If there’s nothing else we’ve learned from the Arab Spring, Wikileaks and the two-term success of the Obama campaign machine, it’s that the links between the online and offline worlds are more concrete and meaningful than ever.
The online world is not some separate sphere of life, but is linked in very real ways to our offline interactions and reactions. What the Internet does do is allow us to amplify those actions to levels never previously imagined. That is what the #FreeMona Twitter campaign reveals. If the online world were its own separate, autonomous sphere of influence, then the Egyptian Interior Ministry would have had no incentive to heed the tweets of prominent “tweeters”. But, the Interior Ministry understood, as did Mona El Tahawy, that the Internet is now an extension of the public sphere. It is a megaphone for the public square. It is more of a microphone, a tool, than a place or sphere of its own. The Internet is a powerful tool to bring people together in the offline world.
The power of the Internet to amplify our offline worlds is also the most salient lesson that Wikileaks showed us. Wikileaks was dangerous not because of anything having to do with the Internet as a place, but because the Internet served as a medium to quickly transmit classified information worldwide without the physical threat of being shut down. The biggest threat to governments around the world is the philosophy of radical transparency propagated by Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, et al. and the newfound power that the Internet as medium brings them to realize their somewhat radical goals.
Going forward, I have a newfound respect and understanding of the Internet’s role as a radical communication tool, but also have a renewed respect and maybe even enhanced respect for the power of offline actions in combination with this radical tool for connectivity: the Internet.
So, I feel empowered, but also a little bit intimidated because, it seems even harder to catalyze meaningful offline action in the wake of great information progogation campaigns like Wikileaks or a combination Youtube + Twitter campaign like #StopKony. The information is easily spread like wildfire, but the offline actions can’t be as simple as tweeting a simple hashtag. In the wake of an arrest of a prominent dissident like Mona El Tahawy, there is still very complicated offline work that needs to occur to make her vision for Egypt a reality.
In many ways then, the Internet is a double-edged sword where information quickly spreads and can even catalyze very basic offline responses, but we still face the dilemma of how to translate complex policy change into digestible bits of information on these new mediums of communication.
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