Facebook ousted Mubarak but China still going strong

            I remember in 2008 when most people realized that Facebook had successfully overtaken MySpace and that social media would not only be around to stay but would have an impact on everyday life. Admittedly I was not so sold on it despite my young age; I remember telling my dad how ridiculous I thought Twitter was: “Who needs to tell the world that they’re going to go get a cup of coffee?”

            Alas, I was profoundly mistaken. While social media does satisfy the needs of teenage girls and boys talking about their quotidien, it does present serious problems for authoritarian governments such as the Mubarak regime overthrown in 2011 in Egypt. The “Facebook Revolution” essentially means an expansion of invisible networks that is difficult to stop. My question: how can certain governments, like that in China, prevent for such long periods of time revolutions that were capable of dismounting a powerful dictator – and what’s more a Western-backed dictator – in Egypt, Tunisia, etc.?

In Lim’s article, Clicks, Cabs, and Coffee houses, she correctly notes that social activism was popular even before the advent of social media on the Internet, but that social media was able to act as a catalyst to a growing disenchanted and disenfranchised Egyptian public in starting a revolution. The high “biographical availability” that Lim discusses has allowed the youth to use social media as a way of disseminating their views across a wide audience. It wasn’t that social media itself caused the revolution, but it surely helped. As early as 2004, social media was at work in Egypt: “The first anti-Mubarak movement in history, Kefaya … had neither physical headquarters not permanent meeting place.” These anti-dictator movements clearly don’t appear out of thin air and must me, as Lim suggests, the result of years of angry people. Social media simply facilitated the movement, having acted as a forum for upset youth to gather and say, “We’re not alone.”

Amelia Arsenault in Networks: Emerging Frameworks for Analysis briefly touches on the chicken or the egg debate: “Did the rise of technological networks facilitate networked forms of social organization? Or do technological networks mirror pre-existing social networks?” Arsenault later suggests that advancements in technology lead to human action (note: “Facebook Revolution”) which then produces a modification to the social structure.

What seems to be an answer to my question then is that the Chinese government is simply more stable and has a better grasp on its state than did Mubarak on Egypt.  I wish that Lim had provided a little more analysis on Internet governance in Egypt, since during my read through of her case study I kept asking myself, “Why didn’t the Egyptian government get a hint and do something about citizens’ access?”