Jacko, Neda, and the Limits of Social Media

As I write this, the memorial service for Michael Jackson is about to kick off. While a large majority of the US (and world) population will be glued to their TV sets watching the spectacle, I imagine that my colleague Michael Eisenberg from Benchmark won’t be one of them.

The other day, Michael penned a heartfelt blog entry entitled “Michael Jackson Killed the Iranian Revolution” which deals in general with how the world focuses its attention to breaking events and more specifically how social media shapes and relates to this. Michael was bothered at what he perceived to be a major shift in world attention away from the popular uprising in Iran and towards the death of the King of Pop.

We have a problem. If our attention and that of the news media can be swayed from earth shattering events and real people, fighting real oppression with the ease that Michael Jackson swayed it, we have a problem. If we are riveted by a miscreant pedophile, who lived extravagantly and ran away from reality, then we have lost our moral compass. Twitter is a pretty accurate reflection of what people are thinking and CNN is a reflection of what media people are thinking. Jackson is ahead of Iran on Twitter and the top story on CNN today was Jackson's memorial. We have a problem.

To some degree, I share his frustration. Less than a month ago, ordinary Iranian citizens took to the streets to protest the outcome of what clearly looked like a rigged election. While the protests were the main story, the sub-story was the role that social media played in all this. Thanks to the power of online tools, people in one of the world’s more oppressive countries were able to bypass the official Iranian media and bring awareness to their cause. Twitter became a major source of news coming out of Iran, while the death of one of the protesters, Neda Agha-Soltan, gained international exposure via YouTube. At the same time, concerned people outside of Iran used the same social media platforms to show their support for the demonstrators.

It seemed, at least to a lot of people involved in the tech/New Media world that we were witnessing something earth-changing.

But, two weeks later, Michael Jackson suffered a heart attack and Iran got pushed back into the inside pages of the newspaper. The attention of the world turned from the streets of Tehran to the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

So, is it right to say that Jacko’s death killed the revolution in Iran? I’d say it’s a bit of a stretch, both factually and conceptually. First, let’s look at the timeline. By the time Jackson’s heart gave out on him early last week, it had become clear to just about everybody that the revolution in Iran was petering out. The authorities used a combination of violence (and the threat of violence) combined with small measures of appeasement, and the street protests quickly died down. Which is to say, world attention would have soon shifted away from Iran even were Michael Jackson still with us.

But on a more conceptual level, I think we need to take a step back and evaluate the ability of social media to influence real-world events. And here, I am probably going to take a lot of flack from friends from the tech community when I say that Twitter as a world-changing tool is highly overrated.

Many friends of mine did their part to raise awareness of the Iran situation, whether changing their avatar color to green or working to keep #irranrevolution a trending topic on Twitter for as long as possible. In this way, it was similar to concerted efforts the day before Jacko died to raise awareness of Gilad Shalit on the third anniversary of his kidnapping. In our little social-media bubble, it’s easy and a bit too tempting to imagine that our little actions are helping to make the world a better place.

But unfortunately, reality has a funny way of laughing in our faces. Gilad Shalit is still held prisoner by Hamas, and Iran is still ruled by a clerical dictatorship that has proven it will beat down its populace by force if it needs to in order to survive. In other words, while Twitter can be a powerful weapon against dictatorship, guns are still a much more powerful counter-weapon.

Now, I’m not completely dumping on Twitter or Facebook or YouTube as a tool in the fight for democracy. There is definitely value to raising awareness. However, as Aung San Suu Kyi or the wretched population of Darfur will tell you, raising awareness only gets you so far. Dictatorships have a tendency to survive, since they have little compunction about using force against their own people (or, in the case of China, a combination of force, co-optation and bribery). Those that fall do so because of internal tensions or, as in the case of Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein, through external force.

The real fear about relying on generalized "awareness" efforts is that it often takes the focus away from actions that might make a real difference, such as pressuring our own leaders to take a stronger stance against the dictators.

This post (which is a lot more political than the blog usually gets) might sound overly pessimistic. But it’s not meant to. I think one of the things the Internet revolution has done well in the past month is to uncover a lot of the fissures and tensions which underlie the rule of the mullahs in Tehran. These fissures, I strongly believe, will eventually undermine their rule and bring change to Iran.

However the clerics are not dumb; the next time uprisings start, the first thing they’ll do is cut off access to Twitter.

Comments

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Rest in Peace Michael.