The “Green Revolution”: a case of being blinded by the new

Written by Noah Flower on Friday, July 23rd, 2010
Filed under Synthesis

“New” is a powerful force for getting people excited. New technologies often create new winners and losers, and in the rush to be a winner, or at least find out who the winners will be, many of us end up getting a little ahead of ourselves. This pattern has been on full display in the past year as the complete story of Iran’s “Green Revolution” has emerged. Many of the most respected media outlets in the U.S. reported on the protests in Iran as being powerfully accelerated by the use of Twitter, and the State Department famously asked Twitter to postpone its scheduled maintenance out of concern that the downtime could hamper the protesters’ coordination. But now it turns out that it just wasn’t so: as documented in Foreign Policy and elsewhere, the tweeting was happening outside of Iran, serving only to spread the news from Iran to the world and hardly—if at all—used by the dissidents themselves. There were those who raised questions at the time. For example, we quoted Gaurav Mishra in an interview with BusinessWeek arguing that Iranians’ use of the tools remains “somewhat limited” but that the story was getting attention because “the international media loves [the] social-networking world.”

I think this is an important cautionary tale for anyone leading an organization who is trying to answer the often-asked question: “What’s your social media strategy?” The dangerous answer is, as we’ve mentioned here before, “We’re going to get on Twitter, start a Facebook group, and launch a blog.” Those are answers that focus on the tool, not the outcome. We see the same issue when we talk to people about innovation, which is a process that is often mistaken for a goal. New technology is just like a new process: a means to an end that should always be used with care to serve your underlying organizational needs.

Why is it so common to confuse the two? One reason is the fear of “grasping the nettle,” hoping that the new process or technology will mean that your problem will simply vanish. Another reason, often ignored, is that we in the West tend to have a kind of lightweight messianism in how we see technology. To my eye, part of the reason why the story of the “Twitter revolution” was so easily believed was because many see new technology as simply making the world better. Technology represents progress, an idea that has a special place in American culture, and that feeds into a common attitude that when there’s new technology available that simply using it should solve the problem at hand. But that’s rarely the case and especially rare when the technology is designed to improve the way we interact. The opportunities we see in those technologies for improved relationships, and the ways we grasp those opportunities, have far more impact than the tools’ mere presence. When we fall in love with the newness of a technology, as the media did with Twitter, we can easily be blinded by that unconscious belief that it will simply whisk us off into a brighter world. But of course, new technologies merely open the door. It is up to use to step through.