This was a question posed for a spectrogramme at the recent TechSoup Global Contributors Summit in California. If you've not come across the idea before, a spectrogramme is a line from one end of the room to the other, with one end labelled 'agree' & the other end labelled 'disagree'. Everyone in the room is asked to stand somewhere along the line in response to a specific question.
The summit took place post Tunisia and just as things in Egypt were coming to a head. Of the 50 people in the room, the vast majority were hanging around between ‘don’t know’ and ‘agree’. I was firmly in the ‘disagree’ camp. When I was challenged on this, I noted the age demographic of the people in the room and observed that I was one of those who was old enough to have been there when the Berlin Wall fell (I wasn’t actually in Berlin, but some of my friends were).
In 1989 the internet hadn’t been invented, nor had text messaging or Social Media. The latest technology was a mobile phone that needed a suitcase to carry the battery! Yet the Berlin Wall still fell. Why? Fundamentally it was because the dictatorships of Eastern Europe (starting with the Soviet Union) had lost the appetite, or the ability, to command their armies to suppress their people by force. When the people rose up, no one was willing to do what it took to stop them.
Contrast Eastern Europe with China in 1989. The Chinese leadership was prepared to crush the Tiananmen Square demonstrators with force, and they were able to rely on the support of their army to do it.
Fast forward 22 years. Popular uprisings topple long standing regimes in Tunisia and Egypt with remarkably little bloodshed. But then we come to Libya. A brutal dictator prepared to crush all opposition with a military that remains loyal to him. Sounds a familiar story?
Social Media has many benefits in helping people communicate. But it is people on the street that change regimes and Social Media doesn’t help them against tanks, planes and machineguns.
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