"The return of the Twitter Revolution?" Part II

Perhaps looking back on the rise of the "Twitter Revolution" nar­ra­tive during the Iranian protests of June 2009 can shed some light on the path for­ward, including how to approach its more subtle but per­sis­tent vari­ants such as “the Wikileaks Revolution” (Tunisia) and “Revolution 2.0” (Egypt). In Iran’s case, techno-utopianism in inter­na­tional cov­erage boomed due to for­eign jour­nal­ists being banned, cred­ited Iranian jour­nal­ists being restricted, and a young, mobile, tech-savvy, and highly edu­cated pop­u­la­tion being at the ready. Certainly, the Western audience’s recog­ni­tion of social media net­working sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as pop­ular, Western, youth-oriented, and benign also played a part. But the “Twitter rev­o­lu­tion” also caught on due to a number of nar­ra­tives that, in the Western con­scious­ness, pre-existed the uprising.

"The return of the Twitter Revolution?" Part I

In her latest speech on internet freedom, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared the internet the “town square” of the 21st cen­tury. Clinton seized on the wide­spread atten­tion for Facebook during the Egyptian rev­o­lu­tion and used the oppor­tu­nity to reit­erate internet-oriented US for­eign policy. Just days ear­lier the Egyptian people had ousted Hosni Mubarak, their dic­tator of 30 years. Cairo’s Tahrir Square had been occu­pied by pro­testers, stained with the blood of the revolution’s mar­tyrs, and gained iconic status as the center of the 21st century’s most pop­u­lous rev­o­lu­tionary move­ment. Soon after, pro­testers in Libya named the Northern Court in Benghazi “Tahrir Square Two.” If these events show us any­thing, it is that the town square of the 21st cen­tury is still, simply, the town square.