There Are Probably No Real Cyberrevolutions, Not Even In Egypt

I just published a post based on Jillian York’s paper reminding Cyberutopians that the revolution succeeded not because Egyptians had social media but because ten years of revolutionary infrastructure–of which the Internet was a part–had been laid down before the Tahrir Square protests ever happened.

Then I stumbled on this 2009 talk addressing Cyberutopians two years before the Tahrir uprising occurred.

It is a reminder of how much empirical information we still need to be able to understand the social and political localizations of global technologies like these.

It also makes us think about whether the Mubarak regime might have been able to forestall the protests more effectively if they had taken the Internet more seriously as a threat, or dealt with it more creatively, as Iran, Myanmar and China have (unfortunately) done…