In his influential 2004 book, “Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah,” the French political scientist Olivier Roy pointed out that what he termed Islamic “neofundamentalism,” despite its frequent references to the past and to the Koran, represents a very modern, even a postmodern, phenomenon. Emphasizing the role of the Internet in recruiting and sustaining jihadis, Roy said that this apocalyptic new ideology “valorizes the uprootedness of uprooted people” and provides them with a sense of belonging and meaning. The true believer, wherever he is, “remains in touch with the virtual community by sharing the same portable kit of norms, adaptable to any social context,” Roy wrote, adding that the Internet was “a perfect paradigm and tool of this virtual community.”
Nothing that has happened since 2004 invalidates Roy’s thesis. With the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, the neofundamentalists, or some of them, have gained a territorial foothold in eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq. But ISIS and other radical groups still rely heavily on information technology. In addition to using the Internet to recruit and to plan attacks, they know they can rely on it to amplify the immediate impact of their atrocities, especially “spectaculars” like the one carried out in Paris. That’s because the virtual community of jihadis and sympathizers that Roy identified isn’t the only one the Internet has created. As the past week and a half has made clear, there is also a global community of virtual witnesses to terrorism—a group of which we are nearly all members.
Sitting at home, in Brooklyn, on the evening of Friday, November 13th, I felt, at times, like I was on Boulevard Voltaire. France 24’s English-language news channel, which I was watching online, had a reporter and a camera stationed on Haussmann’s grand thoroughfare, about four hundred yards from the Bataclan concert hall. “This is a very twenty-first-century scene,” the reporter said at one point. He was referring not just to the police and police vehicles, which had formed a roadblock, but also to the other journalists stationed around him, and to the crowds of ordinary Parisians who had gathered to capture what was happening, or part of it, on their cellphones.
On Twitter, there was so much information and disinformation that I tried to distill some of it for my followers, picking out bits that looked reliable and supplementing them with information from the Web sites of Le Monde and Libération. I stepped away for a while, and by the time I got back online someone had created a #JeSuisParis hashtag. The Eiffel Tower peace sign, which the French artist Jean Jullien posted on Twitter shortly after midnight, Paris time, was going viral.
Many, many people were following the attack on their Facebook feeds. On his own page, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder, announced that it was activating its Safety Check feature, which allows users to notify their friends and family that they are unharmed. (The feature had previously been reserved for natural disasters.) Hours later, the company also activated a filter allowing people to overlay their profile pictures with the French flag. Zuckerberg was one of the first to use it. Millions followed his lead.
Perhaps all of this shouldn’t be over-interpreted. Even without the Internet, the spectacle of a gang of fanatics killing scores of people in a major Western city would of course have had enormous emotional resonance. If such an attack had taken place in 1989, say, during the bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution, it would have been just as shocking, even though people wouldn’t have had an electronic outlet on which to gather and express their feelings. And the outpourings online didn’t prevent people from paying tributes to the victims in more old-fashioned ways. In fact, social media helped to facilitate these reactions. While the hostage situation at the Bataclan theatre was still going on, a vigil began in Manhattan’s Union Square, where French students and others sang “La Marseillaise.” The Empire State Building went dark, and One World Trade Center was lit in red, white, and blue. Over the weekend, buildings from London to Sydney adopted the same colors. On the streets of Paris, and at French embassies all around the world, flowers and handwritten condolence cards piled up in huge numbers.
The English novelist Ian McEwan argued that, in a post-religious world—he was writing about secularized Europe—the proliferation of shrines reflects “a profound need for community.” For some of the people who leave flowers and handwritten notes, it may also reflect a desire to get off the computer, or off the couch in front of the television, and do something more tangible. And that last point can, perhaps, be generalized. Today’s information technology mediates our awareness of dreadful events, such as terrorist attacks, in a manner that makes them feel closer and more pressing. Unless we are dreadfully unlucky, the actual bombs and bullets don’t affect us directly; thanks to social media, though, we are all a part of the aftermath.
One danger is that this distorts the way we perceive such happenings and the scale of the threat that they represent to us. Obviously, ISIS and other radical Islamist groups now represent a real security issue. But how large is it compared to other causes of death and injury? According to numbers from Oxfam, which Max Roser, a data scientist at Oxford University, highlighted a few days ago on Twitter, terrorism of all kinds killed just over thirteen thousand people in 2010. In the United States alone, the annual death toll from firearms, including homicides and suicides, is more than thirty thousand. My aim here isn’t to criticize the gun lobby (I do that pretty often), and of course these deaths are all serious concerns. But I mean to point out that humans aren’t very good at dealing with probabilities, and that attacks of this nature, when viewed through the lens that modern technology provides, can exaggerate a number of well-known psychological biases.
