It’s easy to say that the events in Egypt last week were truly stunning. And regardless of whether the revolution proves to be a good or a bad thing for the country in the long run, here’s another truth that’s equally amazing: It appears that social media was a key player in what happened.
Lots of people have been kicking around the idea that before the protestors descended on Tahrir Square, they were rallying on Facebook and being spurred on by speeches on YouTube. And little 140 character entries on Twitter became the tweets heard ’round the world.
Now, I’m not saying that Facebook caused a revolution in the Middle East. But I do think it’s interesting that this relatively new technology is having such a widespread impact. Or as E.B. Boyd says it in her fastcompany.com article: “Did social media make all this happen? No, of course not. Did it bring everything to a head much sooner than it would have, had Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube not existed? Absolutely.”
And it’s not just that the Internet and this new world-wide interconnectivity got the word out about when and where protests would happen. Boyd states that the constant flowing conversation shaped how the world saw the conflict—bypassing media channels and changing the common descriptors from “chaos” to a more defendable “revolution.” She also suggests that information flooding out in the form of tweets and YouTube videos may have helped shape the U.S. reaction to the protests.
Other commentators have been discussing how social media is literally changing the world’s perceptions about what is and what is not acceptable. This past Sunday on This Week with Christiane Amanpour on ABC, I caught a roundtable discussion of the Egyptian situation and the impact that social network interconnectivity had. Political pundit George Will opined, “All modern tyrannies have depended on an intellectual autarky—being able to seal off the consciousness of their people from the outside world … It can’t be done anymore. And it may be the case then that tyranny is just not feasible anymore.”
Chew on that statement for a moment.
Will’s fellow panelist, Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy backed him up with, “Since social media started spreading across the Arab world—and you had a generation that was always marginalized and told, ‘you do not count,’—everyone started realizing, ‘I count.’ That is an incredible force, ‘I count.'”
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