Revolution by remote control

Kavitha Rajagopalan is the author of “Muslims of Metropolis: The Stories of Three Immigrant Families in the West.”

According to London-based Damascus native Ausama Monajed, a spokesman for the new coalition in Syria, there are about 20 people coordinating the anti-government protests in that country. And most of them are outside of Syria.

That 20 twenty-somethings can, with a mere wireless connection, control the stability and perhaps future of a country several international borders away is both astounding and unprecedented -- and raises questions about political engagement in the age of immigration and the Internet.

This week, The New York Times reported that not only are these exiled Syrians organizing protests, they are also helping to spread the word about the brutal government crackdown on protesters, using smuggled cellphones and other mobile technologies, and are broadcasting images and video to the wide world on Facebook and Twitter. This way, they are working to garner international support for their movement -- and legitimacy in the eyes of the world for any government they might eventually seek to form.

Much has been made of the youth and Internet savvy of the people behind this year's "Arab Spring," the uprisings taking place across the Middle East and North Africa. But as we well know, not all young people in the Mideast have the same political leanings or technological savvy. Whose voices are we hearing, and for whom do they speak?

Certainly, diaspora communities can find a voice and come together on social media like never before. But there are still questions about who uses this technology, and how and why.

In mainstream media coverage, the underlying assumption often seems to be that Internet access is universally empowering and that the Internet-savvy are somehow inherently pro-democracy, tolerant and modern. But we have very limited data on the political leanings of Internet users from around the world or in the Middle East, or if they are politically interested at all.

Just as free elections in the former Yugoslavia and Palestinian territories have brought right-wing leadership to power, so too must we be cautious in assuming that a platform for free speech will guarantee that the loudest (or even the most polished) voice wants the greatest freedoms for the most people.

Some coverage of the Syrian uprisings has highlighted the extreme disconnect between the official and anecdotal narratives of political life in this tightly sealed, highly censored country. But the new narrative that is emerging is likely one of many.

Nonetheless, these remote-control revolutionaries offer a very interesting perspective on the political lives of immigrant and diaspora communities. In an earlier era, immigrants were often expected to choose a new home over the old. In fact, most citizenship ceremonies include a pledge of loyalty, renouncing all ties to the former homeland.

But today, with more immigrants in the world and a wider range of immigration statuses than ever before, along with the rise in social media, it is wholly possible to participate in multiple governments at once. Today, immigrants form online communities around a wide range of issues -- and in a number of countries. Often, immigrant community groups and organizations combine cultural events with political ones, and local politics with global movements.

We know that many people have been enemies of the Syrian state for a broad range of reasons, from political dissent to publishing literary magazines to simply belonging to an ethnic or religious minority. The most powerful, transformative voices in Syria and its diasporic communities today might well be writing poetry or discussing music or building water-management systems or schools or teaching languages that have not been recognized under the Assad regime.

The more of these many unheard voices -- both at home and abroad -- that can weigh in during this transformative moment, the more inclusive and stable any resulting government might be. And that would be truly revolutionary in Syria.