“What we’re seeing right now on our TV screens is no less significant than the images of 1989 in Berlin.”
Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History, speaking on current events in North Africa (Newsnight, Feb 24, 2011).
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These are Crazily Fascinating times. We’re playing witness to some real Melon-twisting moments.
“The Digital Revolution” is ours to work through and figure out. Could go in so many directions; it’ll probably end of going in all of them, all at once.
And it is a “Revolution” (I know, you weren’t necessarily challenging otherwise), but a revolution that’s only just revving up.
Web 2.0? Well, we’re post that, but you still get a sense the dawn light hasn’t yet melted away.
Current events in Egypt, now Libya, the long shadow of implication and the dominoes that may subsequently fall across the Middle East: is this “The Digital Revolution”, now starting to find its wider stride?
There’s been much talk the last few weeks of how up-rising and likely regime change in North Africa has been “made possible” by Social Media.
When agency planners talk about “how media can be used to facilitate people’s lives”, seldom is the “facilitation” in question one of revolution and potential shift in a nation’s political ideology. That’s typically a lot to ask of any media vehicle.
But the question has become...
Are we seeing an evolution of the Internet medium, and an eye-widening sense of its true potential?
Is this Web 3.0?
Not a tech-upgrade, a smarter algorithm, slicker fiber optic or better Bluetooth beam.
Instead, Web 3.0, as in an outcome, the demonstrated consequences of being able to access information? Specifically, the demonstration of how an oppressed majority living under dictatorship and state-controlled media can “socially network” themselves into mobilisation and revolt?
“Social Media”, by means of The Internet, is becoming a geopolitical change-agent; the means to mass-mobilisation of a citizenry, even under a dictatorship. In terms of Cause & Effect, just how much bigger can the Internet get?
Very simply, because on one level I think it is very simple, we’re witnessing an evolution of the Internet in 3 very quick steps.
From Search, to Social, to Social Mobilisation.
First came “Search”.
From a primordial superhighway of disaggregated information and cyber chaos, there quickly came structure and Internet Order. Google and Bing and so many like them kindly provided a torch and shone the way.
Search was for simple, utility-based tasks. Book a restaurant, find a good plumber, look-up porn.
The Internet, for the Late Majority, was the Yellow Pages, only where you typed into a search box and didn’t have to turn any pages. (Not that the Yellow Pages had ever been that great for porn.)
Slight aside, put part illustration: have you seen Yellow Pages’ “re-imagining” of its 1983 classic, J.R. Hartley?
Yellow Pages (2011), Day V. Lately
Skipping 28 years down the time tunnel to a very different world, for cross-reference and pure nostalgia…
Yellow Pages (1983), J.R. Hartley
Back to the Digital Now.
From an Internet that was Search-based, then came Social. The Internet found its mojo (Mark Zuckerberg will happily testify), became “social outreach”, and on one kind of slightly weird and oxymoronic level, we saw the Death of Loneliness. For a permanently “On” society, Staying In provided all the fix of Going Out.
Ian Nathan (writing in Empire magazine, March 2011) hailed Facebook as the act of a “monomaniacal genius, smelling oil in the digital landscape; a brilliant exploitation of the internet generations bipolar status as voyeur/exhibitionist”.
We’re now witnessing the rise of the voyeur/exhibitionist/revolutionary. One simple step on, it stands to reason that a social network can be rallied, can be mobilised into a collective force, for collective action.
What’s presently taking place in Egypt and Libya is no more than a Flash Mob with a Considerably Higher Purpose; a Flash Mob with geopolitical impact, capable of making history.
Living in a Digital Age has meant reading your morning commute in hi-res on your new iPad, but that’s a very Western take on digitally-afforded benefit, as defined by how many screens you need to more happily pass through your everyday. In societies under State lock-and-key, the Digital Revolution is providing a very different kind of liberation.
When we speculate on the consequence of Man converging with Technology, the alarmists and story-tellers in us frequently see that convergence as a grizzly collision. So many juicy and rather literal Doomsday motifs: mice with human ears, bug-eyed scientists playing God, cybernetic organisms… that enjoy killing people. We can get very Mary Shelley about the whole thing.
Man/Machine Mash-Up, l to r: Cyberman, Patrick Stewart "in Borg", JCVD, Arnold.
But here’s the other thing. There’s an upside scenario to Man’s handshake with Technology, one that’s a good deal more utopian in potential. For those who live without the freedom to exercise voice and vote, "technology" may give them means.
Historian Simon Schama recently commented, “You can’t make power out of Twitter”, but it appears you can use it to take power away.
SP.