Technological triumphalists beware: After hearing about the transformative power of blogging for the past 15 years, of social media for the past five years, and of WikiLeaks for the past year, we now have evidence of how easily the disruptive power of the Internet can itself be disrupted — by pulling the plug. For all the talk of the cloud, all those bits and bytes depend on hardware — servers with switches and cables — that can simply be turned off or cut off from the grid, as coverage of the crisis in Egypt makes clear.
“Autocratic governments often limit phone and Internet access in tense times,” Matt Richtel reports in The New York Times. “But the Internet has never faced anything like what happened in Egypt on Friday, when the government of a country with 80 million people and a modernizing economy cut off nearly all access to the network and shut down cellphone service.”
Richtel quotes Prof. Mohammed el-Nawawy of the communications department at Queens University of Charlotte: “The government has made a big mistake taking away the option at people’s fingertips … Blogs are not important right now. Things have moved beyond that point.”