Democracy in Cyberspace: What Information Technology Can and Cannot Do
Author(s): Ian Bremmer
Source: Foreign Affairs, Vol. 89, No. 6, The World Ahead (November/December 2010), pp.
86-92
Published by: Council on Foreign Relations
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Democracy in Cyberspace
What Information Technology Can and Cannot Do
Ian Bremmer
"Information technology has demolished citizens tools to build alternative sources
time and distance/' Walter Wriston, the of power. The democratization of com
former ceo of what is now Citigroup wrote munications, the theory goes, will bring
about the democratization of the world.
in 1997. "Instead of validating Orwell's
There seems to be plenty of evidence
to
support these ideas. In the Philippines
[it] enables the citizen to watch Big Brother.
And so the virus of freedom, for which
in 2001, protesters sent text messages to
vision of Big Brother watching the citizen,
there is no antidote, is spread by electronic organize the demonstrations that forced
networks to the four corners of the earth." President Joseph Estrada from office. In
the lead-up to the 2004 presidential elec
Former Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill
Clinton, and George W. Bush have artic tion in Ukraine, supporters of Viktor
ulated a similar vision, and with similarly Yushchenko, then the leader of the oppo
grandiose rhetoric. All have argued that sition, used text messaging to organize
the long-term survival of authoritarian the massive protests that became the
Orange Revolution. In Lebanon in 2005,
states depends on their ability to control
activists coordinated via e-mail and text
the flow of ideas and information within
and across their borders. As advances in messaging to bring one million demon
communications technology?cellular tele strators into the streets to demand that
phones, text messaging, the Internet, social the Syrian government end nearly three
networking?allow an ever-widening
decades of military presence in Lebanon
by withdrawing its 14,000 troops. (Syria
complied a month later, under consider
share ideas and aspirations, technology
will break down barriers between peoples able international pressure.) Over the
and nations. In this view, the spread of the past few years, in Colombia, Myanmar
"freedom virus" makes it harder and cost (also known as Burma), and Zimbabwe,
circle of people to easily and inexpensively
lier for autocrats to isolate their people fromdemonstrators have used cell phones
the rest of the world and gives ordinary
and Facebook to coordinate protests and
Ian Bremmer is President of the Eurasia Group and the author of The End
of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between Statesand Corporations?
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Democracy in Cyberspace
transmit photographs and videos of gov Americans. Similarly, Americans believe
ernment crackdowns. The flood of words that the millions of people around the
and images circulated by protesters follow world who use the Internet, an American
ing Irans bitterly disputed 2009 presidential invention, will eventually adopt Ameri
election?quickly dubbed the "Twitter
can political beliefs, much like many of
revolution '?seemed to reinforce the view those who wear American jeans, watch
that Tehran has more to fear from "citizen American movies, and dance to American
media' than from the U.S. ships patrolling music have. Champions of the Internet s
the Persian Gulf.
power to promote pluralism and human
But a closer look at these examples
rights point to bloggers in China, Russia,
suggests a more complicated reality.
and the Arab world who are calling for
Only in democracies?the Philippines,
Ukraine, Lebanon, and Colombia?
democracy and the rule of law for their
countries, sometimes in English.
But of the hundreds of millions who
did these communications weapons
accomplish an immediate objective. In blog in their own languages?there are
Myanmar, Zimbabwe, and Iran, they more than 75 million in China alone?the
managed to embarrass the government
but not to remove it from power. As
vast majority have other priorities. Many
more of them focus on pop culture rather
Wriston acknowledged, the information than on political philosophy, on pocket
revolution is a long-term process, cyber book issues rather than political power, and
space is a complex place, and technological
advances are no substitute for human
wisdom. Innovations in modern commu
nications may help erode authoritarian
power over time. But for the moment,
their impact on international politics is
not so easy to predict.
There are many reasons why the opti
mistic view of the relationship among
communications, information, and democ
racy has taken root in the United States.
on national pride rather than cosmopolitan
pretensions. In other words, the tools of
modern communications satisfy as wide a
range of ambitions and appetites as their
twentieth-century ancestors did, and many
of these ambitions and appetites do not
have anything to do with democracy.
NET NEUTRALITY
A careful look at the current impact of
modern communications on the political
First, these communications tools embody development of authoritarian states should
give pause to those who hail these tech
twenty-first-century innovation, and
Americans have long believed in the power nologies as instruments of democratization.
of invention to promote peace and create Techno-optimists appear to ignore the
prosperity. And with good reason. Admirers fact that these tools are value neutral; there
of Reagan argue that the United States'
is nothing inherently pro-democratic about
ability to invest in strategic missile defense them. To use them is to exercise a form of
sent the Soviet leadership into a crisis of
freedom, but it is not necessarily a freedom
confidence from which it never recovered. that promotes the freedom of others.
