Discourses of Technology and Liberation: State Aid to Net Activists in an Era of “Twitter Revolutions”

Abstract

Although the use of social media for the purposes of protest organization and dissent in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya was widely reported by bloggers, journalists, and academics, these reports were rarely rooted in detailed research. In fact, the terms “Twitter Revolution” and “Facebook Revolution” have now been called into question as overly techno-utopian, and as ignoring the use of social media by authoritarian regimes for the purposes of repression. Despite this lack of concrete evidence, representatives of the Swedish state were quick to declare social media as key tools in the battles over freedom of speech rights and democratic change. On January 21, 2011, the Swedish Minister for International Development Cooperation published an opinion piece in the Expressen newspaper, titled, “Net Activists Are the New Democracy Fighters.” The response of the Swedish administration—primarily how the administration made clear links between technological innovation and democratic/social change, and translated those links into concrete action in the form of aid—raises a number of questions regarding the ways in which a powerful stakeholder appears to assume a causal relation among technology use, the expansion of access to information, and democratic change. The purpose of this article is to examine how the technology discourse forwarded by the current Swedish government—in policy documents and public statements—reflects a liberation technology perspective on the relation between technology and sociopolitical change in developing countries, particularly in relation to possible foreign aid to net activists.