Revolutionary Tactics, Media Ecologies, and Repressive States
Adam Fish and Ramesh Srinivasan
Story 1: A small group of activists, taking advantage of a deregulated Internet, begin to publish independent, sometimes critical, views of a repressive regime. One of these activists, a leading young politician who has been the subject of a previous assassination attempt, turns to the blogosphere, where he publishes his views on the subject of independence and builds support networks with sympathetic publics. A few other colleagues, working mostly with Western-supported nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), also begin to publish independent blogs. This small group of activists know one another but have been unable to meet in person because of surveillance and policing, and they begin to use proxy servers and pseudonyms to comment on one another’s posts and to communicate with domestic and transnational Internet journalistic sites. Transnational networks connecting activists, American diplomats, and Western nongovernmental power brokers are facilitated via Internet use, and larger audiences are reached as bloggers share their reflections with foreign and regional journalists. Perhaps the most famous blogger (the previously mentioned politician) takes on a new role as the spokesperson and chief of staff for the transitional government.
Story 2: After a sham of a reelection, a major public figure within a theocratic authoritarian regime maintains power. Activists, including many students, take to the streets in protest. Some of these activists work with technologies of information sharing and coordination, including Twitter, and with domestic social networking technologies. Others work with technologies hosted in Western nations by hackers from the diaspora, many of whom have never been in the nation itself and do not speak the local language. What follows is a great deal of confusion. Western media and diplomats, at odds with the regime, visibly praise these activists and begin to ascribe democratizing values to networked new media technology. A prominent American journalist writes an influential manifesto, “The Revolution Will Be Twittered,” implying that because of the affordances within the technologies, the regime will be overthrown and replaced by a grassroots youth-driven democracy. Others challenge this prediction, noting that the regime has begun to gather intelligence about bloggers and dissidents by mining Twitter and other information feeds and that it subverts movements by pretending to be activist bloggers and ultimately uses brute force to gun down protesters on the street. These skeptics predict that the regime will persist, and perhaps grow stronger, by using new technologies for repressive ends. Ultimately, they are proved right, as the authoritarian regime maintains power.
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