Don't blame tools of social media for how people use them

NET RESULTS:Technologies are neither good nor bad. They don't have political opinions, they don't take sides

WHAT A difference context makes. When communication technologies were used for various protests and uprisings across the Arab world over the past two years, they were hailed in the West as wonderful and important tools that were central, even critical, to the success of those movements.

Remember Iran’s “Twitter Revolution” in 2009? So important was the microblogging site’s support role seen to be for pro-democracy protesters that the US government asked Twitter to postpone a potentially disruptive system update and avoid affecting demonstrator communications.

Social media fans and technology commentators have championed social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter for their role in more recent protests as well, from Tunisia to Egypt to Libya. As did many of the protesters – a Cairo activist earlier this year tweeted: “We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to co-ordinate, and YouTube to tell the world.”

Attempts by governments to disrupt or cut off communication technologies outraged many protesters and were criticised in western democracies.

Fast-forward to this past week and the protests that turned into riots in Britain, in which there is plenty of evidence that rioters used the same technologies to co-ordinate their activities.

Oh, the irony.

Out on the internet, many people have tried to “exonerate” communication technologies from suggestions that they might have had any serious role in the riots.

People in Britain (and Ireland) have argued that the British government should manage the unrest by shutting down the BlackBerry network, national mobile phone networks, Twitter and Facebook.

Wired.com argued this week: “Let’s remember that these riots aren’t really about social media . . . social networks are involved, but that extends just as much to offline social networks – people meeting up and talking in the streets. E-mails, regular text messages and even megaphones are also just as easily used to communicate en masse.”

Well, yes, to some extent – but the ability of packs of hundreds of rioters to travel, gather and target areas and move out ahead of the police would have been unlikely to take place after randomly meeting others on the street in “off-line social networks”, nor could they be co- ordinated by using a megaphone or directed on the fly via e-mail. Social media and closed- messaging systems such as that built into Research In Motion’s BlackBerry seem to have been integral to organising.

The same points could be made of the so-called “Twitter Revolution” and Arab Spring uprisings – indeed, many commentators have argued that off-line social networks were very important there, and the role of social media may have been overstated – but technology fans worldwide were often more than eager to have their favourite social media given credit in a positive way for supporting demonstrators.

None of this is to argue that technologies are “to blame” for the British riots. The point is, rather, that a major western democracy has seen the flip-side of what a “Twitter revolution” means.

Yes, the ability to communicate in these immediate, collective and powerful ways can be seen as a positive when used towards an end goal that is viewed widely as good, but those same communications methods become devilish when used in a way that society perceives as bad.

The tools themselves are simply tools, neither cause nor primary instigator of a national political movement, not even a national state of emergency.

They are neither good nor bad. Technologies don’t have political opinions, they don’t take sides, they don’t care whether a user plans to stage a government protest or loot a flatscreen TV from Currys – but they can be used for either intention.

It’s equally ridiculous to listen to people, including some officials who should know better, insist that Britain should shut down the BlackBerry network, national mobile phone networks, Twitter, Facebook or other communications media simply because a tiny minority is making use of them in a detrimental way.

Setting aside the fact that such intentions were met with entirely appropriate shock and outrage when coming from repressive Middle Eastern regimes, to cut off these technologies is unthinkable for the adverse effect it would have on businesses and the millions of everyday users of these media.

Indeed many Britons were using all of these communication tools to stay abreast of what was happening, to avoid getting caught in dangerous areas and to co-ordinate community clean-ups.

That the same communications tools can and will be used for negative as well as positive ends needs to be recognised by technophiles and technophobes alike.

The problem – or the achievement – is not rooted in the tools used to achieve those ends, but in the people and societies who use them.