The light bulb, the automobile, and the
In enabling choice, the introduction of
airplane have changed the world, bringing
the Internet into an authoritarian country
greater personal autonomy to many
shares something fundamental with the
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Ian Bremmer
attacks and mob justice. In China, the
advent of elections. Some have argued
that promoting elections in one country Internet has given voice to wounded
in the Middle East will generate demand national pride, anti-Western and anti
for elections elsewhere there. "A free Iraq is Japanese resentment over injuries both
going to help inspire others to demand what real and imagined, and hostility toward
I believe is a universal right of men and
Tibetans, Muslim Uighurs, and other
women," Bush said in July 2006; elections minority groups. It has also become a
in Iraq would prompt the citizens of Iraq's kind of public square for improvised
violence. In an article for The New York
neighbors to ask why Iraqis were now
free to choose their leaders whereas they Times Magazine earlier this year, Tom
were not. Similarly, some have argued that Downey described the "human-flesh
the freedom that comes with the Internet search" phenomenon in China, "a form
will inevitably democratize China. Once of online vigilante justice in which Inter
Chinese people read about the freedoms of net users hunt down and punish people
others, the thinking goes, they will want who have attracted their wrath." The
the same for themselves. The tools of
targets of these searches, a kind of "crowd
modern communications will reveal to sourced detective work," as Downey put
Chinese citizens the political freedoms they
it, can be corrupt officiais or enemies of
do not yet have and provide the means to the state, or simply people who have
demand them.
made other people angry.
But the limited history of elections in
These problems are hardly unique to
China.
In Russia, skinheads have filmed
the Middle East shows that people do not
murderous
attacks on dark-skinned im
always vote for pluralism. Sometimes, they
vote for security or absolutism, sometimes
to express outrage or defend local interests.
The same pattern holds true for the Internet
and other forms of modern communica
tions. These technologies provide access
migrants from the Caucasus and Central
Asia and posted the footage online. Also
in Russia?and in the United States and
Europe?hate groups and militants of
various kinds use the Internet to recruit
to information of all kinds, information
new members and disseminate propa
that entertains the full range of human
ganda. Of course, beyond all this fear
and loathing, many more people around
the world use the Internet as a global
shopping mall and a source of entertain
ment. The Internet makes it easier for
appetites?from titillation to rationaliza
tion, from hope to anger. They provide the
user with an audience but do not determine
what he will say. They are a megaphone,
and have a multiplier effect, but they serve
users with political interests to find and
both those who want to speed up the cross
border flow of information and those who
engage with others who believe what
want to divert or manipulate it.
evidence that it also opens their minds
they believe, but there is little reliable
Cyberspace can be a very dark place.
In You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier
argues that the anonymity provided by
the Internet can promote a "culture of
passions?consumerism and conspiracy
theories, resentment and fanaticism?
sadism," feeding an appetite for drive-by
but it promotes calls for democracy only
to ideas and information that challenge
their worldviews. The medium fuels many
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Democracy in Cyberspace
where there is already a demand for
democracy. If technology has helped
citizens pressure authoritarian govern
ments in several countries, it is not because
the technology created a demand for
change. That demand must come from
public anger at authoritarianism itself.
their political power. In June, the Chinese
government released its first formal state
ment on the rights and responsibilities of
Internet users. The document "guarantee[d]
the citizens' freedom of speech on the
Internet as well as the publics right to
know, to participate, to be heard, and
to oversee [the government] in accordance
STATESIDE
with the law." But it also stipulated that
Citizens are not the only ones active in
"within Chinese territory, the Internet is
cyberspace. The state is online, too, pro
under the jurisdiction of Chinese sover
moting its own ideas and limiting what
eignty." That caveat legitimates Chinas
an average user can see and do. Innovations
"great firewall," a system of filters and
in communications technology provide
re-routers, detours and dead ends designed
keep Chinese Internet users on the state
people with new sources of information to
and
new opportunities to share ideas, but they
approved online path.
also empower governments to manipulate
The Chinese leadership also uses more
the conversation and to monitor whatlow-tech means to safeguard its interests
online. The average Chinese Web surfer
people are saying.
The collapse of Soviet communism cannot
a
be sure that every idea or opinion
generation ago taught authoritarian lead
he encounters in cyberspace genuinely
reflects the views of its author. The gov
ers around the world that they could not
simply mandate lasting economic growth
ernment has created the 50 Cent Party,
army of online commentators that it
and that they would have to embrace an
capi
talism if they hoped to create the jobs and
pays for each blog entry or message-board
post promoting the Chinese Communist
the higher standards of living that would
ensure their long-term political survival.
Party s line on sensitive subjects. This is a
But to embrace capitalism is to allow for
simple, inexpensive way for governments
dangerous new freedoms. And so in order
to disseminate and disguise official views.
to generate strong growth while maintain
Authoritarian states do not use technology
ing political control, some autocrats have
simply to block the free flow of unwelcome
ideas. They also use it to promote ideas
turned to state capitalism, a system that
of
helps them dominate market activity their own.
through the use of national oil companies,
NONALIGNED MOVEMENT
other state-owned enterprises, privately
owned but politically loyal national cham
The techno-optimists who hope that mod
pions, state-run banks, and sovereign ern communications tools will democratize
wealth funds.
