Mahmood's Den

“If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet,” Wael Ghonim said following Egyptian ex-President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation on Feb. 11. One of Egypt’s tech-savvy revolutionaries, Ghonim had employed his business and design skills to construct a Facebook protest community and later emerged as a leader of the Egyptian revolution. Thus shines Ghonim in global liberal circles as the prince of “cyber-utopianism,” a view wildly popular in Western circles about the sweeping impact the Internet can have over the social mobilization against “authoritarian” regimes.

It seems like there is little to discuss, let alone try to refute about the impact the Internet’s social media tools have had in the Tunisian, Egyptian and ongoing protests in other Arab countries. The discussion on this has worn itself out so much that some have gone so far as to proclaim, “The Net revolution debate is dead.” However, continuing uprisings ranging from those in Syria to Bahrain present us with new insight into how cyber-utopianism may both be presenting an overly optimistic view of how societies can organize against authoritarian regimes, as well as concealing some of the ironies about the very champions of cyber-utopianism. Thus, the Net revolution debate is far from dead, it merely needs wait for the dust to settle in the Middle East and possibly change course from its wrongheaded “optimistic” direction as we collect more insight.

Looking at events unfolding across the Middle Eastern uprising landscape, it seems that the process of dictatorial regime overthrow in the Middle East has been halted. In countries like Libya, Syria or Bahrain, autocrats seem determined not to surrender to popular pressure but to cling to power by resorting to violence. To make a case as to why a regime hasn’t been overthrown yet, it could be argued that these countries so completely repress the Internet that the citizens cannot circumvent it and organize through social media. The reality, however, is that in Syria, the ruling party supported the digital tools that have proven disastrous for authoritarian regimes elsewhere. Soon after the initial Feb. 4 demonstration the Syrian government legalized Facebook, which had been banned since 2007, according to local Internet users.

One of the few scholars courageously fighting cyber-utopianism, Evgeny Morozov, the author of “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom,” argues that, “The end result is that the Syrian police will be able to monitor its opponents much better, and they would be able to trace their locations, they would be able to arrest them and intimidate them.”

Another case in point, Bahrain also seems to validate Morozov’s claims. On Wednesday, Bahraini authorities arrested respected blogger Mahmood al-Yousif due to his opposition to the current government. Bahrain is not overtly restrictive in its Internet policy, but just like many authoritarian governments, it plays the game of blocking online access when public protests begin to swell though still using the web for its own monitoring purposes only too well.

The ironies that arise from the champions of cyber-utopianism are another significant case in point, making it even more necessary to approach cyber-utopianism with reservations, which is a case that deserves more attention and will receive a separate article devoted to it.

“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding,” Marshall McLuhan argued in his seminal work, “The Gutenberg Galaxy.” As the story goes with the Middle Eastern uprisings and the role of the Internet, enthusiasm for technology should not surpass understanding of it. The best insight seems for all of us to watch what will unfold across the Middle East and in Turkey, to make a healthy and not “overly optimistic” case for the role of the Internet in the democratization of these countries.

*Nazlı Çakıroğlu, MSc London School of Economics and political science, is a communications and corporate social responsibility expert.