to an environmental view of the effects of social media on the
public sphere will the United States be able to take advantage of the long-term
benefits these tools promise -- even though that may mean accepting short-term
disappointment.
**CLAY SHIRKY is Professor of New Media at New York
University and the author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a
Connected Age .
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67038/clay-shirky/the-political-power-of-social-media
Links:
[1]
http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9781594202537,00.html
[2]
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell