(An excerpt from my new book, Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands and Killing Traditional Media, just published by City Lights. To purchase a copy, go here. And for an an ebook from Amazon, go here.)

On December 17, 2010, a young Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself afire. Within months, much of the Arab world was ablaze as well.

Bouazizi’s fatal self-immolation sparked what later became known as the Arab Spring and led to the demise of dictators not only in his country, but in neighboring Egypt and Libya as well. It reverberated among other repressive rulers and regimes in Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, and beyond. Ultimately it resonated far from Bouazizi’s rural hometown of Sidi Bouzid—including thousands of miles away in New York City, where Occupy Wall Street movement began nine months to the day after his desperate act in opposition to voicelessness and powerlessness. The Occupy movement gave rise in turn to more than a thousand similar protests around the world and the creation of a global movement. From London, Madrid and Rome to Athens, Tel Aviv and Tokyo, millions were suddenly on the march, demanding, as had Bouazizi, more respect, hope, dignity and democracy.

They called themselves “the 99%” in opposition to the ruling 1%—the dictators like Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Gaddafi, but also those they dubbed “banksters,” the investment bankers and financial manipulators who had gamed the economic system to their own benefit and then, supposedly too big to fail, forced the rest of society to bail them out. On the heels of the Great Recession, the American Autumn, like the Arab Spring that preceded it, became as much an economic as a democratic revolt. As one writer, Rebecca Solnit, later asked in an open letter to the dead Bouazizi, “What were all those dictatorships and autocracies for, if not to squeeze as much profit as possible out of subjugated populations—profit for rulers, profit for multinational corporations, profit for that 1%?”

Mohamed Bouazizi was neither the first Tunisian to kill himself in protest of the economic and political conditions in his country nor the last. But something was different about his story, or at least the way it had been told. Bouazizi’s personal rebellion led first to a successful societal revolution against a man who had ruled Tunisia for decades with an iron fist, and later to others that dislodged dictators in Egypt and Libya. Why? Did it have anything to do, as some have suggested, with the rise of social media?

Not long after the fall of the Tunisian dictator, many observers, including U.S. President Barack Obama, proclaimed that social media had in fact played a key role in events there, as well as in Egypt, where strongman Hosni Mubarak’s regime was also toppled. Writing for the Reuters news agency, for example, Philip N. Howard, author of The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam, noted that Bouazizi’s death had “activated a transnational network of citizens exhausted by authoritarian rule… It was social media that spread both the discontent and inspiring stories of success from Tunisia across North Africa and into the Middle East.” Among the lessons for the West, Howard concluded, were the facts that “a larger network of citizens now has political clout, largely because of social media,” and that “democratization has become more about social networks than political change driven by elites.”

Months later, after analyzing more than 3 million tweets, gigabytes of YouTube content and thousands of blog posts, he and other scholars at the Project on Information Technology and Political Islam published a study claiming “social media played a central role in shaping political debates in the Arab Spring,” and noting that, “conversations about revolution often preceded major events on the ground, and social media carried inspiring stories of protest across international borders.”

Howard, an associate professor of communication at the University of Washington, said the evidence “suggests that social media carried a cascade of messages about freedom and democracy across North Africa and the Middle East, and helped raise expectations for the success of political uprising. People who shared interest in democracy built extensive social networks and organized political action. Social media became a critical part of the toolkit for greater freedom.”

During the week before Mubarak’s resignation, for example, the rate of tweets about political change in Egypt increased ten-fold and videos featuring protest and political commentary went viral, with the top two- dozen receiving nearly five and a half million views. The amount of content produced in Facebook and political blogs by opposition groups also increased dramatically. Ironically, government efforts to crack down on social media may only have incited more activism, especially in Egypt. People who were isolated by efforts to shut down the Internet, largely middle-class Egyptians, may have gone to the streets when they could no longer follow the unrest through social media.

“Recent events show us that the public sense of shared grievance and potential for change can develop rapidly,” Howard concluded. “These dictators for a long time had many political enemies, but they were fragmented. So opponents used social media to identify goals, build solidarity and organize demonstrations.”

