Cyber-Pessimism and Evolutionary Change

Burma's Saffron Revolution and Egypt's April 6 Facebook strike--through massively hyped by cyber-utopians for their supposedly transformative use of technology--both failed miserably. As Internet and Democracy Blog's Chris van Buren points out,

"Power is power, and in most of these countries, it continues to flow straight from the barrel of a gun, not any robust notion of democratic legitimacy. X Arab autocracy or Y East Asian dictatorship is likely to feel threatened from within by an independent blogging class and humiliated from without by the ridicule of Westernized democracies. When the Burmese junta could no longer take the heat, they simply downed the internet completely, convenient to do when all ISP’s are centrally licensed and controlled anyway."

Marc Lynch, however, argues that political blogging's real impact lies in its effects on the activists who use it:

"The impact of the new media technologies will likely be best measured in terms of the emergence of such new kinds of citizens and networks over the next decades, not in terms of institutional political changes over months or years. The rise of young Muslim Brotherhood bloggers through the ranks of the organization may well change that organization over the years. Veterans of the Kefaya movement may over time figure out how to create lasting, popular political movements (with or without using new media)."

Technology is not neutral. There are certain structural implications pre-set into technologies that have far-reaching changes on the individuals, organizations, and nations that employ them. As dissident organizations continue to incorporate new media and technologies into their strategies and "digital natives" rise through the ranks, their core identities and structures are likely to shift. And with that shift comes new strategies, some of which the regimes will be hard-pressed to counter.