Social activism owes nothing to social media. Egypt, cut off from the internet for several days now, has demonstrated as much.

This isn’t an original idea. Malcolm Gladwell, writing in the New Yorker last October, brilliantly unpicked the idea that Twitter caused revolutions in countries such as Moldova and Iran. His investigation of revolutionary actions pinpointed a common phenomena: the people who show up to demonstrate do so because their “critical friends” are doing so.

“Friends” on Facebook or followers on Twitter mostly fail the critical friend test, being either people you don’t know or acquaintances you kind of do. “The platforms of social media are built around weak ties”, Gladwell wrote, and “weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism”.

Unquestionably social media allows more people to participate but their participation is characterised as at a distance, low risk and with little personal sacrifice. More explicitly, their activism is joining a Facebook group not facing down a police baton. Those on the streets of Cairo today are mostly not there because of Twitter or Facebook but because of their close friends and family.

There are many reasons why the revolution in Egypt may succeed where other actions haven’t. The absence of social media, broadcasting to the authorities, among other things, the identities of organisers or key lieutenants of the organisers, may be one of them. Social media may be good for many things but toppling dictators isn’t one of them.

Suggested reading:

Joseph Mayton on Biyamasar – “Egyptians doing it old school”

Dave Pell: Egypt, Twitter and the Straw Man Revolution (huffingtonpost.com)