What picture can capture the 2011-revolts in the Middle East and North Africa in the best fashion? Is there some picture that can clearest capture what is going on/what has been going on in Egypt, Tunesia, Bahrain and Lybia?
Peter Beaumont writes in his article from The Gurdian that it has very much been a young man or woman with a smart phone taking pictures of the revolts, of inequipped hospitals, of people being shot in the streets...!
Is the revolutions going on in the Middle East right now a 'twitter revolutions'? Revolutions where people use 'new media' to not only get information, but to also use information to fight political forces through pictures and words?
Or is this all made up by the Western media that tend to over estimate the use of new media?
”The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns” Michael Gladwell wrote in october 2010 in the New Yorker about the socalled Twitter revolution in Iran in 2009. He thinks that what happened in Iran in 2009 cannot be called a wtitter revolution, however. There was a twitter revolution made up by people in the West, who read tweets about what was going on in Iran - but all were in English. Gladwell asks if these tweets would not have been in Farsi if the Iranians were in fact using Twitter as part of the revolution...!
I will agree with him on this point. But also highlight that I think that when using the discourse of a 'twitter revolution' it covers more than just the webpage of Twitter. It includes all the use of new media and information. Here I think of the meaning of pictures (as I started this blog post with), also facebook seems to become more and more important. In Tunesia fx most social network pages were closed down - but not facebook. Facebook then became the way for people to get real' information that was not controlled by a state (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/25/twitter-facebook-uprisings-arab-libya)
Off course one can question whether it is a revolution when not everyone have access to computers, can read, etc. But I believe that just the fact that some people can get access to 'real information' and can forward information to others is what it takes for us to talk about a 'facebook'/'twitter' revolution. Their might have been a slight exaggeration of the meaning of these medias, but small things can lead to bigger things. Fx Al Jazeera has this past month shown quite a lot of these facebook - and youtube videos that people have been filming - which has not only lead the revolution to other parts of the Middle East, but also informed us in the West.
I also don't think that it should be called "twitter" or "facebook" revolution, although it is true that this technologies certainly had part in what was and is still going on. But should we then call the French revolution "press" revolution, simply because press had quite an important role at the times?
SvarSletAnd also.. some similar reasons for revolution also exist in western world, where those new technologies are even more present. We can talk about youth unemployment, corruption, clielentism of political elites, neoliberal reforms and so on. But why dont we start a revolution? The problem here is that we already have what they want - a democracy. We can decide how we want our county to be- but onley on paper. Who should we revolt against? Our current governemts? Will that really change anything? They can revolt to their dicators, but how could we revolt to the system?
Well, what I am trying to say, is that new technology is just a small part of the events, it is a tool, a little piece of a puzzle. That is why we should not over-emphasize their role and talk abou "twitter" revolution.