The Net Delusion?

In class I mentioned how Facebook was used for organizing some of the earlier protests in Egypt and the media has really focused on the way that social media has been utilized during the movement.  Has the role of Twitter and Facebook been overstated?  As we will read later in the semester, Malcolm Gladwell warns us that the revolution will not be tweeted and while these tools are valuable as communication devices, they are not as central to what happened last year in Iran as many had previously claimed.  In his recently published book, The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov uncovers that only .027% of the Iranian population were using Twitter.  Most of the Twitter users were highlighted because they had the ability to communicate with the Western world.  In his NYT essay, "Wallflowers at the Revolution" Frank Rich, cites The Net Delusion argues that this hints at America's resistance to the already established media industries within the regions of Northern Africa and the Middle East.  He makes the point that it is not social media at the core of these protests, but rather concerns about human dignity.  It is easy the American population to think about how important the tools of Facebook and Twitter might be, but much harder to understand hundreds of years of complex religious, political, and economic history.  

Returning to Morozov's book (which I haven't read), in the NYT review "Twitter Can't Save You"  Lee Siegel illuminates Morozov's point that the oppressive regimes are just as likely to utilized these same technologies as a tool to remain in power.  Overall this seems like an important message: claims of the complete utopian or dystopian promise of technology are always overstated and oversimplified.