The Internet, conventional wisdom goes, is the modern dictator's great blind spot. It is the shadowy realm where dissent lurks unnoticed, where an Egyptian Facebook page sets into motion an uprising that unseats the thirty-year rule of Hosni Mubarak. On this basis, governments like China police the Internet rigorously, and in Iran, anxious authorities talk of a 'halal' Internet that would cut Iranians off entirely. But what if disrupting communications actually worked the opposite way, speeding up dissent and revolutionary action? That is the provocative thesis put forth by Navid Hassanpour, a political science graduate student at Yale University, who has studied the Egyptian uprising and outlined his findings in a new paper titled “Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest.”
Hassanpour looked at President Mubarak's decision to shut down the Internet and mobile phone network on Jan. 28, as protests raged in Tahrir Square, and concluded that nothing, for Mubarak at least, could have been more devastating. He shows how the disruption worked to disperse the protests, producing a nation-wide movement far harder to control than the massive crowd in Tahrir. Hassanpour builds on these findings to argue that full connectivity, contrary to widely held beliefs, works to stall revolutionary action. Being fully connected, he writes, discourages face-to-face communication; too much news about protests makes the risk of joining in so clear that people are discouraged from participating. And when people watch footage of the uprising on YouTube or follow skirmishes on Twitter, they mistakenly feel themselves to be part of the action, losing any drive to go out and discover the unknown for themselves.
1. Your thesis about media disruption -- that connectivity blackouts actually encourage rather than hinder revolutionary actions -- is wonderfully counter-intuitive. Can you tell us what sparked your sense that this might be the case?
I was thinking about this a year before the Egyptian uprising. The idea is that having more links among people doesn’t necessarily make them more likely to act. If you’re a radical leader bent on mobilizing people, the links among risk-averse citizens don’t necessarily help you, they can accentuate hesitation and risk-aversion. Once you have a disruption in those linkages, radicals become more effective in terms of link making and communication; they become central. You have, the opinion leader in the neighbourhood, the imam in the mosque, and the organizer on the streets moving to the center, as opposed to traditional media outlets.
There is also this intriguing anecdote from the Iranian revolution, in the latter part of 1978. Iranian newspapers staffers were on strike for two months at the height of the unrest in Fall 1979.
Michel Foucault was in Iran in the fall of 1979 reporting for Corriere della Sera an Italian newspaper. He had noticed the importance of the disruption. He writes about how the news industry decided to go on strike during the government of Sharif Emami, unwilling to put up with the military’s harsh censorship tactics. So between 14 Aban and 16 Day 1357, the country’s main newspapers, Keyhan and Ettela’at, were not being published. In the words of Foucault, the journalists who refused to publish, “They knew very well they were making way for an entire network of information, a network that fifteen years of obscurantism had allowed people to perfect -- that of telephones, cassette tapes, mosques and sermons, and of law offices and intellectual circles.”
I talked to some of the people who were on the streets in Iran during those days, and they said and they clearly recalled the blackout, how there were no newspapers being published, and how TV and radio broadcast was rather limited, going from extensive broadcast toward and entire collapse of the traditional media system. That generated an environment of rumours, what Foucault calls counter information, things that are not necessarily real but are very important for mobilization. There was a well known cassette recording of the Shah talking to his military leaders, complaining about indecision; it ended up being fake, but people really believed it at the time. Foucault also mentions an interesting simile, about Charles de Gaulle winning the campaign against the Algerians, with a fake radio announcement which managed to stage a sense of power for his side, “It is said De Gaulle was able to resist the Algiers putsch thanks to transistors, if the Shah falls it will be due largely to the cassette tape.”
2. When the government cuts off mobile communication and the internet, people are plunged into darkness. This darkness changes their behavior, it seems, and their imaginations. Can you tell us about what happens to people when they are cut off?
There are two dimensions to the process. One side is the communicative . When people are tweeting, texting, or calling each other, it becomes easier for a threat from the government to diffuse in the society. At same time, means of communication, for examples text messages, and public expressions of dissatisfaction give governments a way to gauge the situation. For example in the Iranian case having newspapers up helped government to see what was happening on the ground, journalists who worked at these dailies were mostly dissidents, they wrote about the real society.
