[Reader-list] The persistent fear base of authoritarianism

[Jeebesh]

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/03/2011316122450195659.html

The persistent fear base of authoritarianism
Social media sites have become conduits for real political change  
where censorship is prevalent.
Leila Hudson

In her initial call for the January 25th demonstration, Asmaa Mahfouz  
used Facebook and YouTube as the conduits for a message that went  
viral, but the jist of her call to action was for the youth of Egypt  
to tear themselves away from their Facebook accounts and take to the  
streets.

While this rapidly growing and ever more youthful population,  
compressed by rigid national and international structures has found  
itself energised by every new communicative technology, turning them  
in to forms of public expression, new social media certainly were not  
sufficient in themselves to spark an awakening or bring about real  
political change.

I suggest that perhaps it is the pulsating effect of an entire media  
ecology faced with inconsistent and stuttering state censorship that  
has driven people into the streets. Mubarak’s surprising success in  
turning off the Internet as the protests built up, and Gaddafi’s  
successful jamming of Al-Jazeera did not help them; on the contrary  
they took the media seriously enough to give the opposition a critical  
momentum.

Media Ecology

The current media ecosystem is composed of a number of complementary  
elements, which permeated the Middle East over the last two decades.  
The overall effect is the emergence of an interactive and dynamic  
transnational media infrastructure that is beyond the reach of most  
Middle East governments, but not for want of trying.

First, transnational satellite television has near total reach in Arab  
and Middle Eastern societies. Channels like Al Jazeera and BBC Persian  
TV deliver relevant reporting in the language that hundreds of  
millions of ordinary people can understand, but which also remain  
independent of most governments.

The Internet now embraces a host of powerful services; Youtube serves  
as a public record of far more than dogs on skateboards, documenting  
everything from state torture to demonstrations of every size.  
Facebook serves as a place to gather, rally, memorialize while  
WikiLeaks shed light on the very specific and colorful minutiae of the  
ruling class’s MO and lifestyles described with sardonic  
understatement by US diplomats whose cynicism added insult to injury.  
Twitter serves as the gateway to the new, more fluid incarnation of  
the blogosphere, both feeding and circulating mainstream reporting.

Mobile telephony with its camera phones, texting, and now  
increasingly, internet access serves as the most versatile and  
pervasive bi-directional gateway to this ever-expanding digital  
sphere, allowing people to consume and produce and circulate  
information both publicly and privately.

Each and every element in this ecology has faced repeated attempts at  
suppression by Middle Eastern governments in the years prior to 2011,  
but most failed for a variety of reasons. For the most part bans  
driven by political concerns highlighted the vulnerability, Luddism  
and a general lack of strategic vision of the regimes in question.  
Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE filtered the internet for  
sexual content on the other hand found a much greater level of social  
and religious consensus backing such policies.

This is not to say that such this ecology can not be tamed or  
neutralised; the Iranian Green Movement brought millions out on to the  
streets in 2009 and was literally beaten back, while Syria and China  
have yet to see substantial disturbances thanks to  a combination of  
fear and isolation that has kept millions censoring themselves.

Listening autocrats versus stone deaf dictators

Just as the new popular mobilisation involves decentralised deployment  
of television and internet resources, defensive state anti-coup, anti- 
revolution drills all revolve around taking control of key physical  
infrastructure and expelling challengers from public spaces - squares,  
streets, but also TV, computer and mobile phone screens. Trying to  
kill the internet and the mobile phone networks is like putting tanks  
on the street - it is a drastic move that tells everyone just how  
threatened a government feels and is.

All authoritarian regimes require control over telecom infrastructure  
to be able to hit the 'kill switch' on the internet. Governments still  
think (and they may be right) that beating up, expelling or killing  
foreign journalists like murdered Al-Jazeera photojournalist Ali  
Hassan al-Jaber is part of the key to nipping revolt in the bud. 'Old  
media' is still media to the mobilisation of  hundreds of thousands or  
millions on the street, as opposed to hundreds, thousands, or even  
tens of thousands.

The majority of the Middle East is not on the web; they are watching  
television. Television and newswire reporters also generate content  
that feeds new media. For fifteen years Middle Eastern states and the  
US have tried to control Al-Jazeera. They have jailed bloggers. They  
have blocked Youtube. But ISP based shutdowns and slowdowns in the  
uprisings of 2011 in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain were clear  
“supersignals” and reminders of the fundamental weakness and fear base  
of authoritarian states.

My argument is that a harsh state response to popular mobilisation in  
the new public spheres created by communicative technology evolution  
is part of the “recipe” that gets real segments of the people into the  
real streets. The fitful and mistimed attacks on noisy, fun but  
elitist and politically ineffective public fora like Facebook actually  
mobilize the medium and puts it on political high alert by sending a  
“supersignal” of regime fear and weakness. An effective shutdown using  
a kill switch pushes people into faintly remembered old style mass  
politics as in Egypt this January 25th.

Interestingly a hardline “internet enemy” like Syria, with a much more  
sensitive internet policy finds itself in a better position than more  
liberal but tone deaf Egypt in controlling the cascade of events by  
through more sophisticated manipulation of the new social media and  
the use of old survival tactics.