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The new digital technologies are powerful tools in moments of crisis, but they cannot substitute for sustained citizen activism My friends and I spent much of the past month channelling Cairo via New York. Our Facebook and Twitter feeds kept breathless pace with the events in Tahrir Square. There were plenty of fears and reservations (which remain), but our dominant emotion was awe that such change was indeed possible – and that social media could play a significant part in it. Now that the euphoria has waned, hard political realities come into view. But for my part, I’m left wondering about the nature of this new chimera, with the face of social media grafted onto the body of political action. As I ponder at recent examples from my travels, I think I perceive a pattern: social media can make an impressive contribution when there’s a dose of urgency in the air, quickly translated into adrenalin. But absent that charge, online attention and activism can fade quickly. Coincidentally for me, the events in Egypt came on the heels of the first anniversary of the Haitian earthquake. I co-authored a report on the latter event for the Knight Foundation that examined the role of media in the relief efforts. The report describes how the disaster inspired legions of students at various universities to create impromptu support systems for Ushahidi and other social media platforms. The tech community also came together. One of its contributions was to consolidate and upgrade various search wikis into the Google Person Finder. This platform utilises crowdsourcing to help disaster victims locate their loved ones. The advances achieved in Haiti are now available to the victims of the 22February New Zealand earthquake . Obviously, people who see real potential to overthrow a brutal dictator and people involved with dislocated populations as a result of natural disasters experience a strong motivation to use whatever tools come to hand. In Egypt, there has been a lot of emphasis on Twitter, but the data suggests that there were well under 15,000 Egyptians tweeting , out of a population of more than 80 million (and some may have been outside the country). So we shouldn’t let tech-euphoria distract us from other critical factors. These include al-Jazeera’s broadcasts of the protests reaching into millions of Egyptian living rooms; Muslim clerics who authorised resistance to the state’s abuse of authority; and uncounted millions of individual cellphone calls (as opposed to tweets). Not all of these activities generate data, but that doesn’t mean they should be overlooked. At the same time, there are a lot of worthy social media projects that have a hard time getting traction. I’m a big fan of Ushahidi, and have been collecting examples of its use on my travels. One of my favourites is on Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post’s Citizen Map , which charts illegal waste dumping and other environmental abuses. The map has been up since November, but the paper is hoping that the number of participants will grow. The team for the Kibera Open Street Map project in Kenya reports a similar phenomenon: “Build it and they will come … slowly.” It appears that when a situation involves low-grade chronic problems such as uncollected garbage and uncharted neighbourhoods, it’s simply harder to convince citizens to volunteer their time – even if the project is to their immediate benefit. I can’t say I’m surprised. During the last big blizzard in New York, an Ushahidi map popped up on my screen to record street blockages. After a day, there were only some 30 reports. (I’m embarrassed to say none were mine, even though our street was impassable for three days). Evgeny Morozov calls it “slacktivism” , where it’s easier to click a “like” button on Facebook than it is to participate in a crisis-mapping platform. Part of the challenge is to teach the public the power of the new tools. But maybe it’s also time to revive a notion of citizenship that involves more than one-click participation – before we hit the next crisis. • Anne Nelson is speaking at The Morningside Post ‘s second annual conference, “Information Overload? Navigating the Age of Democratised Media” , at Columbia University, New York on Friday 25 February. More details via Facebook Digital media Egypt Arab and Middle East protests Middle East Social media Crowdsourcing Twitter Facebook Google Social networking Protest Activism United States Haiti Al-Jazeera Anne Nelson guardian.co.uk