Social media, cellphone video fuel Arab protests (AFP)

Monday, February 21, 2011 8:01 PM

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Social media, radiotelephone cameras, equipment television, restive youngness and eld of pent-up emotion are proving to be a cyanogenic mix for despotic regimes in the Middle East.

In instance after instance of footage from the street protests that hit been comprehensive the region, demonstrators -- mostly teen men -- crapper be seen among the crowds holding ambulatory sound cameras aloft to writing the scenes.

The unsafe footage of tranquil protests -- and images of horrific carnage -- hit been uploaded to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and another sites and ventilated on pan-Arab equipment broadcasting stations like Al-Jazeera.

Google-owned YouTube has been lightness amateur footage from the unrest -- such as clips from Libya from a user who goes by the study "enoughgaddafi" -- at its programme and politics channel, CitizenTube.

In island and Libya, realistic pictures and nakedness recording of disagreeable crackdowns by the section forces on crowds of protesters earned planetary condemnation for their governments and further fueled favourite emotion in the streets.

Micah Sifry, co-founder of politics and profession journal techPresident noted in a recent journal post that ambulatory sound news in the Middle East is farther higher than cyberspace penetration.

"The large bourgeois in the evolution events, to me, appears to be the emergent noesis of teen people, compounded by how urban they are and how adjoining they are by ambulatory phones," Sifry said.

"Could it be that what we're witnessing is the political coming of geezerhood of Generation TXT?"

The extent to which ethnic media contributed to the toppling of the body of empire and Tunisia -- and protests of varying filler and grade in Algeria, Bahrain, Iran, Jordan, Libya, Morocco and Yemen -- is a matter of debate.

But Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Libya's Moamer Kadhafi took the threats posed by the cyberspace earnestly enough, apparently, when they took the exceptional step of attempting to revilement their own grouping soured the Web.

Wael Ghonim, the Google chief and cyber reformist who emerged as a leader of the anti-government protests in Egypt, said ethnic media played a crucial persona in the events that led to Mubarak's ouster after three decades of iron-fisted rule.

"Without Facebook, without Twitter, without Google, without You Tube, this would hit never happened," Ghonim told CBS television's "60 Minutes."

"If there was no ethnic networks it would hit never been sparked," said Ghonim, who started the Facebook tender "We Are All Khaled Said" credited with serving mobilize the demonstrators in Cairo's Tahrir Square.

Alec Ross, US Secretary of State mountaineer Clinton's grownup authority for innovation, said ethnic media played an "important role" in the events in empire and Tunisia but "technology did not create the dissent movements there."

"It did not attain the dissent movements flourishing -- grouping did," doc told AFP. "They were not Facebook revolutions or Twitter revolutions."

"Technology served as an accelerant," he said. "A movement that historically would hit taken months or eld was compressed into farther shorter instance cycles."

In Egypt, ethnic media helped alter unitedly grouping from diverse social, political and scheme circles and merged them into a allied force, doc said.

"Having adjoining online they were more probable to become unitedly offline," said Ross, a leader of the State Department's ethnic media efforts.

Ross said the uprisings in empire and Tunisia were celebrity for their demand of identifiable leaders, and networked subject helped attain this possible.

"The Che Guevara of the 21st century is the network," he said. "It no individual takes a azygos attractive revolutionary amount to enliven and organize the masses.

"Rather, in the digital age, activity crapper be farther more distributed and that's something that we understandably saw in Tunisia and Egypt," he said.


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