Nancy Scola says our conversations about the transformative power of tech are maturing.
Tunisia’s citizens have spent the last several weeks gathering their collective strength to depose their corrupt president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, and his sclerotic regime. Throughout the turmoil, the populace has been tweeting, blogging, and using Facebook. Mindful of how quickly many rushed to brand the 2009 protests in Iran a “Twitter revolution,” commentators have held back with Tunisia, emphasizing that the uprising is a product of the passions and convictions of Tunisia’s people, not a 140-character status update. That’s a good thing. It means our conversations about technology’s transformative power are maturing past assumptions that the spread of the Internet means an inexorable spread of democracy.
But now is the time, perhaps, for a little backlash against the backlash. Scrubbing the Internet from the Tunisian people’s story leaves us with less than a full picture of this moment.