• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, April 9, 2010

Sometimes some faint doings in the outside world filter into the American news, probably by accident and only on slow news days: I remember something about Moscow subway bombings beneath banner headlines about Ricky Martin's shocking revelation that he is the former lead singer for Menudo. More recently something happened in Kazakhrygikstans.

I'm not going to criticize the news organizations for dropping the story about the revolution in Kyrgyzstan like a C-Span press conference: in addition to being almost impossible to spell, it is small and poor and doesn't have any oil. On the other hand, it hosts a vital U.S. air base that we need to support ongoing operations in Afghanistan against the Tali...*snore* What? Was someone saying something?

But the revolution in Kyrgyzstan is interesting, darn it, because it provides another case study of the power of social media to affect large-scale political change. Or ... does it?

It turns out there is a wee disagreement about this. On one hand, the example of Iranians using Twitter to organize protests last year would seem to suggest that Twitter and other social networks can indeed be valuable tools for coordinating resistance against authoritarian governments. Of course, the bad guys quickly catch on to the social network trick, and it then becomes a global game of cat-and-mouse, as servers hosted by sympathizers to enable continued communication pop up and disappear all over the world -- stalked and blocked by techno-police disguised as, or cooperating with, computing centers at big universities in the home country.

All of which makes for an entertaining spectacle for all the revolution-kibitzers -- the armchair insurgents and foreign affairs nerds (guilty!) who can observe the dangerous, life-and-death events from safety and comfort here in the U.S. or some similarly non-revolutionary setting, maybe even poking their nose in every now and then through social media. But there is a bit of a kibitzer kerfluffle on Kyrgyzstan: was Twitter actually involved?

No, says Evgeny Morozov, who opined "For all the hype about 'digital revolutions,' 'analog revolutions' are still the norm, not the exception." Morozov's posting was picked up by Andrew Sullivan, who re-posted a quote under the headline "This Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted."

But not so fast, replies Sarah Kendzior on the Registan blog, devoted to all things Central Asian. Basically, Kendzior criticizes Morozov out for what I will call social media solipsism: what Morozov was really saying was that the outside world's social media scene was utterly uninterested in the Kyrgyz revolution. Put in those terms, it's a fair observation. Morozov himself wrote that "social media couldn't care less about geopolitics and military bases. Predictably, we see no significant buzz on Twitter; unlike Justin Bieber, the Kyrgyz revolution is not "trending" as a popular topic there."

But as Kendzior notes, this is merely the outside reaction to the revolution -- not the revolution itself. So Morozov's assertion that "'analog revolutions' are still the norm, not the exception," confuses the lack of digital observers (and, yes, foreign sympathizers) with a lack of digital revolutionary activity, period.

But the Kyrgyz revolutionaries were, in fact, using social media to coordinate during the revolution, Kendzior goes on, even if no outsiders noticed: "I would argue that when most Kyrgyz posted on Twitter, they did so for each other. They searched for meaning and answers, using the internet to forge a connection to their countrymen as chaos reigned outside. And through it all, they evaluated Kyrgyzstan's politics, providing a rich and ongoing commentary of events." Kendzior reiterates: "This revolution was tweeted. But unfortunately, the significance of those tweets is decided not by the people who wrote and read them, but by observers in the West."