No government without people's consent
Ignorance and lust for power have all made it difficult for Arab regimes to understand the power of social media
The role of social media in the widely known now as the Arab Spring is increasingly becoming a matter of intense debate. Some tend to exaggerate about its contribution to the awakening of the masses; others go the opposite way and argue that its role was very modest.
Regardless, social media may have not triggered revolutions in the Arab Middle East but has indeed made social mobilisation more easy to occur. Joining a protest group on Facebook is not like standing in a crowd and holding up a sign at a protest rally; but makes anything of that sort more likely to happen. This aspect alone entails it to play a key role in setting the stage for social action; something the traditional media (i.e. TV challenges, the press ...etc.) could not produce over the past two decades.
In Iran, demonstrators in 2009 poured into the stuffy streets of Tehran to protest what they believed to be fraudulent elections, where thousands of Iranians organised and connected through smart phones and Twitter. In the Arab world, the protest movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain and Syria started from Facebook, people who made groups and gathered protesters to overthrow their governments. Social media as such played a major role in influencing, connecting and spreading “Revolution Fever” throughout the region.
In his now famous book The Facebook Effect, David Kirkpatrick stated that “if we are to consider Facebook as a state it will be the third largest country in the world after China and India” — referring to the number of users. As of January 2011, when the Arab Spring started, Facebook has more than 600 million active users. Indeed, the impact is much more serious than that.
A single page on Facebook, or a Tweet, a video on YouTube, could draw world-wide public attention. One must add that we are only at the beginning of a technological revolution as the internet becomes a universal tool of interactive communication.
Over the past two decades, two major world developments have taken place: the end of the old international system and the emergence of a new generation of communication technologies. The collapse of communism and the victory of western liberalism meant the end of the ideological clash of the twentieth century.
The emergence of the new media — social media in particular — made interactive communication the most important political phenomenon in the early years of the twentieth century. At the heart of this new phenomenon lies the fact that the state is no longer a nation-state.
The state in the information age is a network state, a state made out of a complex web of power-sharing and negotiated decision-making between international, multinational, national, regional and local political institutions.
There are two common trends in these processes of transformation that signal a new historic landscape. First, none of them could have taken place without new communication technologies. Thus, while technology is not the cause of the transformation, it is indeed indispensable medium.
And, in fact, it is what constitutes the historical novelty of this multi-dimensional transformation. Second, all processes are enacted by organisational form that are built upon networks, or to be more specific, upon information networks. The most important direct impact of information networks on social structure concerns power relationship. Historically, power was embedded in organisations and institutions, organised around a hierarchy of centres; and in the case of the Arab political system centralised in the hands of the ruling elites.
Networks dissolve centres; they disorganise hierarchy, and make materially impossible the exercise of hierarchical power without processing instructions in the networks, according to the network morphological rules. Thus, contemporary information networks of capital, production, trade, science, communication, human and political rights, bypass the national state, which, by and large, ceased to be a sovereign entity.
These complex settings were hard to grasp or accept by the traditional, nineteenth-century Arab political systems. As a result, some have already been removed by the tide of revolution; others, while awaiting their turn, are still misleadingly talking about national sovereignty, the supremacy of national laws and the right of the state to use excessive force to subdue society.
Arrogance, ignorance and lust for wealth and power have all made it difficult for Arab regimes to understand the multifaceted transformation which has begun two decades ago. Some still need to understand that the impact of the social media cannot be challenged by bullets, torture or abuse. It is a political phenomenon that ought to be dealt with by political means (power-sharing, more participation and good governance). Gone are the days when rulers could rule with mere force. Today, the consent of the people is the prerequisite for governance.
Dr Marwan Kabalan is Dean of the Faculty of International Relations and Diplomacy, Kalamoon University, Damascus, Syria.
