Like King Cnut the Great attempting to command the tide, politicians who try to stop social media risk looking impotent
Earlier this year I visited Kibera in south-central Nairobi; one of Africa's largest urban slums, literally built on rubbish and housing around a hundred thousand of the world's poorest people. Walking in with Médecins Sans Frontières we saw some fairly shocking sights: the smell, streams of open sewerage, kids playing in rubbish heaps, the packs of feral D-list celebrities crying over everything.
This we expected, but more surprising were the forests of TV aerials and the mobile phone ads plastered on every other wall. We even came across a cyber-caf̩ Рan old laptop in a tin shack. The people of Kibera scrape and scratch a living, living fifty to a shack, a family in each room, surviving day-to-day; but even so information is one of their highest priorities. Mobile phones are so common in the slum that local aid agencies like MSF can track their patients with them. Residents share handsets, each using their own SIM card.
It's not really that surprising though. We are one of the most social animals on the planet, and for our species the ability to communicate is an instinctive need, up there with food, water, and shelter. We feel it like we feel hunger; an urge to reach out and find out about our world, to connect with wider society.
And we understand the power of information. Mobile phones and the internet played a key role in helping people in Egypt, Tunisia and other nations sustain the revolutions of the Arab Spring, just as Facebook played a key role in popular protests against FARC in Colombia.
Of course revolution doesn't happen on Twitter or Facebook, but these technologies open our societies and connect people, subverting state censorship and propaganda to an extent unprecedented in history. If a policeman beats a student in Tunisia, a kid with a phone can capture an image and beam it around the world in seconds.
In 2011, Pandora's box is fully open and it cannot be shut. Attempts to stop this flow of information are futile, and self-defeating. When Libyan protest leader Omar Mahmoudi needed an alternative to Twitter and Facebook he simply turned to dating websites. Australia's Herald Sun newspaper reported that:
"He acted as if he was looking for a wife under the profile name "Where is Miriam?" and sent coded love letters to spur people to revolution. Since men cannot talk to other men on the site, revolutionaries posed as women to make contact with Mahmoudi, taking on names such as "Sweet Butterfly," "Opener of the Mountain," "Girl of the Desert" and "Melody of Torture.""
He ended up with more than 170,000 admirers on the site. In 1993 the activist John Gilmore said, "The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Recent research (tentatively) suggests that even if you can shut down the whole internet, the tactic is liable to backfire, with people moving to traditional communication methods or taking to the streets instead.
Sadly, there are politicians who don't seem to have reached the 21st century yet. On the third day of the London riots Boris Johnson's technology advisor, Mike Butcher, tweeted, in a somewhat ironic use of a tweet, "It is unbelievable that @UK_BlackBerry is not shutting down BBM right now." (BBM being Blackberry's secure messaging service which, like other social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, has been accused of helping the rioters organize their carnage.)
More recently, Nadine Dorries (who else) waded in to the debate. The MP, who does not actually use Twitter, suggested that:
"The overwhelming use of social media during the riots was seriously harmful. ... it undoubtedly helped to spread the riots across a wider area."
And went on to claim:
"Twitter and Facebook were used to spread false rumours, to disrupt vital life saving services such as the Fire and Ambulance services and to direct criminals and looters to the areas and sites where the police had been ordered to stand back and not to take action."
No evidence was provided to back up these allegations, of course.
The idea of killing Twitter is completely daft, for at least two reasons. The first I've already covered – people are instinctively driven to communicate, and 21st century technology and human ingenuity means that they will continue to talk to each other regardless of the barriers hapless politicians - many of whom are frighteningly ignorant of the services they would like to disrupt - try to put in their way. Like Cnut the Great attempting to command the tide, politicians who try to stop social media risk looking impotent.
The second is that it ignores the good – the vast amount of good – that social networks were responsible for during the crisis.
In the midst of the rioting, Twitter was used to coordinate support for the elderly and disabled, and people from around the world sent comforting messages to family, friends and complete strangers in the affected areas. Afterwards, groups like #riotcleanup came from nowhere, leveraging the power of the internet to recruit gangs of volunteers who reclaimed the streets with brooms and bin bags, clearing the carnage from the night before.
The tweets pinging across cyberspace in any give second are a snapshot, a detailed photograph of the state of our society at one particular moment in time. Like any accurate picture of ourselves there are parts we like and then there are things that perhaps we'd rather not see. Social networks capture the good in us, but they also capture some of the bad.
But if we shut down our communities because of a few bad people, whether they're city streets or virtual hangouts, if we lose the love, the cleanup crews and the Wombles, then we will all be much, much poorer.
And whatever the reasons for these riots, whatever the politics, one thing should be obvious to everyone, just as it was obvious to Norwegians in the wake of the tragic events that took place there recently. When our democracy is faced by fear and violence and extremism, we should meet them with more democracy, and with more communication, not less.
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Another version of this piece was recorded for The Pod Delusion Episode 97 (I'll also be talking at their live event in London next week - details soon).
Many thanks to @sarahxgilbert on Twitter for pointing out a mistake regarding King Cnut - an earlier draft called him 'ignorant', but actually the whole point of his actions was to demonstrate the folly of imagining kings could control nature. Hopefully this edit is a bit more appropriate.
@mjrobbins | layscience@googlemail.com
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2011/sep/06/1
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