Does Facebook make revolutions?

The main theme of the 2nd meeting of the Arab-Turkish Social Sciences Congress in Cairo was "The non-governmental actors of change in the Middle East." It is now a generally accepted view that states are not to be regarded as the sole, or even the most decisive, actor in processes of social change. The process of globalization opens the way for new actors. But it is important to distinguish that globalization itself is working here not as an "actor" but as a "factor." Confusing the two generally can carry the cost of missing what is going on and of suffering all sorts of political tossing about. Perceiving a historical development that operates as a factor, or its results, as if it were a political actor can drag one into a kind of political inertia or impropriety, such as fighting windmills.

That is why it is necessary to analyze well the situations in which there is a possibility of actor and factor assessments being confused with each other.

For example, where does the media stand today in the transformation under way in the Middle East? It is an evident reality that the media is changing more and more in the course of the process and diversifying within itself. Until the early nineties, at best, the role played by the media was something else: state-directed television and newspapers published under state supervision. Today, by contrast, the new horizons opened by the satellite dish system and the internet media have placed the media among the most important agents of social change. Moreover, entering this media order is extremely easy. Because of the new media order, a television elite that was once extremely narrow has grown immensely today, and the number of people working in this sector has reached a considerable figure. Today in Turkey nearly every province has at least one TV channel and many radio stations. The total of the people employed in these settings makes up a significant stratum. A significant portion of the people in this stratum have the opportunity to express their own views on the events taking place in the country every day and to influence public opinion.

The internet, for its part, is now a field that anyone with simple access can enter. This field allows people nobody had reckoned with to enter the stage uninvited in the shaping of public opinion and, increasingly, in the determination of policies. The internet and social media environments do not merely lead to the opening of new channels of socialization; they also open up to everyone, as an opportunity, the chance of being an actor in social change. Just as the invention of the printing press, beginning in Europe, enabled literacy to reach the masses and, from there, far more crowded segments than before to join the debate, today a revolution on a far larger scale is possible thanks to the spread of the internet. The internet thus fulfills the function of an important public sphere.

But at this point we must correctly understand what kind of public sphere the internet is and what role it plays in the process of change. An assessment we heard often during the Arab Spring is that the revolutions were made by the internet, in particular by social media networks, Facebook and Twitter. Moreover, it did not remain the kind of claim that could be brushed aside as a simple grammatical error or slip of the tongue.

Frankly, overstressing the role of the internet or of the media networks in question in the revolution leads to neglecting the sociology behind the revolution. Moreover, since the internet is used as a symbol of technology, such explanations become another way of saying "there are Western powers behind the revolution." This repeats a West-centric assumption that says Easterners cannot make a revolution on their own and that if there is a revolution it surely came from the West. Yet the internet is a medium, whereas revolution is a will. Without a will of the people, in flesh and bone, to display this will (ash-shaʿb yurīd!), no technology is of any use.

In truth this is a somewhat more complicated form of a simpler explanation we have heard since the beginning of the revolution. Constantly looking for other powers behind the revolution, especially Western powers (the US, the EU), rests on a false belief that people cannot do anything on their own and that behind whatever is happening there is a superior Westerner. Indeed, in the social sciences, imagining so great a power that foresees and manages everything in advance is contrary to the nature of things. Moreover, such a conception is also contrary to the Islamic creed. For imagining so great a power also produces a kind of fatalism and exhausts man's power to be an actor, an agent, in social events.

Since everything is done by a "great power" anyway, there is no need for us to do anything. Whatever we do, we could not have done anything other than serve that great power's great calculation. Yet the most important thing required for real change is will, and will is the most important attribute that makes a human being human. And there is nothing that human will cannot change. As God Almighty says, "God will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves."

That is why we preferred to make "the actors of change" the sub-theme of ATCOSS 2012. With this we in fact aimed both to question the approaches existing in the social sciences that belittle the will of societies, and to talk about how decisive the smaller actors of change, that is, the actors who can use the will God has given, can be. When we determined this subject, the revolution had not yet happened. Thank God, the revolution gave a positive response to this idea of ours very early on.

It showed how those small actors who truly resolve to change themselves can turn into the "real" decisive actors. Thus we also witnessed with certainty of sight how God changes a people who change what is in themselves. In the more than a hundred papers presented at the three-day congress, this process was practically attested.