Last night’s discussion at Amnesty International, heralded as a curtain-raiser for the 2010 Amnesty Media Awards, was illuminating.

A cracking panel of Rory Cellan-Jones, Susan Pointer (Google’s Director of Public Policy), Annabel Sreberny from SOAS, Kev Anderson and the disembodied voice of Andrew Keen discussed the impact of social media tools on human rights and democracy worldwide.

I’m not going to write-up the whole event (including the various pops at Google). Others have done/will do, and the #aitech hashtag on Twitter and @newsfromamnesty cover it off well, as does the SMNR. But I did want to pick off a couple of points.

For me, though, one of the most relevant aspects of the discussion was the historical contextualisation of communications technologies. Kev Anderson and Susan Sreberny nailed this – as did Jon Leyne (who did a great piece on Iranian politics in cyberspace as BBC’s Tehran correspondent) from the floor.

• People challenging regimes use the best/latest communications technologies available in their community (from meetings/the printing press/cassette tapes and smuggled videos through to sms/Twitter/Facebook/Skype and YouTube.
• The newer communications technologies simply speed up politics – they don’t necessarily cause things to happen (but they can)
• Regimes have typically played “catch-up” with these technologies – from smashing up printing presses to restricting access to email. And this cat and mouse game will continue forever. In fact, Andrew Keen suggested that regimes are better at using the tools than individuals – and there are suggestions that the Chinese are now “exporting” their knowledge in this area.

The key take-out for me was a broad comms one, in how the tools are used and useful, to gather like-minded people both in the country and outside. In the same way that the BBC World Service has previously helped mobilise activisits in a country by “normalising” the behaviour of those activists, social media – including email - is now centre stage.

The internet also prevents a news blackout when Journalists are forced to leave a country. So where social media is proving immensely valuable is in mobilising international support – information no longer has to be smuggled out of a country when it can be posted on Flickr and YouTube. And those images are re-invigorating the diaspora/expat communities, who in turn prompt further media and political interest (and a degree of slactivism – excellently described by Annabel Sreberny as mousy solidarity) which may/may not prove effective in the long term.

The internet is neutral. It’s how individuals and countries use it, that’s up for discussion. As is whether access to the internet is a human right – but that’s another post entirely...

All in all a great session over at Amnesty UK. And really good to see a few familiar faces there – in particular Ben, Jed (sorry I dashed off), Matt, Steve, Jaz, Chris, and Peter.

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