Technology and Political Change

Henry Farrell is skeptical of the “twitter revolution” narrative:

As someone who has thought a reasonable amount over the past few years about the relationship between information technology and political action, I am somewhat skeptical of these claims (I also don’t know what the word ‘protagonal’ means, but that’s a whole different issue). First – while Twitter (like SMS) can be used to organize protests on the fly, I haven’t yet seen any evidence that it made a substantial difference to organizing efforts in Iran. This is not to say that it didn’t – but we need good evidence (which will require Persian language expertise, obviously) of correlation between specific bursts of Twitter communication and forms of social protest etc before we can really be sure that there was an effect. What we can say is that previous instances of ‘color revolution’ relied much less on technology than you would have thought from reading Western media. New technologies tend to be less reliable and more easily disrupted than traditional forms of organizing – while they are surely becoming more important over time, I think it is fair to discount some of the more breathlessly enthusiastic reporting until the actual evidence comes in.

Another issue is getting causal direction right. I frequently use my personal Twitter feed to coordinate plans with friends. Anyone interested in seeing such-and-such a movie? But it’s not as if the existence of Twitter caused me to start seeing movies with friends. Thanks to Twitter I now never use one-to-many SMS in order to organize movie going, and I use email for that purpose somewhat less than I once did. And thanks to email and Twitter and SMS, I never arrange movie plans over the phone, which is what I used to do. But, again, what’s going on here is the same old thing happening in a new medium, not the new medium actually allowing new things to happen. Insofar as Twitter becomes a more popular communications tool, popular protests will increasingly have a Twitter component. But that’s not the same as saying that Twitter is actually driving the political events.