Subversive

We took notice of the power of social networking sites when the Obama campaign used these extensively to mobilize grassroots voter support in last year’s American elections.

Then we looked even more closely at them when a television personality challenged the giant news network CNN to a contest on who could raise a million followers on Twitter first. The television network lost to one individual.

When the forces of reform in Iran used the social networking sites extensively in the campaign period leading up to last week’s contested election, the regime in Tehran tried to shut down the sites. They could not. When they blocked Facebook momentarily, the supporters of Moussavi quickly migrated to Twitter.

In the face of angry protests in the wake of what appears to be a stolen election, the security establishment in Iran resumed their efforts to disrupt the web-based communications channels. When they were successful in doing so, reformist forces began sending out video taken by mobile phone cameras through other internet channels.

When it became difficult to send out video, opponents of the regime sent out stills. When internet sites for doing so were disrupted, they still managed to send out still photos of what was happening in the streets from phone to phone.

Turning desperate, the security authorities in Tehran tried to disrupt phone services. That can only infuriate the people and harm economic activity.

It has been reported that the authorities in Tehran have attempted to block satellite signals to prevent foreign journalists in the country from sending out their reports. The collateral costs of doing that will be awesome. Modern economies, even one as isolated as Iran’s, rely heavily on reliable data transmissions. When the communications channels are disrupted, all other activities essential to the life of the economy are disrupted as well.

To prevent the truth from seeping out of the country, Tehran will have to enforce a complete communications lockdown. That is nearly impossible to do. Even if they succeed in doing that, the costs will be many times greater than whatever it is they are trying to suppress.

In the olden days, when communications were confined to traditional, highly centralized media such as print or even radio, it was possible for repressive regimes to fully control what their populations know and what their citizens are able to convey among themselves. Today, only North Korea and Cuba are capable of imposing effective censorship — only because they have kept their populations out of the digital age.

With personal computers and mobile phones, every citizen becomes a broadcaster. They could bear witness to events and instantly communicate their reports to the rest of the world.

The accessibility of modern information technologies makes them potent instruments for asserting freedom. Each new technological advance in communications technologies over the last three decades seems to have produced a political revolution in its wake.

Ironically, it was precisely the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that toppled a centuries-old monarchy that was the first demonstration of the subversive effects of new technologies. The introduction of the highly portable audio-cassette recorder that did not only play back tapes but enabled reproduction of them became potent weapons in Iranian society.

Opponents of the old monarchy found an icon in the then exiled Ayatollah Khomeini. The speeches of the Ayatollah were smuggled into the country in audiocassette format. These were reproduced endlessly. Nearly every citizen had at least a cheap cassette player. There was no way the monarchy could suppress the new medium. It would eventually fall in the face of a mass uprising.

The Iranian Revolution was also called an “audiocassette revolution”. It was that medium that gave the insurrectional forces ideological coherence and a unified tempo of development.

In the early eighties, the tight censorship imposed by the Marcos dictatorship was broken by means of photocopied accounts of those resisting the regime. When the 1986 Edsa Revolution happened, it was also called the “Xerox revolution” because of the role played by photocopying machines in spreading the word and tearing the veil of censorship.

The democratic movement culminating in the historic Tiananmen gathering in 1989 communicated domestically and with the rest of the world using fax machines. It was nicknamed the “fax revolution.” The regime in Beijing could not suppress the medium without shutting down its entire phone system.

This was soon followed by the cat-and-mouse rallies in Thailand that eventually brought down the military regime and brought on a long democratic political phase. These protest action were coordinated by means of the mobile phones that became accessible to large numbers of middle-class Thais. That was called “the mobile phone revolution.”

Might we forget our own Edsa Dos? Large crowds were quickly gathered, the political groups coordinated and the events orchestrated using digital phone text technology. That was called the “text revolution.”

Communications technologies continue to advance with great speed. Close on the heels of every technological advance seems to be yet another explosive advance in democratization.

The whole thing has come a full cycle. In the same place where the close link between a technological advance and a political revolution was first noticed — the scene of the audiocassette revolution — now blooms what might eventually be called “the twitter revolution.”