Foreign Policy's Evegeny Morozov has a cover story in this month's Prospect (UK) on how he evolved into a hearty skepticism about technology's potential to slay dictators, empower the disempowered, and generally lead to a more just political landscape. Morozov -- who has been in the past affiliated with Georgetown University, in his role as a Yahoo! Fellow, as well as George Soros' Open Society Institute -- turned from a proponent of digital democracy to a doubter when his efforts in the field, he says, "seemed to be hurting the very causes we were trying to promote." Morozov's critique here centers on the idea that intolerant regimes seem to be getting pretty skilled as using the Internet to their own advantage.

In this Prospect essay, Morozov brands New York University professor and theorist Clay Shirky "the man most responsible for the intellectual confusion over the political role of the internet." And so, Prospect has given Shirky a chance to respond. He takes the opportunity to highlight how social media creates a new kind of "information cascade" when it comes to political resistance. In other words and to put it simply, the idea is that potential political protestors can wait and see the government responds to opposition. Political protests can have a longer tail today because those on the fence benefit from watching -- often in real time -- how early adopters fare in their resistance. Shirky:

Prior to the spread of social media, a typical classic case of late and failed reaction by the regime to an information cascade is the one documented by Lohmann, around the collapse of communism in eastern Europe. The classic case of late and successful reaction by a regime is Tiananmen Square and, even there, the subsequent alteration of the Chinese state continues to be driven in part by the recognition that without continued economic improvement, the same forces that drove insurrection might return. Though the regime always holds most of the power, insurrections that take advantage of the dynamics of information cascades thus offer protesters both offensive and defensive capabilities that they wouldn’t otherwise have.

It's an interesting debate, and both essays are worth reading.

That said, it's worth noting that both Morozov and Shirky here are focusing their commentary almost entirely on in-the-streets, down-with-dictators style political actions. Of course, politics involves a lot more than just political protests. Marching loudly in the streets of Tehran or crashing Moldova's capital building certainly catches attention. But narrowing in on that sliver of where tech meets politics seems to ignore an enormous universe of other stuff that matters, like using technology to help build civil society, empower social organizations, engage in the political process, advance intellectual arguments, create better options for young people, so on and so forth. (Photo credit: Dan Patterson)

Writing on his Foreign Policy net.effect blog last week, Evegeny Morozov may well have been the first writer to suggest that Moldova's anti-communist protests could be seen as a "Twitter revolution." That theme was picked up in a number of other press reports. It was, notably, the inspiration for the headline under which the New York Times' first front-page story on the post-election protest ran. As I blogged about here, there has been some questioning about whether Twitter played as instrumental a role in the violent two-day uprising as the press attention indicates. Now Morozov is back to explain and shore up his framing.

Morozov's central argument, if I'm reading him correctly, is that those of us questioning the "Twitter revolution" concept are guilty of a failure of imagination. "It's kind of surprising," he wrote, "to see so many people misunderstand the power of networks in such profound ways." Some of the criticism had been that given the small number of Moldovans who are on Twitter and reports that cell phone coverage was shut down in Piata Marii Adunari Nationale during the time of the protests, there was a leap of faith involved in believing that so few people working with so little could spur so large a social protest. We've certainly seen in cases like Colombia's No Mas FARC street protests or the creative opposition to China's Tibet policy in the context of last summers Olympics that a few committed people with access to a few simple social tools can generate social action out of proportion to their relative size and objective strength. I doubt you'll get much argument in these parts over the idea that networks can be immensely powerful.

Remember that episode from Seinfeld where Jerry objects when his dentist, a brand-new convert to the Jewish faith, starts making Jewish jokes? Someone asks Jerry if he's offended as a Jewish person. No, he protests, I'm offended as a comedian. For the tech-minded political writer, there are few things more tempting than the chance to combine "Twitter" and "Revolution" in the same sentence. Throw in the exotic nation of Moldova, and forget it. That's a delicious tale to tell.

Twitter, writes Morozov, might not have played much of a role in organizing the protests in Chisinau, but it has played quite a significant role in promoting what happened there -- and, more importantly, the concerns of Moldova's youth about the direction of the country and the validity of the recent parliamentary election. (The Moldovan Constitutional Court has announced a vote recount.) It's a useful distinction. And indeed, the Twitter stream of the #pman hashtag has piled up thousands upon thousands of tweets. There hasn't, though, been much in the way of studied evidence about how Twitter (and Facebook and YouTube) actually contributed to the recent events in Moldova. What role social media can play in the overthrow of oppressive governments by organized minorities is arguably one of the most compelling questions of our time. But in this case, that's very much an open question. There's really no less reason to be skeptical or rigorous about the role of Twitter in a political episode as we are about the role of, say, ideological conflicts or foreign governments or any other political factor.

More: As in all things in life, Ethan Zuckerman here is instructive.

