Written during the Egyptian and Tunisian protests of January 2011, this piece rejected the framing the argument had settled into. Debating whether something was a Twitter, a Facebook or a WikiLeaks revolution was a dead end; the useful question was what digital networked technologies do to protest and to the movement of information.
Mathew Ingram had put the point plainly: the real weapon is networked communication itself, which in earlier revolutions ran on the fax, the pamphlet or the mobile phone and now ran on SMS, Twitter and Facebook. The counter-argument here was that social media has attributes the fax did not — it lets individuals identify one another, assemble and share information with no central coordination or leadership.
The concept doing the work was danah boyd’s networked publics, set out in Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: simultaneously the space constructed through networked technologies and the imagined collective that emerges from the intersection of people, technology and practice. Such publics, boyd wrote, are not merely publics wired together but publics transformed by networked media, whose properties regulate their structure and reshape the interactions inside them. Zeynep Tufekci’s formulation was the operational one: social media lower the barriers to collective action by providing channels of organisation intermeshed with mundane social interaction, and therefore harder to censor.
The conclusion was deliberately unresolved. Neither denying nor evangelising about the impact of these platforms was useful; what mattered was the specific role networked publics played as the technologies met long-standing frustration, and that was a question for research rather than for assertion.