One of these biases, which the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky pointed out decades ago, is sometimes referred to as the “law of small numbers.” Confronted with very limited amounts of data, people tend to generalize. A quarter comes up heads four times in a row, and we suspect that it is not a real coin. Islamic terrorists strike in Sinai and Paris, and we assume that we are moving into new reality in which such horrific events are everyday occurrences. Last weekend, I ran into an acquaintance who was terrified of a follow-up attack in New York. I pointed out that France is more than three thousand and four hundred miles away, and that there is a vast ocean separating it from the United States. I gently suggested that she take a break from the Internet. It didn’t do any good. Having spent two days monitoring the news obsessively, she couldn’t put it out of her mind: she felt like the threat was here and now.
Such a reaction is understandable, especially when members of ISIS are posting videos in which they threaten to strike Washington or Rome next, and when Brussels is in a security lockdown, as police search for suspects amid fears of an attack. The fact remains, though, that large-scale strikes on civilian targets outside the Middle East are a rarity. Since 9/11, Islamist terrorists have carried out spectacular attacks in London, Madrid, Mumbai, and Paris (twice). That’s a success rate of about once every three and a half years. Countless plots have been disrupted. In the case of the two attacks in Paris, most of the perpetrators were known to authorities, but they slipped through the net. That’s worrying, but it also confirms that Western countries aren’t defenseless. If they maintain their vigilance and insure that their police and intelligence agencies have adequate resources, they can do a great deal to protect civilian populations. Particularly at times like this, though, many people don’t find that very reassuring. They want absolute assurances, which no government can provide.
In other parts of the world, such as the Middle East and North Africa, terrorists do sometimes appear to be able to strike with impunity. Normally, though, these attacks don’t receive much attention in Western countries. The global community of terrorism witnesses didn’t convene such a vast online assembly two weeks ago, when suicide bombers, widely believed to be members of ISIS, killed as many as forty-three people and wounded more than a hundred in Beirut. Nor did it do so last month, when bombs killed at least ninety-five people in Ankara, the capital of Turkey—another attack that some analysts have attributed to ISIS. Friday’s murderous attack on a hotel in Mali has received more attention in Western countries, but that may have been because it came so soon after the attacks in Paris.
Selectivity isn’t a new phenomenon of course. Neither is the “representativeness heuristic,” which is a fancy phrase for allowing salient details, such as the sight of bloodied bodies on a Paris sidewalk, to overload our brains and prevent a calm, probabilistic assessment of the dangers we face. But in today’s world, there is real danger that both of these biases, and many others, can be amplified. Cowering in front of our computers, or crouched over our cellphones, we don’t see a single attack. We see something much larger and more threatening.
That is the mindset that the jihadis are trying to create, of course. In an essay in the Guardian earlier this year, the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, wrote, “People turn to terrorism because they know they cannot wage war, so they opt instead to produce a theatrical spectacle. Terrorists don’t think like army generals; they think like theatre producers.” From its early online shorts that showed young jihadis bearing black flags training in the desert to its ghoulish execution videos, ISIS has demonstrated an adroitness at producing online propaganda. But nothing engages the jihadis’ target audience like Westerners being killed where they live. When the terrorists succeed in carrying out these types of attacks, they don’t need to film the action, or distribute the footage. They know they can rely on us to magnify their actions. Moreover, short of shuttering the media and censoring the entire Internet, there appears to be nothing that Western governments can do about it.
Ultimately, we can only hope that the negative aspects of modern technology are outweighed by the positive ones, of which there certainly are some. The weekend after the Paris attacks, according to Facebook, more than four million people used Safety Check to reassure their friends and relations. That represented a small victory for social media. Another was the fact that so many of the messages posted online contained comments critical of ISIS. Researchers at N.Y.U.’s Social Media and Political Participation Lab analyzed more than four million tweets sent in the twenty-four hours after the attack. In the sample they looked at, tweets using explicitly anti-ISIS phrases appeared more than eight thousand times; pro-ISIS terms occurred fewer than four hundred times. “Twitter may act as an echo chamber to amplify extremist voices in the tightly clustered communities,” Alexandra Siegel, a researcher at N.Y.U., wrote at the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog. “But it can also help bridge the divide and expose online users with different sentiments to one another’s information sources and viewpoints.”
That may be an overly hopeful way to look at things. Just as Democrats don’t generally look around Twitter for tweets and articles critical of President Obama, it is doubtful that many jihadis or their supporters were reading anti-ISIS messages. What cannot be contradicted, however, is the fact that social media, for all its possible drawbacks, can also provide a uniquely powerful platform for ordinary people to register their abhorrence at terrorism.
Early last week, Antoine Leiris, a Parisian whose wife, Hélène Muyal-Leiris, was shot dead at the Bataclan theatre, posted a letter on his Facebook page, in which he addressed the killers directly. “I do not know who you are, and I don’t want to know, you are dead souls,” he wrote. “I will not give you the gift of hating you.” In the grand scheme of things, Leiris’s moving letter was just another simple online gesture. (He also read it in English for the B.B.C., which posted an audio version online.) It won’t bring back his wife, or any of the other victims. And given the grim determination with which many members of ISIS and other extremist Islamist groups pursue their ends, it is unlikely to dissuade any potential terrorists. But at a time when the most basic precepts of human decency are subject to violent assault, it was a welcome effort to confront the killers on their chosen medium, and to remind them that theirs is not the only virtual community.
