{"id":11111,"date":"2011-09-24T14:38:26","date_gmt":"2011-09-24T10:38:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=11111"},"modified":"2011-09-24T14:38:26","modified_gmt":"2011-09-24T10:38:26","slug":"the-facebook-revolution-is-it-really","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/middle-east-politics-analysis\/the-facebook-revolution-is-it-really\/","title":{"rendered":"The Facebook Revolution. Is it really?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>If there is one event or series of events or region that has fuelled the debate\u00a0about the impact on policy and policymaking as well as on social movements and\u00a0protest of technology in general and social media in particular, it is the Arab\u00a0revolt that has been sweeping the Middle East and North Africa since December.<\/p>\n

Many have dubbed the popular revolts in Egypt and Tunisia the Facebook revolution.\u00a0Indeed, in Syria social media and mobile telephony play a key role in circumventing\u00a0news blackouts and censorship to get news of the brutal crackdown by the government\u00a0of President Bashar al Assad to the outside world.<\/p>\n

Yet, despite the perception of many, it is not technology that is sparking the\u00a0revolts. No doubt technology helps, facilitates and accelerates the speed and\u00a0breadth of communication. New technology and social media impact politics, social\u00a0movements, communications and flow of news. But the question one has to ask oneself\u00a0is whether the Arab revolt would have erupted without Facebook and I would think\u00a0that the answer to that question is a resounding yes. To dub the Arab revolt a\u00a0Facebook revolution would require revisiting our explanations and understanding of\u00a0past revolts starting just over the last century Russia and moving on to Iran, the\u00a0Philippines and for example Indonesia.<\/p>\n

To be sure, technology plays a role and indeed a very important role in protest and\u00a0revolt. In Iran in 1979, it was the cassette that helped Ayatollah Khomeini to gain\u00a0and wield power and inspire millions to overthrow the Shah, at the time one of the\u00a0most powerful symbols of US influence in the region In the very initial phase of\u00a0Tunisia in December it was the mobile phone video of a young many whose humiliation\u00a0by the regime of President Zine el Abedine Ben Ali persuaded him to set himself on\u00a0fire that sparked the protests that led to the president’s downfall.<\/p>\n

Cassettes and mobile telephony are technologies that autocrats understand by and\u00a0large. Social media, however, is in many ways a game changer, primarily because it\u00a0involves a degree of engagement and connecting with one another that works in thefavour of activists. Activists employ the medium at a time that autocrats have\u00a0ignored it and failed to understand its power.<\/p>\n

Social media constituted and constitutes a window of opportunity for activists. But\u00a0even when autocrats attempt to engage, they are up against people who understand\u00a0social media and its opportunities in ways autocrats have yet to grasp and\u00a0structurally will find difficult if not impossible to grasp. Social media changes in\u00a0ways earlier technologies did not the way one has to manage communications and\u00a0public affairs, particularly in a crisis.\u00a0 That requires a degree of sophistication\u00a0that many but particularly inflexible, ossified autocratic governments\u00a0 often find\u00a0difficult, if not impossible, to marshal. In fact, marshaling that degree of\u00a0sophistication would mean a far more far-reaching revision of the way most autocrats\u00a0do business, a skill Arab autocrats certainly have yet to put on display.<\/p>\n

Perhaps most frustrating and most fundamental to autocrats is the fact that the\u00a0combination of mobile telephony, the Internet and social media has rendered\u00a0censorship futile. It fundamentally changes the ground rules of communications\u00a0policies. It turns the shaping of the narrative into something much more complex, in\u00a0which governments and institutions, autocratic or not have to engage in ways they\u00a0did not have to in the past. For one communication has truly become a two-way\u00a0street. Shaping the narrative no longer means control, instead it means engagement.<\/p>\n

And that is an approach that in the best of circumstances is a difficult one. That\u00a0is\u00a0 certainly true for autocrats, particularly embattled ones. It requires a mind\u00a0shift few autocrats, certainly those that are on the defensive, can easily make.\u00a0Just how difficult that process is evident in the problems the Western media have\u00a0had in adjusting to technological change. It took the media years to understand that\u00a0format shapes content, that when several years ago broadsheets moved to tabloid\u00a0formats, the nature of the story changed. Similarly, simply moving the print edition\u00a0of newspapers lock, stock and barrel on to the Internet was not a workable formula.<\/p>\n

It failed to recognise changes in terms of interactivity and the way news is\u00a0consumed and the changing expectations the public empowered by new technology has of\u00a0what news organisations offer.\u00a0As a result, governments and institutions irrespective of the political environment\u00a0they operate in have to rethink the way they approach communications. They have to\u00a0pay greater attention to the way they project themselves, their policies and the way\u00a0that they relate to the public in a new and increasingly complex communications\u00a0landscape. It also means that, ultimately, governments and institutions will have to\u00a0become more attentive to public opinion, because whether or not that opinion is\u00a0blocked from being expressed, it is still there.<\/p>\n

The world looked to the Arab street in the wake of 9\/11 for change that would\u00a0eradicate the feeding ground on which extremism feeds. When the Arab street did not\u00a0come through, government officials, analysts and journalists wrote the Arab street\u00a0off. Fact of the matter is, widespread discontent continued to simmer at the\u00a0surface. One only needed to put one’s ear to the ground. If the current Middle\u00a0Eastern revolt or series of revolts and its embracement of technology teaches us\u00a0anything, it is that where discontent exists but cannot be expressed openly, it will\u00a0be expressed elsewhere in what constitutes a truer reflection of reality. It is a\u00a0reality enhanced but not sparked by technology that one ignores at one’s peril.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

JAMES M. DORSEY: Autocrats – and their advisers – around the region have clearly underestimated the power of social media. But how significant has it been in effecting real change? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":11121,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[154,83,60,482],"tags":[513,125,2399,18300,39,434,18306,191,8844,18324,1258,1808,18344,143,18330,18322,166,18302,8397],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11111"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11111\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}