Ryan C Briggs

A month ago, I watched an excellent speech by Clay Shirky on the power of the internet to transform social networks. His speech is now a book, Here Comes Everybody.

I recently stumbled upon a good example of how drastically new technologies can help to change society. The time is 1989, the location is Soviet Eastern Europe, and the quote is from Post War, by Tony Judt:

One novel factor [of the 1989 revolutions] was the role of the communications media. Hungarians, Czechs, and Germans in particular were able to see their own revolution on the television news each evening. For the population of Prague, repeated television re-runs of the events of November 17th constituted a sort of instant political education, drumming home a double message: ‘they are powerless’ and ‘we did it’. As a consequence, Communism’s crucial asset, its control over and monopoly of information, was lost. The fear of being alone—the impossibility of knowing whether your own feelings were shared by others—was dissipated for ever. […] This was not a new pattern, of course—throughout the twentieth century radio stations and post offices were the first objectives or revolutionary crowds, from Dublin to Barcelona. But television is fast.

While the media did not create the revolution, it did enable expressions of discontent, stemming from economic hardship and political repression, to be shared with a massive audience in close to real-time. That allowed these revolutions to spread much faster and more effectively than others such 1848, 1919, or, a more minor case, 1968.

The internet is in many ways the next step in this sharing of information, as Shirky demonstrates in his speech (watch it). I think the internet has great transformative potential, but its power is often overplayed.

The internet is a method, not a cause. In 1989, the revolutionaries were upset about everything but televisions (which they often had)—that is what made the power of TV coverage so great. A lot of people talk about China’s “Great Firewall” and seem to think that if only it didn’t exist and Chinese citizens had more access to information then Chinese society could be swayed by similar movements. I think they are largely wrong.

The drive toward rebellion in Eastern Europe was economic and political, and TVs just happened to be there. I think a similar drive to rebel is lacking in China, and that may be one reason why the “Great Firewall” can be effective, even when it is “crude, slapdash, and surprisingly easy to breach.”