Social Media Revolution?

The beginnings of revolutions always seem to have something wonderfully democratic about them. Not democratic in the terms of the political scientist – democratic in the ecstatic sense of the unenlightened American patriot. In the Egyptian revolution, we are being told things are a little bit different.

Commentators have immediately decided that, as their analysis is now being dished out in bite-size chunks of discardable micro-news, the whole world runs that way and therefore every noun should be pre-fixed with the word ‘Twitter’. Either that or Facebook. If and when Twitter and Facebook do merge, it seems entirely likely that the whole Guardian staff will explode onto their Macbooks.

The problem is not that older people do not understand New Media; rather it’s that they misinterpret it, and they grip onto it – with the zealousness of a convert – as a safe digital rock in a rapidly-changing world.

If you cast your minds back 6 or 7 years ago, you may remember a time when every teenager in the world was being told that they were using ‘SMS’ to send messages like ‘LOL RU 1Ting 2 go 2 prk L8R’, never mind the fact that messages like this are damn near unreadable, never mind that they require a laborious changing of case, never mind that the entire claim was an absolute fabrication. That’s the way we used media, because that’s how the media told us we used media.

Today, just as surely as then, culture columnists  will be telling us that we update our Facebook statuses every 6 minutes and converse only in egocentric 140-character outbursts. We do. And nothing as insignificant as the truth is going to get in the way of that fact.

And this brings me to where we started: Egypt. If you read The Guardian the other day, you would have been reassured that this revolution (not like that boring Tunisian one last week) is the real Facebook revolution. You see, there was a Facebook group and loads of people joined and also there was an uprising. Facebook caused a revolution!

No. It didn’t. If it worked like that Jeremy Clarkson would be Prime Minister, petrol prices would be at rock-bottom, and breast cancer would have been defeated by the combined medicinal power of everyone changing their profile picture to a cartoon.

Joining a Facebook group is a zero-commitment decision, it means nothing, and it takes nothing to create one. What matters is not saying ‘I wish there was a ‘dis-like’ button’ but going outside, taking to the streets and showing this displeasure. And this is precisely what the Egyptian people have done. It is also why bandying about ideas about the future political involvement of Wael Ghonim (the founder of the Facebook group) is dangerous; as surely as revolutions begin with a democratic feeling, they end with a bitter power struggle.

In all of this, Facebook, Twitter – MySpace, if you’re feeling retro – was an instrument but it wasn’t a cause. To argue that it was, is to denigrate the true cause of this revolution. Don’t put these brave people’s efforts into the same category as Farmville and a video of a cat being startled.