How Killing the Internet Helped Revolutionaries

An anonymous reader writes "In a widely circulated American Political Science Association conference paper, Yale scholar Navid Hassanpour argues that shutting down the internet made things difficult for sustaining a centralized revolutionary movement in Egypt. But, he adds, the shutdown actually encouraged the development of smaller revolutionary uprisings at local levels where the face-to-face interaction between activists was more intense and the mobilization of inactive lukewarm dissidents was easier. In other words, closing down the internet made the revolution more diffuse and more difficult for the authorities to contain." As long as we're on the subject, reader lecheiron points out news of research into predicting revolutions by feeding millions of news articles into a supercomputer and using word analysis to chart national sentiment. So far it's pretty good at predicting things that have already happened, but we should probably wait until it finds something new before contacting Hari Seldon.

Comments

Just give it a little thought

[Dyinobal]

If you're like me you don't generally like the government I got loads of complaints with the state of the government in the USA but do I really do much about it? No I'm too busy with my job, friends and other stuff. Plus lets face it things aren't that bad here despite all the dire stuff they put on the news. But if the government suddenly turned off my porn and tv shows plus slashdot and various other sites I habitually use I'd be up in arms pounding on my congressman's door maybe even joining a riot if the mood was right.