The Importance Of The Choice Of Tunisia

To begin with, globalization has furthered accessibility(SA1) to other groups and causes in many way. In Ariela Garvett essay “Tweets and Transitions: How the Arab Spring Reaffirms the Internet’s Democratizing Potential” Garvett argues that “as reflected in the recent political upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East, the internet is a potentially egalitarian and boundary-less structure...(174)

Gladwell sends a very strong message about how social media cannot cause a major revolution in society; likewise, Baron is sending across the same message. Revolutions continue even after the internet is shut down. As crowds gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Baron describes how they “continued to grow during the five days that the Mubarak government shut down the internet” (330). The crowds increased in size without the help of social media. Somehow, word got out and people came to support the cause. Also, Baron brings into realization that Americans are too involved in the world of social media. Americans fail to realize all of the news that they are missing because they “can’t seem to survive without the constant stimulus of digital multitasking” (Baron 330). American citizens are too busy tweeting about what they ate for breakfast to worry about the hungry that is going on overseas. They depend on social networking to tell them the news rather that picking up a newspaper and reading about what is going on in their country or maybe even overseas in a different country.

In the aftermath of the Arab uprisings the role and influence of social media became a contentious issue among news media outlets and political analysts. In a study conducted by the Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism, “New research suggests that the primary role was in spreading news outside of the region, connecting a global audience to the events through tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube.” While the mainstream media focused heavily on young protesters mobilizing in the streets with smartphones in hand–much of the attention was on whether social media played a causal role in the uprisings.

In France in the late 18th century information was spread by the use of public spheres, books, newspapers, coffee houses, and salons. In France there was a realm of common discourse and every person was expected to have an opinion on the issues of the day. The ideas of the France Revolution were spread through public realm. When people see that one nation is having success protesting with nonviolent acts on the television, people inother countries are more inclined to walk the streets asking for changes. During the French Revolution, once the proletariats found out the lifestyle of the nobles and they could not afford to buy basic necessities through the public sphere, a revolution occurred. Once people realized the extravagance the nobles lived through, people got angry. During the Arab spring, social media changed everything. Due to technology, leaders would find it nearly impossible to fire against protesters because CNN would be covering it on live TV.2 When the Arab leaders choose to fire there was a lot of criticism. Nothing could stay secret for very long due to the invention of the internet. Information was given instantly and it was difficult to deny the abuses on the people there. It was much more staggering to watch a video of someone being beheaded for a crime than to read about it in a pamphlet. People began to realize there was a better world out there and they started to rebel. The poor helpless commoners in France and Arab nations had nothing to lose and everything to gain through a

Delving deep into the history of how new media has the ability to cause the autocratic ways of governments to run into a stone wall, the infamous incident of how university students of Indonesia leveraged on the power of e-mail to overthrow the then corrupt President Suharto presents itself as an excellent illustration. Through examining more recent cases where the citizens of Tunisia and Egypt have tapped on the power of social media to help upend the existing political order, the potency of new media becomes apparent.

Johan Pouwelse, a professor at Delft University and a technological company founder, has written several articles (Pouwelse) that stress the dangers of filtering the internet. One such article is “Moving Toward a Censorship-free Internet,” which was published in the Internet Engineering Task Force Journal (IETF). In this article, Pouwelse references the Arab Spring, which was a set of revolutions that took place throughout the Arab world in 2011 and 2012 and resulted in overthrows of oppressive governments. In nearly all the affected nations, dissenters used Twitter and Facebook to organize their protests and planned outcries (Heins). These two social media platforms are easily accessible and allow their users to post any information that they please; this served as both a benefit and a drawback during the protests. “During the 2011 Arab Spring,” Pouwelse writes in in his article for the IETF, “Egyptian authorities demanded that telecommunication companies sever their broadband connections and mobile networks—both local and European operators were forced to comply, and, as a result, digital Egypt vanished.” The world stopped receiving tweets from their Egyptian contacts, stopped viewing videos posted to YouTube by Egyptian vloggers. Online entertainment halted, which was a victory for the government. However, this blackout did not put a stop to open criticism, as the Egyptian government intended. The

December 10, 2010, a Tunisian produce seller sets himself on fire in protest of the government’s extreme repression while under the leadership of the country’s former President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. The prolonged frustrations lead Tunisia into revolution, provoking the already corrupt and violent security forces to counteract in bloodshed. Still, and utilizing the Internet and social media, the revolutionaries reached out to global communities to depict the horror, in hope for help. Consequently and with success, Tunisians’ gained the sympathy they were seeking, while also inspiring the Arab Spring to ignite, a mass of revolutions across Arab nations.

