Autocracy, Unemployment, Poverty, Human rights violation, suppression: whatever the reason may be, the people’s revolution which started in Tunisia, spread across the Arab world, travelled through a different way, which the world never witnessed before. Fidel Castro took years (exactly 5 years 5 months and 5 days!) to liberate Cuba from the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. But the self-immolation of Mohamed on 17 December, 2011 took only 28 days to overthrow the Tunisian autocratic rule. The debates and discussions through blogs and social networking sites among the Arab youth resulted in the outburst of frustration that was stored for years.
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This revolution is different from other agitations ,not because it doesn’t have a leader or ideology to lead from front, but the urging for uprising and controlling it till one extend was done by the social networking sites in Internet. Youngsters all over the world, without the barrier of boundaries unite through blogs and social networking sites against the autocrats who were in power for years. The uprising was given major impetus by Wikileaks cables, Egyptian internet activist Ahammed Meher, Google’s Marketing Chief (Middle East) Vel Khonim , the self immolation of about 20 youngsters and people who were killed during the protest. Egypt, where internet censorship is liberal compared to other Arab countries, was the epicenter of all the internet revolutionary movements. In Egypt, such online communities against government started working years back. This served as a pioneer for youth in Tunisia and Libya. Different from other movements in the history, Arab upraise started with tiny groups which later joined forces through digital media and transformed into a public protest of epic proportions.
The large-scale use of internet in political campaigns was first witnessed in 2002 during the American presidential elections. Known as ‘Second generation political campaign’ (Politics2.0),it started spreading all over the world after the spectacular campaign by Barack Obama using networking sites in 2008. In Egypt, Ahammed Mehar started the first major internet community for protests, known as ‘April 6 Youth Movement, on Facebook. The community announced strike in Egypt in which 64,000 people took part. Even though Muslim Brotherhood, the opposition party, was not directly involved, they supported the strike by providing wide publicity using Twitter, Flickr etc.
The videos that spread through mobile phones and YouTube also helped raise the intensity of the revolt. The movement, which started in Tunisia, gradually found takers in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan and Iraq.
Knowing the impact digital media can have on the masses Libyan dictator Muammer Gaddafi banned YouTube last year accusing that it worked against his government. Once the recent agitation found its way into Libya, the government also blocked social networking sites. Yet the youth unites through the websites! They shrewdly used the football fan websites for the discussions.
Even though rulers differed in all these countries, they followed the same policy towards the people. These revolutions can be considered as a single revolution in one aspect, the channel they used, i.e., the information technology. The Arab protest clearly demonstrates the importance of new media in the current world politics and democracy.
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