The Real Net Effect: Social Media and the Changing Middle East (Murphy)

Caryle Murphy writes for Majalla:

They are easy to spot in Deborah Wheeler’s class at American University of Kuwait. They favor brightly colored Polo shirts, cargo shorts and sandals. Sometimes toting both iPhone and Blackberry, they will each send 20 to 30 text messages while attending Wheeler’s lecture.

“They’re so good at paying attention and texting,” she said, “that you don’t really realize it until it’s too late. We did have rule, that if the phone rang or I caught them texting, they had to bring me chocolate the next day. But I was getting fat. So I decided that I should just understand that this dialed-in, networked generation is just absolutely addicted to these technologies.”

Or consider Ahmed Shihab-Eldin. At the very moment that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, Shihab-Eldin was watching the historic event on the express train from Washington to New York. He could barely contain his excitement as he viewed live images of Tahrir Square streamed by Al-Jazeera on his laptop and texted friends in the square on his cell phone. “This is what is meant by global village,” said Shihab-Eldin, 27. “You can be traveling 85 miles an hour on a train and still be able to participate-both as consumer and producer of information and news.”

The students in Kuwait and Shihab-Eldin are homesteaders on the electronic frontier of the Internet, skillfully mining blogging sites, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and scores of other applications. Coming of age as these online tools came on stream, they have a love—some say obsession—for the social networking of cyberspace that is revolutionizing human communication and interaction.

They are the “Twitter Generation.”

Like connected, clicking youths everywhere, those in the Middle East have used social media to keep in touch with friends, share music, follow celebrities and pass around photos. But lately, they also demonstrated how these tools can be valuable assets for making history, employing them in the Arab Spring to usher in a remarkable transformation in the region’s political dynamics.

“The first three months of 2011 saw what can only be termed a substantial shift in the Arab world’s usage of social mediatowards…social and civil mobilization online…to organize demonstrations (both pro-and antigovernment), disseminate information within their networks, and raise awareness of ongoing events locally and globally,” concluded the Arab Social Media Report (ASMR). Issued in May by the Dubai School of Government’s Governance and Innovation Program, this report is perhaps the most comprehensive study of online social networking in the Arab world.

Social media’s rising stature prompts a host of questions about who is using it, its role in the Arab spring, its relationship to mainstream media and its impact on Arab societies.

Twitter is just one social media tool, but possibly because of its novelty and immediacy — tweets get read and responded to instantly — it acquired a high profile during the Arab Spring.

“Twitter is used for different things in different places, but in an authoritarian context like Egypt, it is a tool of dissent, and they used it for that relentlessly,” said David Faris, an assistant professor at Chicago’s Roosevelt University who spent four years studying how Egyptians use social media.

Jillian C. York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, is a dedicated social media user herself with many friends in the Middle East whom she met online. “The use of Twitter has been more innovative in the Middle East and North Africa than anywhere else in world,” she said.

DEFINING THE “TWITTER GENERATION”

Dedicated users of social media are a small vanguard in the Arab world, where access to the Internet and digital literacy levels are still low. But the number of people flocking to social media in the region is rising rapidly. This trend accelerated in the first quarter of this year, most notably in countries where protests occurred, according to the ASMR.

Facebook is the most popular social networking tool in Arab countries, with 27,711,503 users as of April 2011. That is almost double the 14,791,972 on Facebook in April 2010, the ASMR found. In the first four months of 2011, Facebook users in the Arab world grew by 30 percent, with Egypt accounting for most newcomers in this time period (2 million). Egypt’s 6.5 million Facebook users comprise about a quarter of all users in the region.

As for Twitter, the ASMR estimates there are about 6.5 million users in the Arab world, of whom 1.5 million are frequent tweeters. The countries with the most users and tweets are United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. In Saudi Arabia, tweets went up 400 percent in one year (the average increase in the same time period in the rest of the world was 90 per cent).

This social media vanguard is young. Around 70 percent of Facebook users in the Arab world are between 15 and 29 years. And since they live in a region where at least 60 percent of the population is under 30, their online social media activity is bound to impact their societies.

But defining such a new phenomenon as the “Twitter Generation” is not easy. Who better to ask than Shihab-Eldin, co-presenter of Al-Jazeera’s The Stream, a news program about social media that links online communities to television audiences. Now based in Washington, Shihab-Eldin has spent half his life in the Arab world with his Palestinian-born parents.

“Reckless, instant, aware, nuanced, connected, compelled to communicate … even if they have nothing interesting to say,” he replied when asked to describe his peers. “But all in all, the first word that comes into my mind is brave, and honestly for me, that’s a product of the people I follow and the conversations I choose to pay attention to.”

Generalizing about the “Twitter Generation” is not easy, York said.  “But what I’ve seen is a lot of younger people, a lot of tech-savvy people. Education seems to vary, lots have college degrees, or a minimum of a high school education. They’re people who have been using digital tools not necessarily for political activism though. There are a lot of folks who just like Facebook.”

That corresponds to the findings of a 2010 survey sponsored by American University of Beirut’s Issam Fares Institute and UNICEF and directed by Jad Melki, assistant professor of media studies at AUB. That survey found that “barely any Arab youth were using social media for political activism,” Melki said. “They were mainly using it for entertainment, for connecting with friends, and mainly for consumption rather than production of information.”

But his poll was conducted before the Arab Spring. Also, the 2,744 youths aged 13 to 28 he questioned lived in Lebanon, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. When Roosevelt University’s Faris examined social media use in Egypt, he found a different picture. And it helps explain the role of these tools during the recent uprisings.

SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE ARAB SPRING: A SYMBIOSIS

The role of social media in the Arab Spring has been hotly debated. But an emerging consensus goes like this: The revolts in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries were precipitated by long-standing grievances in a broad swath of their populations and would probably have happened at some point.

But social media played a vital role in several different ways. First of all, it prepared the ground for the revolts by influencing public opinion and creating online networks of like-minded people.

For years prior to the outbreak of Egypt’s 25 January protest, Faris found, digital activists had been using social media “to connect people who shared the same views about the regime, to organize protests … and to build a movement that could be deployed in a moment of crisis to undermine the regime.” These online activities, mostly blogging at first, were building “alternative public spheres” where dissent and information could be shared “as a way to do an end run around authoritarian state structures,” Faris added.

Facebook was especially important in both Tunisia and Egypt. The 2010 Facebook page “We are all Khaled Said,” created by Google executive Wael Ghonim to memorialize an Egyptian beaten to death by police, was key to galvanizing public sentiment and paving the way for the events of January 2011, according to many observers.

In the early stages of protests in both countries, social media was used as an efficient way to mobilize people and quicken the pace of events until they reached a critical stage. At this point, Twitter came into its own, said Faris. “Once action moved to street,” he said, “Twitter was more important … just in terms of sharing information about where the protests were developing.” The Twitter hashtag #Jan25 instantly created a unified community, he added, “bringing together everyone with internet access who was participating in these protests.”

Read full article....