The two articles I read for ThinkCERCA were about activism using social media. They highlighted one particular example, Wael Gonhim’s Facebook page, Kullena Khaled Said. Using social media, he was able to hear about a current event, and make a difference. The question was “Based on the evidence provided in these two articles and the visual sources, how did social media affect the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt?”

In his opening paragraph of “Reforming Egypt in 140 Characters,” Dennis Baron acknowledges the role of Twitter and other huge forms of social media in the impeachment of the the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak. However, Baron then points out that the protest continues in Cairo despite the government's shut down of the internet. He says, “that while the Iran protests may have been tweeted round the world, there were few Twitter users actually in-country; and that although Americans can't seem to survive without the constant

It is important to note that these two case studies share a number of similarities that are worth pointing about before emphasizing their distinctiveness. Firstly, both the uprisings in Tunisia as well as the Syrian conflict both belong to the arena of collective political action, that is rather than individual acts of political dissent. Secondly, they are employed by organized opposition movements representing an oppressed minority of the disempowered majority, engaged against the unjust action of the state and institutionalized violence they exert. Thirdly, each operate outside the bound of conventional political channels such that they are non-institutional. Arguably, the most important similar factor is that the both belong to the larger

Kassim, S. (2012). Twitter revolution: How the Arab Spring was helped by social media. Retrieved from http://www.policymic.com/articles/10642/twitter-revolution-how-the-arab-spring-washelped-bysocial-media

Tunisia’s National Constituent Assembly wrote a new Constitution for Tunisia on January 25 2014. It was to help reshape Tunisia’s government after the poor ruling by Ben Ali. The constitutuion protected freedom of belief and gender equailty in politics and society. Also in political you can now affirm the opposition’s rights.

In Here Comes Everybody, Shirky suggests that digital tools enhance democracy, (Shirky, 2008) and this paradigm shift indicates that individual voices can be heard in the digital era; for instance, the use of social media platforms including status-posting on Facebook and tweeting on Twitter. Moreover, the mounting popularity of online social movements deserves a careful examination. Castell believes that the digital social networks are decisive tools which facilitated modern-day movements, and that the Internet empowers people to exchange emotions, which then become the impetus that transform collective feelings into collective actions. (Castells 2012, pp. 1-19) In the light of the Arab Spring, it is evident that the protest organizers had strong online presence, and the Internet acted as a bridge from the activist core to the mass publics. While this echoes with Castells’ idea of the creation of counter power and the Internet being the cradle of society communicative autonomy (Castells 2012, p. 1-18), the analysis of the Arab Spring suggests that this concept could be somewhat reductive. In the wave of protests, the megaphone effect exceeded all the other results brought by the social media. According to research, majority of the online clicks came from outside of the stakeholder countries – this may illustrate how the Internet is drawing external attention instead of being the nucleus

In retrospect, the uprising of new media has flaws and loop holes that have the ability to undermine the authenticity of public freedom. This may be achieved through rhetorical manipulation. Democracy is essential in representing the rights and freedom of individuals. Caudill (2008) discusses a true key in achieving authentic democracy is access to truthful information. Globally it is evident that this is not the case when comparing countries such as Australia to Tunisia, not all governments provide transparency to its publics. Government and supra-state policies vary worldwide and impact individuals differently. When looking at the example of Tunisia, the government’s inability to effectively communicate with its country resulted in ongoing political unrest. It is evident how tools such as social media can reach out and impact countries such as these with democratic

One perspective is that the “Arab Spring” may refer as “Twitter Revolution” or “Facebook revolution”. Social media played a vital role to reshape the politics of “Middle East”. The impact of this change was very crucial for the governments. The lash back of this change was different in different countries. In “Tunisia” and “Egypt” government regimes did not have any social media base and they could not estimate the impact of social media in the society. In “Tunisia” and in “Egypt” nine out ten people responded to a poll conducted by the “facebook” to organise the protest. Finally its ended up with a regime change democracy won through social media