Social media may help drive protests, but revolutionary force lies with people

The Revolution will not be televised, said Gil Scott-Heron, an American poet and musician, in 1970. His prediction holds regarding the revolutions happening in the Arab world right now. For the most part, the uprisings have been tweeted, Facebooked and blogged about.

The protesters have used social media to plan protest times, locations and tactics. Facebook events and Twitter updates in particular have been used to get people excited about the movements and to publicize how many people are involved. Some have gone so far as to even call this the “Facebook Revolution.” Labeling it as such is wrong because the revolution belongs to the people in the streets, not Twitter or Mark Zuckerberg.

Calling the movements the Facebook or Twitter revolutions takes the human agency out of these protests and makes everyone forget the sacrifice these protesters are making, said James Gelvin, professor of Middle East history.

The true role of social media has been that of a vehicle providing organizing capacity for movements ignited and forwarded by the people. Social media have been helpful in sustaining and spreading the ideas.

Ten years ago, getting people to protest was possible, but it was difficult to reach populations across Middle East countries quickly, as bloggers have been able to do recently.

This tide of Arab world revolutions all started on Dec. 17, when Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, lit himself on fire in protest of police corruption. This started a large string of protests, publicized via Facebook and Twitter, in his country. Eventually it led to the ousting of the president of Tunisia, who had been a dictator for 23 years. People in neighboring countries in similar situations picked up on these tweets and they started organizing their own demonstrations.

But Arab countries are not new to mass demonstrations. What makes this round different is that almost all of the countries are experiencing some sort of protests ““ facilitated by social media ““ for democratic change and freedoms.

Those in the Middle East that are protesting should be commended for standing up for democratic ideals. It’s a bold move to voice such opinions in oppressive dictatorships.

A lack of democracy is a large part of the fuel that’s keeping this fire going. Of the 22 members of the Arab League, a group with a combined population larger than that of the U.S., only three are democracies without a dictator. And those three, Iraq, Palestinian territories and Lebanon, are democracies held together by the efforts of a few.

This lack of democracy, coupled with corruption and a high unemployment among youth, has led to a long-standing unhappiness, according to Willeke Wendrich, professor of Egyptian archaeology who has worked in Egypt for more than 30 years.

Noticing the success of protests in Tunisia pushed others in neighboring countries to push for their own freedoms. It makes sense that young people in Yemen who read about the success of Tunisian revolts yearn for change and start their own Facebook pages and events to publicize a protest.

So far, we’ve seen the fall of one dictator in Tunisia, major changes and the likely end of a dictatorship in the most populous Arab country of Egypt, the ousting of a government and a new prime minister in Jordan, and the announcement of a president retiring in Yemen among other smaller successes for the protesters.

Facebook pages advertising locations of protests and Twitter messages allowing protesters to update each other across cities have helped keep these protests alive and kicking.

But if the people weren’t committed to the cause, the protests in Egypt would have fallen apart when the government of Egypt shut down access to the Internet, said John Scott-Railton, who has been tweeting for Egyptians under the Twitter username @Jan25voices.

Still, not all of the hype on social media has been successful for these protests. An attempted “day of rage” in Syria failed to bring the mass protests that have been happening in other countries.

This may have been due to fear of police brutality by the particularly oppressive regime ruling the country. Pressuring the masses this way will only make protests worse in the future, though stifling voices for the time being.

The government of Syria also recently removed a five-year ban on Facebook and YouTube, which shows they don’t want to go down the road of Egypt, in which banning the social media led to protests worsening.

While social media have not started the revolution and Mark Zuckerberg is not in the streets, the role of social media has been important in helping the revolutionary ideas spread as quickly as they have. It’s odd to think of, but Facebook, a tool we use to poke, stalk and message, just helped people topple a dictatorship in the Middle East.

Want to start a revolution? E-mail Ramzanali at [email protected]. Send general comments to [email protected].