Following precisely the same logic,
authoritarian governments are now trying
to ensure that the increasingly free flow of
ideas and information through cyberspace
fuels their economies without threatening
authoritarian states are also hoping that
they will help align the interests of non
democracies with those of democracies.
But the opposite is happening. Efforts
by police states to control or co-opt these
tools are inevitably creating commercial
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Ian Bremmer
conflicts that then create political conflicts the citizens of the two countries closer
between governments.
together, conflicts over the flow of infor
In January, Google publicly complained mation through cyberspace will further
that private Gmail accounts had been
complicate the already troubled U.S.
breached in attacks originating in China?Chinese relationship.
Signs of strife are already visible. When
attacks that Chinese officials appeared to
tolerate or even to have launched them Google first went public with its complaints
selves. In protest, Google announced that about cyberattacks and censorship, Beijing
it would no longer censor the results of looked past the company, which it sees as
users' searches in mainland China, which a high-tech arm of the U.S. government,
and addressed its response directly to
Washington. A Chinese Communist Party
Beijing refused to back down, and Google tabloid ran an editorial under the headline
"The World Does Not Welcome the White
automatically redirected searches by
Chinese users to the uncensored Hong
Houses Google"; it argued, "Whenever
the U.S. government demands it, Google
Kong version of the site. But much to the
can easily become a convenient tool for
relief of mainland users, mostly students
and researchers who prefer Google's
promoting the U.S. government s political
capabilities to its main domestic rival, will and values abroad." In response, U.S.
Baidu, Chinese officials eventually an
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged
nounced the renewal of Google's operating companies such as Google not to cooperate
license. (It is possible that they backtracked with "politically motivated censorship,"
because they believed that they could
further emphasizing the difference, not
control Google or use it to monitor the
the convergence, of political values in the
United States and China.
online activities of political dissidents.)
As Chinese technology companies
Revealing similar fears about the future
begin to compete on a par with Western of its political control, the United Arab
Emirates and Saudi Arabia took action
ones and the Chinese government uses
legal and financial means to more actively earlier this year against Research in Motion
promote domestic firms that see censorship (rim), the Canadian company that makes
it had reluctantly agreed to do when it
entered the Chinese market in 2006.
as a routine cost of doing business, there
the BlackBerry, for equipping its devices
will be less demand for Google's products with encryption technology that authorities
in China. In August 2010, the state-run cannot decode. Arguing that terrorists and
Xinhua News Agency and China Mobile, spies could use BlackBerries to communi
cate within the uae without fear of being
the country's largest cell-phone carrier,
announced plans to jointly build a state detected, Emirati officials announced in
owned search-engine and media company. August that they would soon suspend
In response to these developments, U.S. BlackBerry service unless rim provided
state officials with some means of moni
technology companies will undoubtedly
turn to U.S. lawmakers for help in creating toring BlackBerry messaging. Within two
and maintaining a level commercial playing days, Saudi Arabia announced a similar
shutdown, although Riyadh and rim have
and Chinese political values and bringing since reached a compromise that requires
field in China. Far from aligning American
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Democracy in Cyberspace
rim to install a relay server on Saudi
halt the proliferation of weapons of mod
territory, which allows Saudi officials to
ern communications, but they can try to
monitor messages sent from and within the monitor and manipulate them for their own
country. The uae will probably also make purposes. That struggle will continue as well,
a deal with rim: there are half a million
limiting the ability of new technologies to
BlackBerry users in the uae (about ten
empower the political opposition within
percent of the population), and the country these countries and creating more conflicts
wants to remain the Arab world s primary
commercial and tourist hub. Yet far from
promoting Western values in non-Western
police states, the BlackBerry has sparked a
over political values between democratic
and authoritarian states.
FEEDBACK LOOPS
new round of debate over the willingness ofThe Internet may have changed the world,
Western technology companies to protect but now the world is changing the Internet.
their market shares by making concessions For 30 years, new communications tech
that help authoritarian governments spy
on their citizens.
nologies have driven globalization, the
defining trend of the times. The companies
In fairness to these governments, the
that created these products made long
worlds leading democracies are no less
term plans based on the wants and needs
concerned about potential terrorist threats of consumers, not governments. Their
posed by unmonitored messaging. The profits rose as they connected billions
Indian government has also threatened to
of customers with one another; borders
ban BlackBerries unless rim gives it access
became increasingly less important.
But now, the pace of technological
to certain data, and counterterrorism
officials in the United States and Europe are change and the threat of terrorism are forc
considering the option as well. Via efforts
ing policymakers to expand their definitions
to amend the Electronic Communications of national security and to rethink their
Privacy Act, the Obama administration definitions of "critical infrastructure."
As a result, governments are turning to
gain access to "electronic communication high-tech communications firms to help
has already taken steps to help the fbi
transactional records"?recipients' addresses, shore up emerging security vulnerabilities,
logs of users' online activities, browser
and high-tech communications firms
histories?without a court order if inves have begun to think more like defense
tigators suspect terrorism or espionage. contractors?companies whose success
Politicians and technology companies such depends on secrecy, exclusivity, political
as Google and rim will be fighting these contacts, and security clearances.
battles for years to come.
As a result, political borders, which
Of course, authoritarian governments, the rise of information technology once
unlike democracies, also worry that indi seemed set to dissolve, are taking on a new
importance: if greater openness creates
new opportunities, it also creates new
challenge their political legitimacy. China, worries. Unable to match U.S. defense
Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Saudi Ara spending, China and Russia have become
bia, and other authoritarian states cannot adept at information warfare. The Pentagon
viduals who are neither terrorists nor spies
will use new communications tools to
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Ian Bremmer
reported last August that China continues
to develop its ability to steal U.S. military
secrets electronically and to deny its adver
saries "access to information essential to
intranets closely monitored by various
governments. The Internet is not about
to disappear, but the prediction that a
single Internet could accommodate both
the West and the evolving demands of
conduct combat operations." In 2007, a
authoritarian
states was never realistic.
massive cyberattack launched from inside
Russia damaged digital infrastructure in American and European users will access
neighboring Estonia. The United States' the same Internet as before, but the Chi
vulnerabilities range from its nuclear power nese government has already made clear
plants and electrical grids to the information its intention to declare sovereignty over
systems of government agencies and major an Internet of its own. Other authoritar
U.S. companies. Despite their political and ian states have every incentive to follow
commercial rivalries, the United States, its lead.
China, Russia, India, and many other states
also share a vulnerability to cyberattacks,
and they have pledged to work together
to build a joint cybersecurity strategy. But
when it comes to espionage, governments
can never fully trust one another. And of
course the Obama administration does not
There are far too many variables at work
to predict with confidence the full, long
term impact of modern tools of commu
nications on the political development
of authoritarian states. But it seems safe to
expect that their effects will vary as widely
as the motives of the people and the states
want to share technologies that would make that use them.?
it easier for security officials in Beijing or
Moscow to track the online activities of
political dissidents.
Other problems will exacerbate inter
national tensions. Technology firms in
the United States and Europe, mindful
of Google's recent troubles in China, will
increasingly turn to their governments
for help with their own security needs.
As cyberthreats become ever more sophis
ticated, these companies will collaborate
more actively with national security agen
cies on developing new technologies.
This will pull more technology companies
into the orbit of the military-industrial
complex. That, in turn, will make them
even more suspect to authoritarian regimes
and likelier targets for hackers and spies
of all kinds. Borders are about to become
much more important.
The result will be a world that has
not one Internet but a set of interlinked
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Small Change | The New Yorker
Annals of Innovation October 4, 2010 Issue
Small Change
Why the revolution will not be tweeted.
By Malcolm Gladwell
t four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students
sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro,
North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile
or so away.
A
“I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress.
“We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.
The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six
people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar
was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table,
approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!”
she said. They didn’t move. Around ve-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked.
The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had
gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow
with A. & T. College,” one of the students said.
By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most
from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties.
The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On
Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined
in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters
numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus
of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred.
People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate ags. Someone
threw a recracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the
wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted.**
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By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty- ve miles
away, and Durham, fty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State
Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on
Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On
Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and
Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By
the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I
asked every student I met what the rst day of the sitdowns had been like on his
campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was
always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand
students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more
radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the
South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or
Twitter.
he world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social
media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like,
the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been
upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to
their concerns. When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the
spring of 2009 to protest against their country’s Communist government, the action
was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators
had been brought together. A few months after that, when student protests rocked
Tehran, the State Department took the unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend
scheduled maintenance of its Web site, because the Administration didn’t want such a
critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations. “Without
Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and con dent to stand up
for freedom and democracy,” Mark Pfei e, a former national-security adviser, later
wrote, calling for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Where activists
were once de ned by their causes, they are now de ned by their tools. Facebook
warriors go online to push for change. “You are the best hope for us all,” James K.
Glassman, a former senior State Department official, told a crowd of cyber activists at a
recent conference sponsored by Facebook, A. T. & T., Howcast, MTV, and Google.
Sites like Facebook, Glassman said, “give the U.S. a signi cant competitive advantage
over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was ‘eating our lunch on the
T
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Small Change | The New Yorker
Internet.’ That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now
about interactivity and conversation.”