The second part of the process is psychological. We ran a survey in Cairo after the effect to gauge the consequences of the media disruption in early 2011. I could not go to Egypt on an Iranian passport though and had Egyptian research assistants implement the survey. In the survey we asked people, ‘how did you feel when you woke up and couldn’t use your cell phone and access the Internet.’ There were three words repeated again and again in their comments: anger, anxiety, and fear. Especially anxiety, I was very surprised, many told us they were very anxious, they thought they should do something --talk to somebody, find out where their significant others were, or what their siblings or children were doing.
This really amplified the presence in public places, people had to find out about the situation in ways that necessitated face to face communication. Thinking of anxiety as a motivation somewhat puzzles me. We usually think that conviction forces people to action. Maybe that’s not entirely the case, maybe we are ignoring another dimension of action. Sometimes it’s anxiety and the lack of direct, pre-determined plans of action that drives cascades of collective action. Modernism often invokes conviction for national, ethnic, or religious mobilization. There are reasons to believe maybe that’s not the whole story.
3. Then how do you distinguish chaos from collecitve action for a specific cuase? And what role does social media play in directing actions towards a social or political objective versus confusing people about their goals? Do you think social media played a different role in Egypt and Tunisia than in London during the 2011 riots?
I don’t think the nature of the processes were very different. Collective action has to do with chaos and unified acts of contention originate from cascades of imitation and persuasion. The point is that these events are often not fully planned, this is the side I would like to emphasize, because it is not mentioned as much as the other aspect of mobilization. The Facebook page ``We are all Khaled Said” is important in the early stages, but once the cascade starts, it follows different dynamics. For example here we are discussing media-disruption and what ensues afterwards . People have their own wants and inclinations, and improvise in the course of events. Those individual improvisations are key once the movement is set into motion.
4. So basically this anxiety that arises from a communications blackout is actually very productive, in terms of getting people out onto the streets?
Under normal conditions, you wouldn’t engage in abnormal actions in the manner you would under a sense of heightened anxiety. For example, the arson in Cinema Rex in Abadan in 1978 made people extremely anxious, the anxiety in the air shows when you read the contemporaneous literature. The reaction of people to the unrest was never the same after that event, it put people at edge.
The events of 18 Tir were also a sort of answer to this same situation. When the reformist newspaper Salaam was closed on 16 Tir 1378, I was a freshman in college, and I clearly remember it was very startling for everyone, happening at a time when many read several newspapers every day. The atmosphere became very excitable. Suddenly the most important outlet of a major political faction in the country was simply discontinued, and many thought at time that this is going to induce major reactions. This is another example where major unrest occurs in response to the discontinuation of a periodical. The student protests and the response from the pressure groups were shaped around this event.
The final edition of Salaam was published on 16 of Tir, and the disruption was publicized and talked about on the 17th. The protests originated from that shock. After a day the idea started to mobilize people from both sides.
5. It seems like the nature of the media disruption is very important. There seems to be a difference between when the state suddenly and completely cuts off communications, as what Mubarak did in Egypt, and more temporary, limited disruption as we saw in Iran in 2009. Mubarak turned the switch, and within days Egypt was engulfed in protest. But Iran in 2009 wasn’t plunged into that darkness. The reality is that the Green movement didn’t spread across Iran, whole major cities like Tabriz saw no significant protests. Can the state’s handling of the communications help explain the different outcomes?
We don’t know exactly why things didn’t happen differently, there are many different parameters. But if somebody would have been stupid enough to turn off the whole thing, you would have seen much more dispersed and probably more diverse and widespread unrest across the country. The control apparatus in Iran acts more smartly, it doesn’t really function as in Egypt. If you look into what happened after the unrest in June 2009, the disruption was approximately few hours, and then a slowdown of the Internet for a few months.
This kind of internet throttling regularly happens in places like Singapore, and China, authorities often delay text messages and slow down the internet when they see fit, to somehow prevent any quick spread of unrest. This approach makes communications dysfunctional but only to a certain extent; it’s very slow, not very useful, but it’s still there. That’s the smart way of censorship, which is probably being honed in Iran. It’s always targeted, local, and mostly based on throttling. Authoritarianism in Iran is smarter than Egypt.
6. So essentially the new media, the internet and social networks don't function that differently from traditional media like newspapers, radio and television. People can express themselves and mobilise themselves through them and the govnerment can gauge people's moods and plans for immediate or long-term action.
