Emerging Media, Fledgling Democracy

Did the emerging media of Facebook and Twitter start the revolution in Egypt?

Wael Ghonim thinks so:

“If you want to liberate a country, give them the internet,”

Those are the words of the young Google executive who has became a symbol of Egypt’s pro-democracy uprising after he launched the original Facebook page credited with 130,000 “likes” and sparking the initial protest. Ghonim has called the Egyptian upheaval, “Revolution 2.0.”

But how much did social media really contribute to the recent political changes we have seen throughout the region? Is it possible that Facebook and Twitter are powerful enough to bring down a government?

Some say yes. Rafat Ali, a social media expert and founder of PaidContent, said Facebook and Twitter played different roles in the uprising.

• Facebook helped to organize the activists inside the country
• Twitter functioned to help get the message out to the broader world.

“Facebook definitely had a role in organizing this revolution,” Ali told Wired.com. “It acts like an accelerant to conditions which already exist in the country. Twitter and YouTube serve as amplification for what’s happening on the ground. And they directly affect Western media coverage.”

So perhaps it is a domino affect. Facebook and Twitter start the conversation, stir up the firmament, and then the traditional media finally catch on and critical mass is achieved.

To see the affect of social media, I went to Google Trends and looked at search traffic for key words since January 2011.

Do you see the significant spike in searches during the height of the social and traditional media activity? 

Former CIA director James Woolsey thinks social media had an impact. In the Wired article, When asked by CNN host Anderson Cooper whether the U.S. intelligence community has fully grasped the power of social media in catalyzing pro-democracy movements worldwide, he said “I think they’re starting to,” … “We should have been doing exactly what has happened in Egypt,” Woolsey added. “We should have been trying to help foster that in Iran, helping them set up servers to protect their Facebooks, protect their Twitters, and we really have not.”

Wired Magazine agrees. “It is a truism in political science that successful revolutions are born in the streets — from the Boston Massacre of March 1770 and the storming of the Bastille in Paris in July 1789, to the streets of Cairo in January and February 2011. What has shocked most observers of the current Egyptian scene is the sheer speed with which the regime fell — 18 days.”

So are we giving too much credit to social media in creating social change? Not according to FastCompany, “Did Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube send people out into the streets? Of course not. Did they speed up the process of protest? Absolutely.”

That's a lot to think about.