Social Media Revolution or Old-Fashioned Social Revolution?

The events of the Arab Spring (and the wider events of the Summer of 2011) draw analysts to the comparative.  Thus, the editors of the Middle East Report note "the Syrian revolt of 2011...is the nightmarish opposite of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutionary dream." ("Syria's Torment," the Editors, Middle East Report, August 10, 2011, Middle East Research and Information Project) One of these is not like the other. Such comparisons are the bread-and-butter of all those who search for the independent variable, be they historical sociologists or political scientists.  But the comparative is a game that historians must play if they are going to use terms to describe what is going on.  (Is it a revolt, sire?...)  And, indeed, the analysts tend to draw from the ready-made language of historical, even European revolts, to understand the present.  Thus, the same Middle East Report: "No rustic jacquerie, the Syrian revolt has leaped from town to town." ("Syria's Torment,") (Are, then, protest videos posted to Youtube the new urban cahiers de doléances?)

It might seem that recent media-drenched revolts are tailor-made for the linguistic turn - deep cultural analysis of modes of discourse.  And certainly there were claims at the outset that the Medium is the Message:

• "Yet another Facebook revolution: why are we so surprised?," by John Naughton, The Observer, 23 January 2011
• "Faces of the Facebook Revolution," by Lenora Jane Estes, Vanity Fair, 4 April 2011
• "Why not call it a Facebook revolution?," by Chris Taylor, February 24, 2011, CNN
  

Just a partial listing, shows how this quickly devolved to a meer trope.  Naughton revealed the formula:

• "The story is always the same: something unexpected happens in the real world; journalists notice that some of the people involved are users of the web/mobiles/Facebook/Twitter (delete as appropriate); the unexpected is then labelled 'the Facebook/Twitter/smartphone (delete as etc) revolution/protest/demonstration/election'." ("Yet another Facebook revolution")

Instead, what has dominated analysis is state-centered analysis of social revolutions, the type that developed out of the 1960s and 1970s from Barrington Moore, Theda Skocpol, and Charles Tilly. For Skocpol, state situations, not revolutionary ideologies, are most determinative of successful revolutions which she distinguishes as fundamentally different from unsuccessful ones.

•  “Social revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of society's state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below." Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (1979), 4

And Jeff Goodwin reiterates this definition in his "narrow" revolution definition below:

• "Two definitions of a revolution: a broad one, where revolution is 'any and all instances in which a state or a political regime is overthrown and thereby transformed by a popular movement in an irregular, extraconstitutional and/or violent fashion'; and a narrow one, in which 'revolutions entail not only mass mobilization and regime change, but also more or less rapid and fundamental social, economic and/or cultural change, during or soon after the struggle for state power.'” Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945-1991 (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 9, cited in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution.

What is intriguing is that the language of the state-centered analysis of social revolutions has returned to center stage. Anne-Marie Slaughter has recently drawn a number of "lessons" from recent events in Libya in the Financial Times. "The first is that, against the sceptics, it clearly can be in the US and the west’s strategic interest to help social revolutions fighting for the values we espouse and proclaim. The strategic interest in helping the Libyan opposition came from supporting democracy and human rights, but also being seen to live up to those values by the 60 per cent majority of Middle Eastern populations who are under 30 and increasingly determined to hold their governments to account. This value-based argument was inextricable from the interest-based argument." (Anne-Marie Slaughter, "Why Libya sceptics were proved badly wrong," Financial Times, August 24, 2011)  And there are many analyses of contemporary Arab "social revolutions": see for example "Social revolution in Tunisia and Egypt" (Steven Adolf and Sadik Harchaoui, Forum Report, 11 February 2011).  Is this another trope or a useful recognition of what is going on on the ground?  Perhaps it is best to note that the link between the state political and the social is a useful metaphor, then and now.