Other researchers and scholars, however, are not so sure of the actual role social media played in facilitating the protests. Writing in mid-September, 2011 on nextgov.com, a web site devoted to “technology and the business of government,” Joseph Marks reported that although experts were in agreement that, “Something extraordinary happened at the nexus of   social media and political action during the Arab spring uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa…just what happened is less clear.” While Twitter and other social media had become a megaphone that disseminated information about the uprisings to the outside world, Marks said, “a comprehensive study of Tweets about the Egyptian and Libyan uprisings” between January and March found that more than 75 percent of people who clicked on embedded Twitter links related to the uprisings were from outside the Arab world.

As one researcher, GWU associate professor John Sides, noted, “This obviously suggests that new media presents a tremendous opportunity to inform an international audience, but it also raises the question: ‘Will they be there tomorrow?’” Sides said public attention spans in the Western world are limited and cited Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution as an example. Although the Iranian events attracted a surge of international activity on Twitter, attention dwindled shortly after the death of pop icon Michael Jackson (See Chapter 7).

Alec Ross, senior adviser for innovation at the U.S. State Department, supported the idea that social media had played a determinant role in the Arab Spring. Ross said the use of social media during the uprisings signaled the beginning of a “massive transfer of power from nation states and large institutions to individual and small institutions.” Other panelists warned, however, that, “data on the role of social media during the Arab spring is so disparate and confusing it is nearly impossible to draw meaningful conclusions from it.”

Cyber-Realists vs. Cyber-Utopians

The ongoing controversy over whether and to what extent social media helped create the democratic surge of the Arab Spring brought to the fore earlier disagreements between “cyber-utopians” and more skeptical “cyber-realists” such as Malcolm Gladwell and Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. Gladwell’s New Yorker article, headlined “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” created a storm of reaction—most of it negative—when it was published two months before Mohamed Bouazizi’s death.

“The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution,” Gladwell had written. “The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns.” Like Morozov, Gladwell was convinced that those he derided as “digital evangelists” had, at the very least, vastly overstated the impact of social media on the new wave of political activism.

As evidence he cited reaction to the protests in both Iran and Moldova in 2009. When thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in Moldova against their country’s government, Gladwell noted, “The action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together.” And when protests later erupted in Tehran, the U.S. State Department asked Twitter executives to suspend previously scheduled maintenance of the service so it could still be used as an organizing tool during the demonstrations.

Gladwell remembered derisively that former U.S. national-security adviser Mark Pfeifle had called for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and had said, “Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy.” He also recalled former U.S. State Department official James K. Glassman telling a crowd of activists that sites like Facebook “give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was ‘eating our lunch on the Internet.’ That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation.”

These were “strong, and puzzling, claims,” Gladwell said. After all, “Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet?” Like Morozov, Gladwell believed “Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution” was impossible since very few Twitter accounts exist there. As for Iran, the people “tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West.”

Writing in Foreign Policy, Radio Free Europe correspondent Golnaz Esfandiari supported Gladwell’s conclusion. “Simply put: there was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran,” Esfandiari stated forthrightly. Twitter’s impact inside Iran was nil, she believed, as did the manager of one of the Internet’s most popular Farsi-language websites, Mehdi Yahyanejad, whom Esfandiari quoted as saying, “Here [in the United States,] there is lots of buzz. But once you look, you see most of it is Americans tweeting among themselves.” Those who disagreed, Esfandiari continued, were lazy and uninformed. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

Grandiose claims for new media forms were only to be expected, Gladwell concluded. “Innovators tend to be solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model.” But there was something else at work, as well: “in the outsized enthusiasm for social media…we seem to have forgotten what activism is.”

Two months after Bouazizi’s death, amid a new spate of claims that the protests in Tunisia and Egypt were also Twitter or alternately, Facebook-inspired, Evgeny Morozov decried as “cyber-utopians” those who believe “the Arab spring has been driven by social networks.” In a post for the UK Guardian, Morozov argued that they “ignore the real-world activism underpinning them.”

Morozov began his argument by restating theirs, reductio ad absurdum: “Tweets were sent. Dictators were toppled. Internet = democracy. QED.” He found it sad but entertaining, he said, to watch as “adherents of the view that digital tools of social networking such as Facebook and Twitter can summon up social revolutions out of the ether trip over one another.” He also complained about what he called “the ongoing persecution of Malcolm Gladwell.”