These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch
on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for
us all? As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at
Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that
Twitter had scant internal signi cance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter
accounts exist. Nor does it seem to have been a revolution, not least because the protests
—as Anne Applebaum suggested in the Washington Post—may well have been a bit of
stagecraft cooked up by the government. (In a country paranoid about Romanian
revanchism, the protesters ew a Romanian ag over the Parliament building.) In the
Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all
in the West. “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz
Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter
Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who
championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the
situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people
on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with
tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people
trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than
Farsi.”
Some of this grandiosity is to be expected. Innovators tend to be solipsists. They often
want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model. As the historian
Robert Darnton has written, “The marvels of communication technology in the present
have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication
has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television
and the Internet.” But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm
for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social
upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.
VIDEO FROM THE N
YORKER
How Fortnite Captured Teen-age Minds
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Small Change | The New Yorker
reensboro in the early nineteen-sixties was the kind of place where racial
insubordination was routinely met with violence. The four students who rst sat
down at the lunch counter were terri ed. “I suppose if anyone had come up behind me
and yelled ‘Boo,’ I think I would have fallen off my seat,” one of them said later. On the
rst day, the store manager noti ed the police chief, who immediately sent two officers
to the store. On the third day, a gang of white toughs showed up at the lunch counter
and stood ostentatiously behind the protesters, ominously muttering epithets such as
“burr-head nigger.” A local Ku Klux Klan leader made an appearance. On Saturday, as
tensions grew, someone called in a bomb threat, and the entire store had to be
evacuated.
G
The dangers were even clearer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964,
another of the sentinel campaigns of the civil-rights movement. The Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee recruited hundreds of Northern, largely white
unpaid volunteers to run Freedom Schools, register black voters, and raise civil-rights
awareness in the Deep South. “No one should go anywhere alone, but certainly not in
an automobile and certainly not at night,” they were instructed. Within days of arriving
in Mississippi, three volunteers—Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew
Goodman—were kidnapped and killed, and, during the rest of the summer, thirtyhttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell
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seven black churches were set on re and dozens of safe houses were bombed;
volunteers were beaten, shot at, arrested, and trailed by pickup trucks full of armed men.
A quarter of those in the program dropped out. Activism that challenges the status quo
—that attacks deeply rooted problems—is not for the faint of heart.
What makes people capable of this kind of activism? The Stanford sociologist Doug
McAdam compared the Freedom Summer dropouts with the participants who stayed,
and discovered that the key difference wasn’t, as might be expected, ideological fervor.
“All of the applicants—participants and withdrawals alike—emerge as highly
committed, articulate supporters of the goals and values of the summer program,” he
concluded. What mattered more was an applicant’s degree of personal connection to
the civil-rights movement. All the volunteers were required to provide a list of personal
contacts—the people they wanted kept apprised of their activities—and participants
were far more likely than dropouts to have close friends who were also going to
Mississippi. High-risk activism, McAdam concluded, is a “strong-tie” phenomenon.
This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian
terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at
least one good friend already in the organization. The same is true of the men who
joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Even revolutionary actions that look
spontaneous, like the demonstrations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin
Wall, are, at core, strong-tie phenomena. The opposition movement in East Germany
consisted of several hundred groups, each with roughly a dozen members. Each group
was in limited contact with the others: at the time, only thirteen per cent of East
Germans even had a phone. All they knew was that on Monday nights, outside St.
Nicholas Church in downtown Leipzig, people gathered to voice their anger at the
state. And the primary determinant of who showed up was “critical friends”—the more
friends you had who were critical of the regime the more likely you were to join the
protest.
So one crucial fact about the four freshmen at the Greensboro lunch counter—David
Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil—was their relationship
with one another. McNeil was a roommate of Blair’s in A. & T.’s Scott Hall dormitory.
Richmond roomed with McCain one oor up, and Blair, Richmond, and McCain had
all gone to Dudley High School. The four would smuggle beer into the dorm and talk
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late into the night in Blair and McNeil’s room. They would all have remembered the
murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott that same year, and the
showdown in Little Rock in 1957. It was McNeil who brought up the idea of a sit-in at
Woolworth’s. They’d discussed it for nearly a month. Then McNeil came into the dorm
room and asked the others if they were ready. There was a pause, and McCain said, in a
way that works only with people who talk late into the night with one another, “Are you
guys chicken or not?” Ezell Blair worked up the courage the next day to ask for a cup of
coffee because he was anked by his roommate and two good friends from high school.
he kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms
of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being
followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently
managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise
be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on
Facebook, as you never could in real life.
T
This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the
sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are
our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power
of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terri c at the
diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers
and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead
to high-risk activism.
In a new book called “The Dragon y Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to
Use Social Media to Drive Social Change,” the business consultant Andy Smith and
the Stanford Business School professor Jennifer Aaker tell the story of Sameer Bhatia,
a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came down with acute myelogenous leukemia.
