Tiananmen Square and Social Media: What Could Have Happened?
This post by Neal Wiser originally appeared on AddictedtoSocialMedia.com (A2SM) and is being revisited in light of the Egyptian government’s decision to shut down the Internet in order to quell this week’s protests. In addition to being ODM’s Vice President of Digital Strategy & Operations, Neal is the Co-Founder of A2SM and Co-Host of the A2SM Podcast.
Take a look at the picture on this page. It tells a remarkable story of courage and defiance in the face of overwhelming and potentially lethal force. It is an picture of the indomitable resilience of the human spirit and the desire for freedom. Indeed, it is remarkable for so many reasons, yet perhaps among the most significant is that this picture got out of China at the height of the protests in Tiananmen Square.
Taken on June 5, 1989 by photographer Jeff Widener, this picture, along with video of the event, shows an unknown man stopping a column of Chinese army tanks approaching Tiananmen Square. Both this picture and the video were seen across the globe (but not in China) and most likely led to the Chinese government’s decision to cut off all reporting and broadcasts during the bloody crackdown that followed. As a result, there is very little photographic or video evidence of what would later happen.
Of course, things were different back then. Few people had personal computers (especially in China), the Internet was virtually unheard of and almost no one had a cell phone. There was no email, no YouTube, no Twitter to spread the word. Consequently, there was no need for the government to shut down access to those websites or to Flickr, Bing, Hotmail or Blogger like the Chinese government recently did in order to quell potential protesters from using these services to organize follow-on protests. But what would have happened if the Tiananmen Square protests occurred today (or, conversely, what if the protesters had access to global social networks in 1989)?
On the one hand, probably very little. Case in point; recent protests in Moldova (the comments offer significant insight) suggest that, at least in some places, social networking technologies are not highly effective tools for organizing dissent.
However, consider a much more (dare I say) “wired” society where a large percentage of the population not only have cameras in their cell phones, but can also send photos from those very same phones across the globe as events happen. Add to that the ability to post videos to YouTube or to a blog and you can see why it’s so easy for, say, a crowd of teens to use social networks to organize riots in the center of an American city.
Imagine what could have happened if the tens of thousands of protesters in Tiananmen Square had access to cell phones, video cameras, Wi-Fi, Twitter and Facebook. Considering that the Chinese Government missed cutting off access to API-based Twitter apps (they were initially not as severely impacted as the website) there is little doubt that “Tank Man” would not have been alone as the sole, iconic picture of Tiananmen.
