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rfmcdonaldDo communications disruptions in potentially revolutionary situations accelerate change? 80 Beats' Veronique Greenwood linked to and summarized a recent study, Yale graduate student Navid Hassanpour's paper "Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest: Evidence from Mubarak’s Natural Experiment", draws from the experience of--among others--the recent Egyptian revolution to say that is the case.
If Hassanpour's theory is correct, this has interesting repercussions, not least of which are implications for authoritarian governments. The Chinese government may tolerate the human flesh search engine--briefly, the mass mobilization of Chinese Internet users to identify, and punish, ill-doers--because crackdowns on the specific networks and users involved would risk redirecting the energies of China's hundreds of millions of Internet users against the People's Republic. Authoritarian governments that have enabled the Internet are stuck with it, in other words. Any manipulation of online social networks is going to have to be subtle indeed.
Using the theories of Mark Granovetter, a social scientist who pioneered the study of social networks in the 70s, Hassanpour took a close look at how a sudden dearth of information would affect individual actions. Granovetter helped popularize the “threshold” model of group dynamics, which holds that what neighbors are doing and how many of them are doing it determine the point at which an individual decides to get involved.
When information about protests is freely available, individuals can be passive while remaining informed. Additionally, the government can promulgate both reassurances that protests will soon be resolved and threats that military force will be used against protestors, thus maintaining the status quo and deterring involvement.
But when people are suddenly plunged into radio silence, they almost by default must take action: they have to leave the house to check up on family members and learn more about events. If they hadn’t heard of the protests before, they will have now, and they will have to take to the streets as well. And the government loses its ability to spin the situation through Internet channels. In Cairo, as more and more people who’d stayed inside began to leave their homes, the process accelerated, and protests exploded all over the city and the rest of the nation.
“The disruption of cellphone coverage and Internet on the 28th exacerbated the unrest in at least three major ways,” Hassanpour summarizes. “It implicated many apolitical citizens unaware of or uninterested in the unrest; it forced more face-to-face communication, i.e., more physical presence in streets; and finally it effectively decentralized the rebellion on the 28th through new hybrid communication tactics, producing a quagmire much harder to control and repress than one massive gathering in Tahrir.”
If Hassanpour's theory is correct, this has interesting repercussions, not least of which are implications for authoritarian governments. The Chinese government may tolerate the human flesh search engine--briefly, the mass mobilization of Chinese Internet users to identify, and punish, ill-doers--because crackdowns on the specific networks and users involved would risk redirecting the energies of China's hundreds of millions of Internet users against the People's Republic. Authoritarian governments that have enabled the Internet are stuck with it, in other words. Any manipulation of online social networks is going to have to be subtle indeed.