Back in my high school days, I hosted a sophisticated little soiree amongst some close friends that happened to turn into a raging kegger requiring of police intervention. How'd it happen? One friend called another, who called another, who called another, who called another, who called another. So on and so forth. (This was the prehistoric days before cell phones, so news of the party was traveling via land lines, if you can believe it.) Eventually, my house was packed to the gills with a rowdy bunch of strangers. Things finally came to a head when someone decided that it would be a good idea to bring lit tiki torches inside the house.

Now, is it fair to call that an epic house party a product of telephone technology? It seems a bit silly to do so. At the time, it seemed to me much more a product of the degenerate class of people I went to high school with. It's a question on my mind as people start to take a second look at went went down in the Moldovan capital city of Chisinau, where a reported 10,000 people gathered in the central square of Piata Marii Adunari Nationale and stormed government buildings there. The New York Times ran a story of the protest by writer Ellen Barry that put a heavy focus on Twitter. That, it seems, kicked off a frenzy of similar stories telling the tale of how young Moldovans, angry about the certification of election results that put the ruling Communist Party at 50% of the vote, took to Twitter and Facebook to generate the Chisinau protest.

But Daniel Bennett, a PhD student embedded at the BBC to study the impact of new media on war coverage, isn't so sure. "As it stands, the Twitter revolution is a myth," he writes. Bennett traces the spark of the protests to a core group of young activists, with investigative journalist Natalia Morari, exiled back to her home country after exposing corruption and possibly murder in Vladamir Putin's Russia, at the center. Morari herself, reports Amnesty International, now says that she only intended to organize a few hundred people. The several thousand that turned out, she argues, where opposition groups who took the opportunity of the small protest to throw, in effect, a rager. Says the group, "Amnesty International considers that they were exercising their right to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly and if arrested for organizing a peaceful assembly for which they had notified the authorities, Amnesty International will consider them to be prisoners of conscience." And Wired's Nathan Hodge reports that Morari and other organizers will be charged with "calls for organizing and staging mass disturbances."

For his part, Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin is convinced that it was actually Romanian nationalists behind the uprising, and has closed the border with the country that many young Moldovans see as a beacon of hope. Some in the opposition are arguing that Moldovan president Vladimir Voronin organized the uprising against his own party so that he might engineer a crackdown.

Bennett has a look at Morari's Live Journal blog and finds no mention of Twitter. (She does, though, talk in retrospect about the флэш-моба that went down on Monday, which of course is Russian for "flash mob.") Writes Bennett about the New York Times piece that started the "Twitter Revolution" meme, "the Twitter community in the whole of Moldova is around 100 to 200 strong and there is scant mention of the organisation of the protests at all apart from a rather vague quote the Times has put in at the end of the piece." To be sure, the Twitter stream of the #pman hashtag -- shorthand for the park in which the protests took place -- is still flowing rapidly. Understanding what's happening in there is, alas, hampered by my dreadful Romanian. But you have to wonder how many of the reporters repeating the "Twitter Revolution" theme speak it much better.

Out of the many stories being told this morning about how Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media is fueling robust anti-communist protests in the Moldovan capital of Chisinau, one quote in particular jumps out. "Moldova is like a sealed jar," said 48 year-old theater director Mihai Fusu, quoted in a New York Times' piece by Ellen Barry. In recent years, young people fled the tiny former Soviet country nestled between Romania and Ukraine to seek jobs and opportunity abroad. But the global recession has pushed them back within Moldova's borders. Many gathered in Chisinau, feeling trapped and without options. But as we watch the protests from afar this morning, that jar isn't looking quite so sealed.

The spark of the protests was an election Sunday in which the ruling Communist party claimed 50 percent of the vote, which puts it in a position to name a new president. The election results were certified by the United Nations-affiliated Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. But some young Moldovans weren't buying OSCE's final summary of election results. Twitterer @mad_ab_you, for example, tweeted this: "#pman european observer admits communists only had 35% of the votes at counting end." As we've seen so often on Twitter in times of protest or trouble, tweeters linked off to third-party sources to validate the information they're sharing with the world. In this case, @mad_ab_you linked off a report on Moldova Azi, the Soros Foundation-backed local newspaper.

The Twitter protest seems to have caught fire. That hashtag of #pman -- standing for Piaţa Marii Adunări Naţionale, the name of a a public square in the city center -- was used to call Moldovans to rally. Reports are that more than 10,000 people rapidly gathered yesterday in the square to protest the election results and the country's communist leadership. And it's become one of the top trending topics on Twitter. Groups like Think Moldova are also working online to organize offline, and aggregator sites are popping up to pull together relevant Twitter streams, blog posts, Flickr feeds, and YouTube videos.

Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin, for one, is having a tough time swallowing the idea that the uproar is spontaneous, bubbling up organically and coming together via Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. CNN reports that he's attempting to convince Moldovans that the protests were "well thought-out, organized and paid for" by his political opposition.

(Photo credit: Unimedia)