Facebook and Twitter alone can’t be used to win elections

By Moses Karanja

Sir Tim Berners Lee invented something of unbelievable power. The connectivity of computers, and hence individuals, has been billed as the flagship innovation of the last century, and rightly so.

Time and distance have continually lost their traditional value in most human interactions. What has been lost on many though is the control side of this socio-techno revolution. Political masters and corporate vampires find it easier to control and predict populations more than ever.

We are still wobbling in the baby steps of the Internet age and can be forgiven for believing the Internet will be the panacea of our social contradictions. Many Kenyans on Twitter believe they can Tweet MPs to forced retirement while Facebook ‘friends’ are convinced liking a page will miraculously bring home a new government.

Intellectual sources of the growing excitement about the liberating potential of the Internet have been backed up by data from the Iranian Revolts, North Africa’s Arab Spring and recently the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. Online degrees have made possible the reach of education to many thousands of miles from Ivory Towers.

E-commerce has seen consumers buy from the comfort of their rooms while sharing of information saw the likes of Julian Assange put a dent on modern international relations through his Wikileaks venture.

When everyone was asking why the Facebook revolution was not flowing southern against the Nile from Tahrir Square to Sub Saharan Africa, one answer would have explained why. Freedom and control are the thesis and antithesis of society. Karl Marx said history of all hitherto societies has been a history of class struggle. If the industrial age exemplified his analogy, then the information age sharpened its edges. The citizen is in the radar; she can be counted, heard and easily predicted.

We forget the other side of the equation. Governments are out to control citizens by gathering as much information about them as possible. Michel Foucault, the French philosopher concept of governmentality comes in handy. To him, the states penetrate social spaces to eavesdrop on citizens’ trending topics. Through this, they can better govern them or rather impose their order by design.

Through social media, individuals share when they wake up, why they hate the public transport, what they are having for lunch and where, with whom will they watch which movie and why Arsenal should buy new players and Gor Mahia fans banned from public stadiums. This has offered the keen state unbelievable arsenal for their survival. Such free and correct information shapes trends, patterns and expectation on the side of the citizens. Corporate intelligence knows who visits which restaurant, who visits which website and why advertising on a website works better than through radio.

The powerful, economically and politically, have penetrated the masses. The masses have become too excited to notice it, or if they do, they tweet and post about it. The extent to which one side of the divide is organised in harnessing their energies while at the same time deconstructing that of the opponent explains success or failure.

The dominant political and the corporate world, being more organised and consistent have reaped the benefits of an expanding visible population. When a few individuals attract more of their fellow peasants and lumpens, they are co-opted by the corporate firms to advertise their products. Politicians shamelessly hire them to tweet and post or in politically correct wording, manage their social media portfolio.

Paraphrasing a researcher on how technology affects society, he observed that when we get the remote peasant online, what will get him to the Internet is not going to be reports from Human Rights Watch. It’s going to be pornography, ‘Sex and the City,’ or maybe funny videos of cats. The more technology changes, the more society remains the same.

The writer is a researcher with Africa Policy Institute on Strategic and Security issues