Like Gladwell, Morozov is convinced, “The current fascination with technology-driven accounts of political change in the Middle East is likely to subside, for a number of reasons.” First, he said, accounts of the revolutions that emphasize the liberating role of social media tools function mostly to “make Americans feel proud of their own contribution to events in the Middle East. After all, the argument goes, such a spontaneous uprising wouldn’t have succeeded before Facebook was around—so Silicon Valley deserves a lion’s share of the credit.”

Second, he suggested that social media “by the very virtue of being ‘social’—lends itself to glib, pundit-style overestimations of its own importance.” He then added, with no small degree of snark, “Perhaps the outsize revolutionary claims for social media now circulating throughout the West are only a manifestation of western guilt for wasting so much time on social media: after all, if it helps to spread democracy in the Middle East, it can’t be all that bad to while away the hours ‘poking’ your friends and playing FarmVille.”

Morozov, Gladwell and their allies cloak their argument in academic terms often used to describe different types of social capital within networks. They believe what they call “high-risk, real world activism,” such as that demonstrated during the Arab Spring, to be a “strong-tie” phenomenon.

“The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all,” Gladwell wrote. “The platforms of social media are built around weak ties.”

Social networks are “simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger,” he said, making it “easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.

“There is strength in weak ties…. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information,” Gladwell conceded. But those same weak ties, “seldom lead to high-risk activism,” he concluded. “The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend.”

Social networks, these naysayers claim, are ill-suited to real-world activism and high-risk strategies such as those employed during Arab Spring—”boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations”—because they are messy, non-hierarchical, and cannot provide the necessary discipline and strategy. When taking on a powerful and organized establishment, Gladwell declared, “You have to be a hierarchy.”

The explanation for why Mohamed Bouazizi’s death uncorked such a fury of change, however, is more nuanced than either of the dueling cyber-camps is willing to admit, as a closer examination of the protests in Tunisia and later in Tahrir Square in Cairo as well as the various Occupy demonstrations that followed in other parts of the world, seems to suggest. In the North Africa/Middle East region, a pan-Arab collaboration of young activists skilled in the use of technology did in fact given birth to a new movement dedicated to spreading democracy. They were strategic and disciplined, even as they shied from hierarchy. They relied not only on tactics of nonviolent resistance but also those of marketing borrowed from Silicon Valley. Tunisians and Egyptians did share expertise and experiences with similar youth movements in Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Iran. “Tunis is the force that pushed Egypt, but what Egypt did will be the force that will push the world,” Walid Rachid, one of the members of the April 6 Youth Movement, which helped organize the protests that set off the Arab Spring, explained to the New York Times.

That being said, it is also true that both the Tunisian and Egyptian revolts were literally decades in the making. Speaking in June 2011 at the eight annual Personal Democracy Forum, a procession of young Arab activists who had all been intimately involved in the spring revolts, explained the process of how they and millions of supporters were “weaving a network for change” in their countries, and what role the emerging media played in making that happen. From Riadh Guerfali to Dr. Rasha Abdulla to   Mona Eltahawy to Alaa Abdel Fattah, they noted the Arab Spring actions were emphatically not “Twitter” or “Facebook” revolutions that had coalesced online, but were instead the outcome of decades of networked resistance offline.

At the same time, they said, the revolts were clearly facilitated, and to some extent accelerated, by the decentralized organizing power of the new social media. The results of this offline/online action mashup were surprisingly successful revolutions that overthrew long-entrenched political forces. As Alaa Abdel Fattah pointed out in his remarks at the forum, the roots of the revolution in Egypt went back as far as 1972 and efforts made by his parents’ generation. Ultimately, he explained, they had been stymied by a clever power structure that painstakingly divided and thus conquered the protesters, marginalizing some and buying others off with favor and access. Decades later, Fattah pointed out, the emerging social media suddenly made it possible “to make noises louder online, to build local movements with one narrative and then build them online to a mass movement.” As another speaker at the forum, Omoyele Sowore, explained, “The Internet has helped revolution; but the Internet is not revolution.”