Not exactly. the dynamics and nature of interaction in new media is significantly different from the unidirectional flow of information in traditional media. However, it is absolutely true that authorities have also found the most amazing tool for gauging public sentiment and fine-grained information on the dynamics of opinion through social media. This is a realm that is—at least for now—up for grabs, and traditional opinion leaders—including the governments--and the newly shaped public spheres are heatedly contesting the new dominion of influence that has presented itself in the form of social media. It is an ongoing rivalry. We do not know the final result of this contestation.
7. How important is people’s changing perceptions of risk, when cut off from information? You write about how media blackouts make it hard for people to measure the risk of participation, and in that way actually encourage going out into the street. The iconic images of Neda Agha Soltan being shot on a Tehran street, for example, went viral, and was in the West viewed as part of the power of social media. But in lots of Iranian living rooms it had parents trying to forbid their children from going outside.
This is an example of how these issues work both ways. Sometimes the imagery of suppression channels people’s grievances, but it can also deter those who might engage in action otherwise. The moral of story is that the glasshouse world we live in has removed a lot of these distances that are fundamental to political power, and we are facing new processes. These iconic images cause heightened anxiety and they can also become rallying points. Political power is constituted through making people believe. Once they stop believing and go after their own calculations, they are out of that trap.
8. You write about the media as playing a normalizing role, a tool that both democratic and authoritarian states use to exert their control and pacify people. But can you explain how that works in the context of a diverse media environment? People in Iran, for example, have access to a wide variety of news websites conveying representing various views, from Baztab all the way to BBC Persian and other outlets who aren’t reporting the state’s line. How can that diverse media still extend an authoritarian state’s control?
Media play a normalizing role, but that does not mean states intentionally enforce all parts of that role. The idea is that normalcy is founded on predictability, and people are more predictable when they are involved in the public medium. Media channels either Baztab or BBC Persian tell you more about the state of affairs, on either side of the spectrum; what we don’t see and can surprize us is not in the news yet.
9. You mentioned also being inspired by a paper that looked at cold war era Germany, and the effect of West German television on East Germans who were able to watch West German TV. The authors were examining some long held assumptions that Western media would somehow counter East German state propaganda, and give these East Germans a window onto free life in the West. But they found that exposure to the Western-friendly television actually increased support for the Community regime. Can you explain that to us?
What the authors found was that East Germans in areas with access to West German TV, had lower rates of application for exit visas to the West- My hunch is that when you see the outside on the screen you are less likely to actively seek an exit from the situation. You see the coveted outside already in the virtual world. When that connection does not exist, imagination and resolve drive action.
10. Does the research on the East Germans who weren't swayed at all by West German television tell us anything about Iran? Do Western governments and liberal sometimes over emphasize the potential of media like VOA Persian and BBC Persian to change people's minds?
Well, I think there existed an unconditional fascination for everything Western in the Eastern Bloc towards the end of the Cold War—it still exists in many countries in Eastern Europe, that sentiment definitely drove their movements for gaining freedom of expression and finding access to the outside world. However, it did not give them intellectual creativity of the kind they craved and searched for. I believe the most interesting cultural productions that can come out of more traditional societies, including Iran, are made at the intersection of the West and the East, they are the products of a synthesis. That synthesis is not necessarily about changing people’s minds.
11. Don’t some of your conclusions ultimately pose some ethical dilemmas for the dissident’s perspective? If we accept that media blackouts favor radicals, because people are more likely to act and go out onto the street when they have less information about the risks involved, it almost feels like seeking change involves needing people to act blindly.
Taking risky action is partly believing in something that is unthinkable at first and then making it possible because enough people believe in it. It basically becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, initially there is ample risk. If there are enough people joining it ceases to be a risk. The level of risk is dependent on exactly how many people make that decision to join.
12. Do you happen to how Mubarak officials are viewing their decision to cut off communications, in retrospect? Do they see it as a catastrophic mistake?
In the survey we ran we asked people in Cairo if they found [the blackout] useful to the mobilization or not. Majority of people said it was useful to the movement. However the majority of those who had used the state media in order to find out about the protests told us they thought the disruption had a negative effect. On the other hand, people who were used decentralized ways of getting news, from friends, acquaintances, or the internet, said it had a positive effect. This makes sense, I assume those who shut down the networks were enthusiastic users of the state narrative. it also shows the emergence of a different media culture, how younger people think about collecting news is different from than their parents. Thirty years ago, it was all about television, radio and newspapers; right now we absorb news in all kinds of ways.
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