I wrote a post earlier on my blog about the rare possibility that the government could shut down the internet. In the nature of that statement, I have understood that it might seem absurd to even contemplate such a thing happening, over here, in the free west.  But that post was spurred on by the movement that was happening in Tiran and Lybia.  Simply by looking at the patterns of that movement and how social media and technology played such an important part, it made me realize that something like that could possibly happen here.  Here’s why: for the first time in our civility, a single individual has been able to challenge our government or the institution without the threat of being filtered, unheard or made desist by leveraging a platform made available almost to everyone, easily and quickly.

This is a threat

Right or wrong, when the people have the power to form movements and spread their message quickly, the easiest and most effective way to shut them down is to go to the root of the ‘problem’ and prevent any further means of communication.  If you look at what’s happening in places like New York where the Occupy Wallstreet movement is gaining steam, it’s easy to predict that there might come a point where the mayor makes the decision that a site like Twitter needs to shut down.  God forbid, the movement turns into riots or violence, it’s safe to say that something along the lines of what happened in London is quite possible here.

To make it clear, I’m not part of any movement and I’m not advocating any of this to happen.  I just think that more and more, it’s bound to happen.  When it does, we’ll have to evaluate what it means to have access to tools like Twitter and we’ll have to see if our freedoms are intact and if the internet still represents they type of autonomy we think it does.

Counter Arguement

Evgeny Morozov, the author of the book Net Delusion proposes the argument that in the extreme case the internet can be used against its people by ‘suppressing free speech, honing their surveillance techniques, disseminate cutting-edge propaganda, and pacifying their populations with digital entertainment’.  He cites countried like China and even Iran where he states that a movement like the Twitter movement didn’t accomplish much.