FT | When I recently discovered Twitter, I went from contemptuous to addicted in about three days. But one thing still puzzles me about the world’s 10th most popular website: the notion that it’s a revolutionary medium. The failed Moldovan rebellion of 2009 was probably the first to be dubbed the “Twitter revolution”, but since then, Twitter has been credited with launching the Iranian uprising, Arab spring and London riots. Now it has supposedly prompted the African Union to hunt for the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, after an anti-Kony propaganda film spread through social media and was watched more than 100 million times. I confidently predict that the next revolution anywhere on earth will be dubbed “the Twitter revolution”. Non-tweeting readers may have formed the impression that the Twittersphere is devoted to summoning people to demonstrations in grey repressive capitals. In fact, “trending” items are usually celebrity deaths, goals in football matches or anything to do with the teenaged singer Justin Bieber. And what’s true of Twitter appears true of computers in general. They are antirevolutionary devices. The global addiction to computers is helping keep the world quiet and peaceful.
Every now and then, of course, social media do contribute to change. The Facebook page “We are all Khaled Said”, named after a young Egyptian who died in police custody, helped galvanise protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square last year. And bad activists use YouTube and Twitter too. “On the web one can proselytise for the jihad all day and night with friends from around the world,” writes Jytte Klausen, an expert on terrorism at Brandeis University, and colleagues.
Mostly, though, computers produce quietism. Despite Occupy Wall Street, a striking fact of the great recession in developed countries has been the passivity of young people.
