The tweeting classes

The role of social media websites — such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube and Skype — in the unfolding revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, with ripples elsewhere in North Africa and West Asia, has given new impetus to the discussion of their impact on world politics. The eminent American journal Foreign Affairs recently

debated the issue, with opinion divided between those hailing them as Twitter revolutions and others dismissing the argument on the grounds that the uprisings would have occurred even in the absence of social media.
Both have a point, and my own position is somewhere between them. Of course uprisings can occur (and have occurred) without Twitter or Google, but media always has an impact on the reach and spread of word about protests, and therefore, on their intensity and sustainability. In this case, satellite television — notably Al Jazeera and its imitators — as well as SMSes, had probably more of an impact on the unrest across the North African Arab countries than Facebook or Twitter. But whatever the degree of social media’s impact, the fact of impact is undeniable. As American commentator Peter Osnos puts it, “It is pointless to dispute that digital advances have played an enormous role in recent years in the speed of communications, and, in some situations, Egypt and Tunisia certainly among them, these technologies have played a meaningful part in the rallying of crowds and in garnering international recognition. A global generation of mainly young people will continue to refine and use the capacity to reach out to each other. Turmoil reflects the conditions of the era in which it occurs, and social media are very much a factor of our age”.
This is why China has paid particular attention to censoring the Internet, employing 40,000 cyber-police to monitor blogging sites, shutting down any sites that get out of line and banning Twitter. When a US-based Chinese-language site called for a Jasmine Revolution in China, the Great Firewall of China blocked all searches for the word “Jasmine”, even if you were merely looking for jasmine tea! Clearly the authoritarians in Beijing are quite aware of the enormous potential of social media to disrupt even their politics.
The reach of social media has been facilitated by rapid technological developments. In a recent study, my good friend Nik Gowing of the BBC highlights how in a moment of major, unexpected crisis, the institutions of global power face a new, acute vulnerability of both their influence and effectiveness, thanks to new media technologies. As Mr Gowing points out, it was a 41-second video taken on a mobile phone by a New York investment banker that dramatically swung public perceptions of police handling of the G20 protests in which a protester died. Similarly, when US-led Nato (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) warplanes bombed villages in Afghanistan’s Azizabad area, US forces initially claimed only seven people died. When mobile phone video emerged, US commanders had to re-investigate and revise the death toll up to 55. As Mr Gowing argues, “Such examples confirm how new information technologies and dynamics are together driving a wave of democratisation and accountability”.
Increasingly, a cheap camera or mobile phone that is easily portable in a pocket can undermine the credibility of a government despite the latter’s massive human and financial resources. The new lightweight technologies have created what Mr Gowing calls “non-professional information doers”: hundreds of millions of amateurs with their own electronic eyes, who can now be found anywhere. As many as four billion people worldwide — including 84 per cent of Americans and today over 50 per cent of Indians — now use mobile phones. They all get messages out. And they do so more rapidly than the official mechanisms can. Their strength is that they enable people to issue and disseminate material, including raw footage and compellingly authentic images, before the mainstream media, or for that matter governments, can do so. Inevitably, this means they shed light where officialdom would prefer darkness, as China learned when video footage of a shootout involving Uighur separatists in 2008 made it to the world media despite Beijing’s denials. In the old days, governments assumed they could command the information high ground in a crisis. That is simply no longer true.
Of course, there can be a more positive use of social media in a crisis, as we saw with the triple catastrophe of the tsunami, earthquake and nuclear accident in Japan. Within days of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, 64 per cent of blog links, 32 per cent of Twitter news links and the top 20 YouTube videos carried news and information about the crisis in Japan. Nine days after the earthquake, two urgent tweets for help in evacuating patients from a hospital in the affected area, addressed to US ambassador John Roos, led him to activate the US military and the Japanese Self-Defence Forces, who transported the patients to safety. A year earlier, before Mr Roos opened his Twitter account, getting the US ambassador’s attention in such a direct and immediate way would not have been possible. This time, troops were mobilised by Twitter.
Japan’s disaster has spotlighted the critical role that social media websites are increasingly playing in responses to crises around the world. They may have been designed essentially for online socialising and just having fun, but such sites have empowered people caught up in crises. In one week after the earthquake, people viewed more than 40 million disaster-related items. Volunteers using social media sites have played pivotal roles in responses to various types of global crises, from the BP Horizon oil spill to the unrest in West Asia to the earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, New Zealand and Japan. There were 70 million tweets on the Haiti earthquake alone, and social media proved indispensable in providing information to draw crisis response maps, find missing people and dispense assistance.
On any given day, people are sending 140 million Twitter messages, nearly a billion tweets every week. Facebook has more users around the world than the population of any single country, ours included. There are two ways to look at this. One is that it’s symptomatic of information overload. The other — my own view — is that it represents a huge audience of information-generators and consumers, which people in positions of public responsibility ignore at their peril.

Shashi Tharoor is a member of Parliament from Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram constituency