This week, in lieu of the congressmen and capitalists who typically make up delegations to Russia, Washington sent a detachment of Silicon Valley dreamboats: the 33-year-old creator of Twitter; the “chief lizard wrangler” of Mozilla; the chief executive of eBay; and — for good measure — the actor Ashton Kutcher, who has edged out Britney Spears to become the world’s most popular Tweeter.

The approach is an unorthodox one, punctuated by such strange moments as Mr. Kutcher’s tweeted discovery of a Siberian man whose arm bore a large tattoo of his face. But it indicates how seriously Washington takes online networking as a social force.

Among the delegation’s goals was to persuade Russia’s thriving online social networks to take up social causes like fighting corruption or human trafficking, said Jared Cohen, who serves on Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s policy planning staff.

But it also references an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal by Evgeny Morozov, who isn’t so sure that social media is going to succeed where more conventional means of diplomacy have not :

While sanctions and negotiations—the well-tested ways of wielding American power—do not get us very far with China and Iran, social media as a tool of foreign policy has the unique advantage of being untested. It never failed—so it must be working.

An attempt to log on to Facebook in Iran. The screen reads in part, ‘access to this site is not possible.’

It’s easy to see why a world in which young Iranians embrace the latest technology funded by venture capitalists from Silicon Valley, while American diplomats sit back, sip tea and shovel the winter snow on a break from work, sounds so appealing. But is such a world achievable? Will Twitter and Facebook come to the rescue and fill in the void left by more conventional tools of diplomacy? Will the oppressed masses in authoritarian states join the barricades once they get unfettered access to Wikipedia and Twitter?

This seems quite unlikely. In fact, our debate about the Internet’s role in democratization—increasingly dominated by techno-utopianism—is in dire need of moderation, for there are at least as many reasons to be skeptical. Ironically, the role that the Internet played in the recent events in Iran shows us why: Revolutionary change that can topple strong authoritarian regimes requires a high degree of centralization among their opponents. The Internet does not always help here. One can have “organizing without organizations”—the phrase is in the subtitle of “Here Comes Everybody,” Clay Shirky’s best-selling 2008 book about the power of social media—but one can’t have revolutions without revolutionaries.

Contrary to the utopian rhetoric of social media enthusiasts, the Internet often makes the jump from deliberation to participation even more difficult, thwarting collective action under the heavy pressure of never-ending internal debate. This is what may explain the impotence of recent protests in Iran: Thanks to the sociability and high degree of decentralization afforded by the Internet, Iran’s Green Movement has been split into so many competing debate chambers—some of them composed primarily of net-savvy Iranians in the diaspora—that it couldn’t collect itself on the eve of the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution. The Green Movement may have simply drowned in its own tweets.

Rita J. King, whose work studying how people learn about Islam in the virtual world of Second Life we have featured in a previous post, has a different take; she agrees with Morozov that “Twitter and Facebook can potentially present more harm than good when it comes to creating and executing a real revolution, but so could drawing your pistol slower back in the wild wild West.”

King adds:

While Morozov focuses on what he perceives to be an illusion of “techno-utopianism,” I would argue that the illusion runs even deeper, because even successful revolutions eventually morph into the hard reality of “now what?”

And “now what” will not be solved on Twitter or Facebook, but rather within complex platforms that foster design and simulation of better systems that benefit more human beings, which is what the #RusTechDel is attempting. The sum total of the Internet is not just social media, but also the facilitation of more thoughtful, sophisticated design of systems that will undermine human suffering and give us a greater understanding of the common bonds that make us human and ultimately give our lives meaning.

I absolutely support the ongoing development of meaningful social media and its ability to make us more complete, connected human beings. It is revolutionary in itself that Evgeny Morozov and the Wall Street Journal can get so many people thinking, talking, blogging, and musing about revolution on a Saturday morning!