How Much Did Social Media Shape Politics This Year?

A lot, says Christia Freeland:

What’s important to remember in hindsight is that one of the most provocative ideas of late 2010 — published just two months before a Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, posted his suicide note on his Facebook Wall, and three months before the Egyptian government blocked Twitter in an effort to muzzle its people — was Malcolm Gladwell’s characteristically iconoclastic assertion that, as the subhead to his October 2010 New Yorker essay put it, “the revolution will not be tweeted.” At least in public, Gladwell is sticking to his guns, but not too many other people are. In one informed example, consider a recent public interview I conducted with Naguib Sawiris, the Egyptian telecommunications billionaire and liberal politician who backed the Tahrir Square demonstrations. When I asked him about the Gladwell theory, Sawiris first wondered, “Is he here in the room? Do I have to be polite?” and then went on to explain his criticism: “He has no clue what this technology has done to my part of the world. Ninety percent of the success of this revolution is attributed to it.” 

Peter J. Munson counters:

Across the Middle East, we saw an unprecedented wave of revolutions.  Like dominoes, dictators fell in rapid succession.  Some, however, weebled and wobbled but wouldn't fall down.  Not yet anyway.  What should this teach us?  It should teach us that the hope that the artificial suppression of political volatility can be a useful tool in managing change is false.  For all the talk of Twitter and Facebook and new technology leading to revolutionary social mobilization and change, these mechanisms were at best tangential to the movements.  The market penetration of the internet and these social media services was very low in the countries in question.  While it may have helped some elites to mobilize, the true roots were far deeper and more significant.  The bottom line is that the rapid economic changes of the past decade or so created a socio-economic dynamic that the political apparatus could not accommodate.