The mass defiance that greeted the government of Turkey after it controversially blocked Twitter last week is an indicator of how this social media tool is defining contemporary politics. Within hours of the official ban coming into force, the nearly 12-million-strong community of Turkish tweeters cleverly circumvented the government’s gag orders and resumed posting and forwarding acerbic 140-character messages against their progressively draconian Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
In a country where Mr Erdogan’s imprint on policies is as profound as that of the iconic father figure of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the ease with which the former’s whimsical ban on Twitter was overcome by plucky citizens proved that he was no longer the unchallenged boss in all spheres of Turkish life.
When Mr Erdogan first strode to power in 2003, Twitter had not yet been conceived and Facebook was not founded. But true to its billing, technology is disruptive by reordering the distribution of power.
Today, Mr Erdogan can only fret and fume at the accusations that fly around in social networking websites about official corruption and mismanagement. His threats of “eradicating” Twitter and displaying the full “power of the Turkish Republic” to control what he labels as “systematic character assassinations” are being blunted by an activist and politically mobilised urban Turkish resistance movement.
Mr Erdogan’s high-handedness had previously irked sections of Turkish society, but the ban on Twitter drew a particularly vociferous reaction because this microblogging service has become a parallel public space in which political viewpoints are aired and public opinion is shaped.
Tweeting is a “fundamental right” that is now central to the concept of freedom of expression. It is a sort of 24x7 opinion poll and political barometer in countries with high Internet penetration rates.
The more a regime tries to suppress what the former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton described as “Internet freedom”, the greater the chances of such moves boomeranging. In 2011, the then Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, tried to unplug the entire Internet from his people through a total Web blackout, and paid the price by arousing even apolitical citizens to swarm into the streets and script his downfall. Twitter is like oxygen in the ecosystem of digital democracy. Denying people their Twitter access is suffocation and provocation which could trigger regime overthrows.
Web 2.0 technologies, of which Twitter is a pole star, have unrecognisably altered news and information, which lie at the heart of democratic practice.
In time to come, will a platform like Twitter have the means to actually conduct live debates among elected and electors, rulers and ruled? The ideal of direct democracy without intermediary institutions and crippling distances has always existed. Are the Internet and future developments in this technology going to make this romantic notion a lived reality?
The Westphalian nation-state system, where different sets of human beings are assigned to respective territories called countries, is already under pressure from economic globalisation and borderless movement of goods and capital since the 1990s. Can it survive the aggregating power of the Internet, which may break down narrower local or national identities and bring about new forms of mega communities?
Economic historians predict the mid 21st century to be the time when China and India will dominate the nation-state ranking system. But will the nation-state system as we currently know it even remain intact by then?
Or will humans reorganise through the connecting power of the Internet and enter into new forms of macro-social units and political entities that break the Westphalian mould? If the digital currency Bitcoin clicks, won’t it redefine economic exchange?
Futuristic thinking is often scoffed at as fantasy. However, we are in the midst of an exponentially fast rate of technological advancement. The futurologist, Raymond Kurzweil, contends that successive paradigm shifts are now happening much quicker, leading to “technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history”. Each moment a seasoned politician from an older generation like Turkey’s Erdogan bats eyelids, s/he will be facing a fresh landscape of possibilities and limits.
Technological change has been accepted as a main mover and causer of historical change in the way society, economy and polity are organised. Thinkers like Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) articulated this view during the Industrial Revolution. Marx’s most famous correlation between technology and society says, “The hand mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill gives you society with the industrial capitalist” (The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847).
To paraphrase Marx, what kind of society will Twitter and its successor technologies “give you”? Will they democratise the whole planet, including large holdouts to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube like China, which currently enforces a ban on these platforms more rigidly than Turkey?
Some caveats are due here. Determinism and teleological thinking have often failed to anticipate unexpected changes. Is the Internet simply a medium that depends on the preferences of its users or is it an independent variable that will by its own qualities shape social, economic, political and cultural trends of the future? In other words, are we mistaking the medium for the agent of change?
One must not get carried away by the Internet as an all-determining mega causal factor or even a positive one that will enhance human freedom and dignity.
China’s sophisticated Web censorship and online opinion manipulation regime reveal that the same Internet which is a rallying force for democratisers in Turkey can also be an instrument for manufacturing consent.
If the World Wide Web has the potential to reconstruct human relations in more horizontal and egalitarian directions, it is simultaneously a site for struggle between dominant nations and corporations intent on leveraging it for their own hierarchical motives. In the age of “Twitterocracy”, virtual may be real and vice-versa. But the construction of the “real” is still subject to political contestation.
