Why you can’t save the world with a simple click of a computer mouse

IF the number of Facebook friends were any way of assessing popularity — which they’re not — Micheál Martin would be the leader of Fianna Fáil by close of play today.

Actually, my hunch is he will be the leader anyway. He has played his cards deftly in recent times, unlike his rivals. Still, 4,000 “friends” is pretty impressive.

One or two of his rivals who haven’t gone down the Facebook route might counter that, having lost touch with citizens in the real world, only desperate politicians go online in search of “netizens”, clearly, but mistakenly, seeing the internet as a place where they can fix the disconnectedness they’re experiencing in the offline, political world.

Perhaps, or perhaps that’s just an excuse for ignoring the fact that, for many people, the internet is their main means of communication and not having a social media presence makes politicians look inaccessible, opaque. The transformative political power of social media has, however, come in for more serious and sustained criticism in a new book by a Belarussian-born US writer, Evgeny Morozov. Once an advocate of the Google Doctrine — the belief that unlimited flows of information would spread democracy and undermine tyranny — Morozov has become a sceptic.

Morozov believes that the social and political potential of the internet has been misrepresented, citing a misguided sense in the everyday user that new media has the power to cure all the world’s ills with a simple click. The internet, Morozov argues in The Net Delusion, is breeding a generation not of activists but of “slacktivists”, who think that clicking on a Facebook petition counts as a political act.

A key part of Morozov’s thesis is that the impact of social networking sites on protest movements has been overestimated. He suggests that contrary to media hype, Twitter played only a small part in social unrest in Iran in 2009.

To Morozov, it was all a trick of the light, “a wild fantasy”. Many Iranians hated the West more than they hated their president. Even the deluge of tweeting and blogging was not what it seemed. Much of it came from outside Iran and, anyway, the regime continued to unleash the secret police. The idea that the internet was fomenting revolution and promoting democracy in Iran was just one example of the widely-held belief that the internet is inherently pro-democratic. Morozov takes a stand against this “cyber-utopian” view, arguing that the internet can be just as effective at sustaining authoritarian regimes. The Russian government has a massive incentive to watch the blogosphere, to watch for and contain discontent — and punish dissenters. He also points out there was a big push to develop mobile banking in places like Kenya, but now policemen there are using mobile phones to take bribes more efficiently.

As it happens, the African country that has the highest percentage of people with Facebook accounts is Tunisia. Does the fact that Tunisians earlier this month overthrew their dictator of more than 20 years prove that revolutions can happen in countries with a relatively high penetration of social media, or is it an irrelevance? In fact, the depressing truth is that the Tunisian government was long a regional pioneer of cyber-censorship. The state-run internet service provider secretly inserted software on sites such as Facebook so that the government could access the passwords and usernames of popular bloggers and political activists. Facebook groups were deleted, and bloggers were arrested.

But while revolutions need more than communication, information is still a prerequisite for action. Cynics need to recall that Cold War was won in part because the West was willing to spend billions on radio broadcasts and on photocopiers and fax machines smuggled behind the Iron Curtain. People eventually understood how fragile the Soviet regime was, so that when economic failures could no longer be hidden, change became possible.

Morozov counters this with the case of East Germany. Unlike most populations in the Soviet bloc, East Germans were exposed to the joys of capitalist life through West German television. Far from radicalising the people, it seemed to make them more compliant. This, Morozov glumly observes, is what is happening in Putin’s Russia.

Distraction, he argues, can be a crucial ally of authoritarian regimes. The vast amount of entertainment available on the Web can be depoliticising and demobilising. The internet spawns more giggling or aroused couch potatoes than angry activists.

This is also true, but also only up to a point. Entertainment can only go so far if a regime is unable to provide the basic foundations of legitimacy, which almost always includes the necessities for life and often extends to freedom and personal autonomy.

Perhaps the very mundanity of human sociality exposed through the internet does deserve to be mocked, and people’s sincere attempts to express their identity and convictions through online methods derided. There is certainly an awful lot of discussion of what people had for breakfast and other mindless trivia. But does anyone think most people used to discuss philosophy over the dinner table before the advent of the internet? Jokes, noting birthdays, small talk, personal tidbits, the weather, food, children and a little bit of information ... Yes, that’s humanity for you.

Sure, there is an element of vanity and voyeurism in the “me-media”. And certainly the online social networking phenomenon raises interesting questions about the blurring boundaries between privacy and openness. Yet the shrill warnings and criticisms levelled at Facebook are enough to make you think there is a virtual, out-of-control and naive mob roaming the world wide web, whose members must be protected from themselves by experts and internet-therapists lest they are seduced by extremists’ Facebook pages or robbed by menacing cyber criminals. The reality is quite different. Most Facebook users do not use the site for sinister purposes or in a belief that they are forging a new global form of citizenship. They take Facebook at face value: as a form of entertainment and communication, which can be either practical and fun or mindless and superfluous. It isn’t self-destructive or dangerous, and it isn’t empowering either. It’s just fun.

So, to dismiss ordinary interactions of life as narcissism or meaningless is unwarranted, and misunderstands the fundamental functioning of community and the relationship between social communities and civic action. Online petitions and “like” buttons do not work to bring about social change. In the internet age, easy clicks produce big numbers but very little commitment. Virtual resistance is not resistance until it takes to the streets and, on the whole, it doesn’t.

Likewise, it is hardly news to discover that the spread of internet democracy is being thwarted at every turn. The Chinese, in particular, have shown amazing ingenuity in controlling the net. But political activism is not failing because people are too busy watching cat videos online, and the reason online protests do not work is not that they are online, or that they are easy.

Besides, 15 years ago, we’d all have been watching events in Iran or Tunisia on TV. Now at least we’re communicating our reactions to each other. That has to be a step in the right direction, even if it isn’t a quantum leap forward.