Swept by confusion: Twitter and the tide of revolution

On the night of the U.S. presidential election, Gideon Rachman, the Financial Times’ foreign affairs columnist, decided it was as good a moment as any to try out Twitter, the microblogging site that allows you to “tweet” messages to the world as long as they don’t exceed 140 characters, and to follow the pith of other people’s lives, as long as they too have Twitter accounts. Rachman was not impressed. Writing about the experience, he noted that “One of my very last tweets was: ‘This is possibly the most moronic form of journalism ever done.’”

In March of this year, Grammy-winning musician John Mayer appeared to confirm that Twitter was the digital equivalent of cocaine -- God’s way of telling someone they were too wired into technology. Mayer had just been dumped by actress Jennifer Aniston after she reportedly found that his claims of being too busy to talk to her were belied by a rich Twitter trail of inane updates to his 400,000 or so followers. Twitter, he said, upon reflecting on his fate to E! Online, is “inherently dumb ... if you really think that Twitter is the pathway to spiritual enlightenment, well... it’s one step away from sending pictures of your poop."

And this might have been Twitter’s epitaph in 137 characters (including spaces) but for Iran. The political protests in the wake of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fairytale electoral victory, and the mass use of Twitter to foil official attempts at suppressing news coverage of his political opposition, appeared to turn the near-scatological medium into the near-eschatological: As the Los Angeles Times headline proclaimed, “Tyranny’s new nightmare: Twitter.”

Anyone with a cell phone camera and a Twitter account, argued the LAT’s media critic, Tim Rutten, could and would function as a journalist in the event of a crackdown on the press:  “This is bad news for authoritarian governments,” he said. “In the future, they'll have to choose between underdevelopment -- denying their people social media, cell phones and the Internet -- and control.”

The FT’s Rachman admitted that Iran had forced him to “rethink his disdain” of Twitter in light of the “power of extreme brevity.”

But what kind of power is this exactly? Twitter is certainly capable of undermining a key aspect of any autocratic state, the myth of unanimity that sustains the ruling party’s power: We are you... and when we speak, we speak for you.

But Twitter’s brevity, its inherent capacity to reflect and create chaos, and to do so instantly and without verification,  does not suggest that it has the power to create the kind of narrative that sustains real revolutionary action. That requires a highly developed samizdat culture, the extent of which is difficult to determine in Iran, given both the reach of government and religious control and that the focal leader of the political opposition, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, was a consummate insider in the Islamic Revolution.

The word samizdat has come to mean any underground dissident culture that engages in publishing material which the state does its best to suppress; but it originates in the Soviet era from the portmanteau word, samsebyaizdat -- “publishing house for oneself.”

Russia and the Soviet Union offer many of the richest examples of samizdat publication, from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s arrest for circulating anti-government pamphlets in 1848, to smuggled Bolshevik agitprop, to Mikhail Bulgakov’s epic satire on Soviet repression, "The Master and Margarita," to the revelations of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the criticism  of Andre Sakharov.

As Michael Meerson Akhsenov, who has written extensively on samizdat in the Soviet Union, has noted, such publication has evolutionary stages, the final and most crucial one being where it creates a “growing independent consciousness in the intelligentsia as an emancipation from party-government ideology.”

The failure of China’s rough equivalent to samizdat -- datzepao, literally, “paper of bold characters” -- to reach such an evolutionary stage before being suppressed by the government in 1979 suggests that revolution requires richer narrative texture than can be provided by 140 characters.

More to the point, the limitations of overinterpreting Twitter’s power to undermine the current Iranian regime are evident when one looks at the Islamic Revolution of 1979, an event triggered by mass protests similar to those of recent weeks. The difference is that in the downfall of the Shah, the mosques, effectively, played the role of samizdat press, churning out and distributing cassette tapes and pamphlets of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s denunciations of despotism and calls for social justice without apparent notice or intervention by the authorities of the time.

The mosques also worked with the social network of the bazaaris to further political opposition. The bazaaris -- the merchant, shopkeeper and artisan class -- leaned towards supporting modernizing and liberalizing policies in Iran, but anti-profiteering, price controlling and other repressive measures by the government led them to make a common cause with the clerics. As Misagh Parsa notes in “The Social Origins of the Iranian Revolution,” the mosques were the only places free of government supervision and control, and the bazaaris mobilized under the cover of mourning ceremonies to plan a series of protests that would grind Iran to a halt.

Similar circumstances cannot simply be tweeted into existence. Political change -- especially the overthrow of authoritarian regimes -- requires a richer emancipatory narrative, which must sound persuasive to key constituencies and then must be reflected in concrete effective action that they can see happening. A stolen election can produce cohesive fury, especially in light of shared economic hardship, but the agglomeration of tweets on Andrew Sullivan’s blog and other western media made for a fairly thin and confused narrative -- a series of exciting navigational signals rather than the sweep and purpose of an epic journey.

Moreover, the Iranian authorities and security forces may have lacked the imagination to adapt Twitter to their own ends, preferring, instead, club-wielding motorcyclists to combat the crowds, but there is no reason to see how the chaos of democratic expression can’t be bent to authoritarian needs by exploiting the unverifiability, the brevity and the instantaneousness of the medium.

Wherever Iran is going, it will depend on a lot more than the apparent revolutionary mojo of Twitter. The tweeting mob will surely need some balance-of-power shifting support from the mosques, and the clerics will need a narrative that binds them to declaring the current government illegitimate and advancing change. And why should it be otherwise? After all, the Bolshevik revolution could no more have been brought about by carrier pigeon or the Berlin Wall brought down by the telephone.

(Trevor Butterworth is editor of STATS.org and a contributor to the Financial Times, Forbes.com, and Book Forum.)