Tweeting in Tunisia

Here we go again! Is society determined by technology or does society determine technological innovations and their uptake? With the regime change in Tunisia – mis-labelled as “revolution” – debates over the role of social media have re-surfaced. Such debates reinforce the misleading idea that there are clear-cut boundaries between “technology” and “society”. Another way of looking at the issue is that technologies are forms of social relations that bind people together in particular configurations even as they enable or constrain social action. To claim that the regime-change in Tunisia could not have occurred without Twitter and Facebook is as misleading as the claim that social media had nothing to do with it. Freedom of the press was the official policy but in practice, censorship and control of print and electronic media were particularly pronounced in Tunisia. The dramatic inequality in a country that was by all economic indicators quite well off, combined with corruption verging on kleptocracy was quite obviously the key factor that ignited the protests after a poor street hawker set himself on fire. At the same time, the protesters' use of social media to communicate discontent and to connect for demonstrations demonstrates the seamless web of technology as social relations. The issue of either technology or society is simply a non-issue.