It’s a perfect illustration of social media’s strengths. Bhatia needed a bone-marrow
transplant, but he could not nd a match among his relatives and friends. The odds
were best with a donor of his ethnicity, and there were few South Asians in the national
bone-marrow database. So Bhatia’s business partner sent out an e-mail explaining
Bhatia’s plight to more than four hundred of their acquaintances, who forwarded the email to their personal contacts; Facebook pages and YouTube videos were devoted to
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the Help Sameer campaign. Eventually, nearly twenty- ve thousand new people were
registered in the bone-marrow database, and Bhatia found a match.
But how did the campaign get so many people to sign up? By not asking too much of
them. That’s the only way you can get someone you don’t really know to do something
on your behalf. You can get thousands of people to sign up for a donor registry, because
doing so is pretty easy. You have to send in a cheek swab and—in the highly unlikely
event that your bone marrow is a good match for someone in need—spend a few hours
at the hospital. Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it doesn’t involve
nancial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by armed
men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms
and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social
acknowledgment and praise.
The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe
that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor
registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated
lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at
increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are
effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that
participation requires. The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339
members, who have donated an average of nine cents apiece. The next biggest Darfur
charity on Facebook has 22,073 members, who have donated an average of thirty- ve
cents. Help Save Darfur has 2,797 members, who have given, on average, fteen cents.
A spokesperson for the Save Darfur Coalition told Newsweek, “We wouldn’t necessarily
gauge someone’s value to the advocacy movement based on what they’ve given. This is a
powerful mechanism to engage this critical population. They inform their community,
attend events, volunteer. It’s not something you can measure by looking at a ledger.” In
other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real
sacri ce but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not
motivated enough to make a real sacri ce. We are a long way from the lunch counters
of Greensboro.
T
he students who joined the sit-ins across the South during the winter of 1960
described the movement as a “fever.” But the civil-rights movement was more like
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a military campaign than like a contagion. In the late nineteen- fties, there had been
sixteen sit-ins in various cities throughout the South, fteen of which were formally
organized by civil-rights organizations like the N.A.A.C.P. and
. Possible
locations for activism were scouted. Plans were drawn up. Movement activists held
training sessions and retreats for would-be protesters. The Greensboro Four were a
product of this groundwork: all were members of the N.A.A.C.P. Youth Council. They
had close ties with the head of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. They had been briefed on
the earlier wave of sit-ins in Durham, and had been part of a series of movement
meetings in activist churches. When the sit-in movement spread from Greensboro
throughout the South, it did not spread indiscriminately. It spread to those cities which
had preëxisting “movement centers”—a core of dedicated and trained activists ready to
turn the “fever” into action.
The civil-rights movement was high-risk activism. It was also, crucially, strategic
activism: a challenge to the establishment mounted with precision and discipline. The
N.A.A.C.P. was a centralized organization, run from New York according to highly
formalized operating procedures. At the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
Martin Luther King, Jr., was the unquestioned authority. At the center of the
movement was the black church, which had, as Aldon D. Morris points out in his
superb 1984 study, “The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement,” a carefully
demarcated division of labor, with various standing committees and disciplined groups.
“Each group was task-oriented and coordinated its activities through authority
structures,” Morris writes. “Individuals were held accountable for their assigned duties,
and important con icts were resolved by the minister, who usually exercised ultimate
authority over the congregation.”
This is the second crucial distinction between traditional activism and its online
variant: social media are not about this kind of hierarchical organization. Facebook and
the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and
character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks
aren’t controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus,
and the ties that bind people to the group are loose.
This structure makes networks enormously resilient and adaptable in low-risk
situations. Wikipedia is a perfect example. It doesn’t have an editor, sitting in New
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York, who directs and corrects each entry. The effort of putting together each entry is
self-organized. If every entry in Wikipedia were to be erased tomorrow, the content
would swiftly be restored, because that’s what happens when a network of thousands
spontaneously devote their time to a task.
There are many things, though, that networks don’t do well. Car companies sensibly use
a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars. No one
believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a
sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because networks don’t have a centralized
leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching
consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to
con ict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or
philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?
The Palestine Liberation Organization originated as a network, and the internationalrelations scholars Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Calvert Jones argue in a recent essay
in International Security that this is why it ran into such trouble as it grew: “Structural
features typical of networks—the absence of central authority, the unchecked autonomy
of rival groups, and the inability to arbitrate quarrels through formal mechanisms—
made the P.L.O. excessively vulnerable to outside manipulation and internal strife.”
In Germany in the nineteen-seventies, they go on, “the far more uni ed and successful
left-wing terrorists tended to organize hierarchically, with professional management
and clear divisions of labor. They were concentrated geographically in universities,
where they could establish central leadership, trust, and camaraderie through regular,
face-to-face meetings.” They seldom betrayed their comrades in arms during police
interrogations. Their counterparts on the right were organized as decentralized
networks, and had no such discipline. These groups were regularly in ltrated, and
members, once arrested, easily gave up their comrades. Similarly, Al Qaeda was most
dangerous when it was a uni ed hierarchy. Now that it has dissipated into a network, it
has proved far less effective.
The drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network isn’t interested in systemic
change—if it just wants to frighten or humiliate or make a splash—or if it doesn’t need
to think strategically. But if you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment
you have to be a hierarchy. The Montgomery bus boycott required the participation of
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tens of thousands of people who depended on public transit to get to and from work
each day. It lasted a year. In order to persuade those people to stay true to the cause, the
boycott’s organizers tasked each local black church with maintaining morale, and put
together a free alternative private carpool service, with forty-eight dispatchers and
forty-two pickup stations. Even the White Citizens Council, King later said, conceded
that the carpool system moved with “military precision.” By the time King came to
Birmingham, for the climactic showdown with Police Commissioner Eugene (Bull)
Connor, he had a budget of a million dollars, and a hundred full-time staff members on
the ground, divided into operational units. The operation itself was divided into steadily
escalating phases, mapped out in advance. Support was maintained through consecutive
mass meetings rotating from church to church around the city.
Boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations—which were the weapons of choice
for the civil-rights movement—are high-risk strategies. They leave little room for
con ict and error. The moment even one protester deviates from the script and
responds to provocation, the moral legitimacy of the entire protest is compromised.
Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that King’s task in
Birmingham would have been made in nitely easier had he been able to communicate
with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a
Birmingham jail. But networks are messy: think of the ceaseless pattern of correction
and revision, amendment and debate, that characterizes Wikipedia. If Martin Luther
King, Jr., had tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been
steamrollered by the white power structure. And of what use would a digital
communication tool be in a town where ninety-eight per cent of the black community
could be reached every Sunday morning at church? The things that King needed in
Birmingham—discipline and strategy—were things that online social media cannot
provide.
he bible of the social-media movement is Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody.”
Shirky, who teaches at New York University, sets out to demonstrate the
organizing power of the Internet, and he begins with the story of Evan, who worked on
Wall Street, and his friend Ivanna, after she left her smart phone, an expensive
Sidekick, on the back seat of a New York City taxicab. The telephone company
transferred the data on Ivanna’s lost phone to a new phone, whereupon she and Evan
T
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discovered that the Sidekick was now in the hands of a teen-ager from Queens, who
was using it to take photographs of herself and her friends.
When Evan e-mailed the teen-ager, Sasha, asking for the phone back, she replied that
his “white ass” didn’t deserve to have it back. Miffed, he set up a Web page with her
picture and a description of what had happened. He forwarded the link to his friends,
and they forwarded it to their friends. Someone found the MySpace page of Sasha’s
boyfriend, and a link to it found its way onto the site. Someone found her address
online and took a video of her home while driving by; Evan posted the video on the
site. The story was picked up by the news lter Digg. Evan was now up to ten e-mails a
minute. He created a bulletin board for his readers to share their stories, but it crashed
under the weight of responses. Evan and Ivanna went to the police, but the police led
the report under “lost,” rather than “stolen,” which essentially closed the case. “By this
point millions of readers were watching,” Shirky writes, “and dozens of mainstream
news outlets had covered the story.” Bowing to the pressure, the N.Y.P.D. reclassi ed
the item as “stolen.” Sasha was arrested, and Evan got his friend’s Sidekick back.
Shirky’s argument is that this is the kind of thing that could never have happened in
the pre-Internet age—and he’s right. Evan could never have tracked down Sasha. The
story of the Sidekick would never have been publicized. An army of people could never
have been assembled to wage this ght. The police wouldn’t have bowed to the pressure
of a lone person who had misplaced something as trivial as a cell phone. The story, to
Shirky, illustrates “the ease and speed with which a group can be mobilized for the right
kind of cause” in the Internet age.
Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of
organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information
over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our
energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward
those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to
express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments
of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They
are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world
needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think
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that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you
pause.
Shirky ends the story of the lost Sidekick by asking, portentously, “What happens
next?”—no doubt imagining future waves of digital protesters. But he has already
answered the question. What happens next is more of the same. A networked, weak-tie
world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls.
Viva la revolución.
♦
* Clari cation: This piece’s account of the Greensboro sit-in comes from Miles Wolff ’s
“Lunch at the Five and Ten” (1970).
Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer for the The New Yorker since 1996. Read more »
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Jia Ni
Basic composition
Prof. Troiano
Paper 2 RD
10.15.2018
Benefits of The Internet
Wa
With the unprecedented development of the society, the living standard of all the
people around world has been increased a lot. In the recent year, scientist have invented
advanced technology to make people’s life more convenient. Individuals have more different
way of enjoying the entertainments, social network, medical treatment, education and so on. The
development of different types of technology has brought various benefits to human’s lives,
especially the emerging of the internet and social network. Ian Bremmer and Malcolm Gladwell
both indicated this topic in their article. In the article, What Information Technology Can and
Cannot do, Bremmer indicated that the advanced communication technology break down
barriers between peoples and nations. The spread of “freedom virus”(86) which is the multiple
choices of living life gives ordinary citizens tools to build a alternative sources of power. In
Gladwell’s article, Small Change, the new tools of social media have reinvented social activism,
which helps the society get improved and become more internationalized. Even though
communication technology lack of physical presence which will leads to negative influences on
society, pluralism will be eventually achieved and the global interaction will bring economic
prosperity and better world
The sense of responsibility is hard to present on the cyber communication. The
communication
technology such as Facebook, instergram have created lots of arugement and
comflict online. People do not need physical present therefore when they are expressing their
opinions, they would not think about the the influences of their languages. Gladwell mentioned
in his article, “We don’t serve Negroes here” (1). It was the case happen in 1960, four college
students tried to get coffee in the lunch counter. Even in the daily life, some people still have the
narrow minded and discrimination. When people can speak out online without any present, they
would probably say something much more unrespectful and do not need to take any
responsibility. The people who do not fit into the mainstream which is the general social norm,
are very easy to get insulted. The cyber violence kills thousand of people every year and the case
will not reported to the police, and no one will be responsible for that. Someone would say, “you
should not care about what people say to you online”, however, the cyber violence can spread
like a virus into a person’s daily life. The information pass by really fast, even a really short
message can be spread to all over the world. People do not have the awareness that words are
danger than a gun. Bremmer also mentioned, “As cyberthreats become ever more sophisticated,
these companies will collaborate more actively with national security agencies on developing
new technology”(92). Internationally, for example, Google, the firm in United States were
getting suspect to authoritarian regimes, like hackers and spies. Some counties tend to use spies
and hackers to gain the information and induction the words online. Especially in some
developing country, people do not have enough ability to discriminate the real and fake
information, which will lead them blindly believe in some negative information about their own
country. And they will blindly judged and bring more despondent information into the public,
which also bring chaos for the government. Bremmer and Gladwell both indicated their concern
of the communication technology. Those people who act not respectfully and attempt to bring
chaos to the society will gradually decrease, because the security of the technology are getting
improved and people are becoming more and more understanding of each other.
Communication technology bloom the pluralism to the society. Before the internet borned
in the world, people communicate with each other by letter, phone. It all takes time to get in
touch with someone. Now people only need to press some buttons on the screen and then can
exchange the information immediately. Bremmer wrote, “these technologies provide access to
information fo all kinds, information that entertains the full range of human appetites —from
titillation to rationalization, from hope to anger ”(88). Hundred years ago, there was no chance
for a regular person has chance to communicate with a person who from another country. Right
now people from all over the world have same access to talk to each other. People start to have
more connections and understanding between each other. For example, Instagram is one of the
most popular social media around the world. People can post and share their person life and
interesting thing there. A photographer can share a picture took in Norway and people who live
in United States can have the same enjoyable when they are looking at the beautiful view they
never seen before. And they have full access to see and know how a person lives who from a
total different country and cultures. They can share their person view and what they think about
of a topic. The information can get exchange so fast that people can see different kind of
restaurant that are always popular around the world, like Chinese food, Thai food, American
food. The nature of pluralism is people can accept any different kinds of culture and get along
with each other. Like Gladwell said, “Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your
acquaintances”(6). On the social media, it is like a information melt pot. People can learn and
obtain the information directly, gaining knowledge and enhance their horizon efficiently. The
social media has the full strength to give people’s power to become more understandable and
knowledgeable. Eventually, people can have better understanding of those people who are living
in a different environment, therefore, there’s less and less bias and discrimination in this society.
And people will start to notice the way of their speaking online, they will gradually have more
compassion and empathy to stand in different perspective to understand other people. There will
be less social conflict and violence and the government can save money to invest money to more
important things, like strengthen the nation strength.
Domestic and international Economy is always the hottest topic among people. Based
on the development of the Internet and related technology, there’s more and more international
agreements to help each countries have more interaction and resources exchange. The market
exploring and the labor recruitment can be achieved based on the developed Internet information
system—the big data era. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation”(7),
Gladwell mentioned that in his article. The development of the social media has brought extra
benefits on economy, such as the big company Google and Youtube. These two company gather
the diverse insight and outsight together to share them all to the people around the world,
therefore especially the industry of entertainment, such as movies, music and advertising.
Bremmer also mentioned the same perspective in his article, “The Internet may have changed the
world, but now the world is changing the Internet”(91). It is true that the companies around the
world have created more products make long-term plans based on the wants and needs of
consumers. The borders became increasingly less important nowadays, because the international
cooperation can not to stop by the prosperous of Internet. The advanced communication
technology bring a lot convenience of international trade. There is more negotiate between
different counties in the world, and there will be more agreement that benefits both part of the
counties.
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