Blog like an Egyptian
I'm in Doha, Qatar this week at the Sixth Al Jazeera Forum by personal invitation from Wadah Kanfar. As director general of Al Jazeera he is hailed as pivotal in recent events in the region and named one of the most influential Muslims in the world. So here goes, day one.
Conference: The Arab world in transition. Has the future arrived?
Theme: Political changes in the Arab world.
Session: the Al Jazeera Unplugged interactive debate 'Can the blogospere affect societal and political change?'
Degrees celsius: thirty, Scale of Richter: zero, Social unrest: zero, officially. Social tsunami alert still in place throughout the Middle East.
Take away:
Malcolm Gladwell wrote that online social networks lack the deep interpersonal ties needed to create or sustain social movements. If true then the role of Twitter and Facebook in the Middle Eastern uprises would seem limited to a purely technical one. Initially I tended to agree with Gladwell as especially Twitter makes for chatter rather than conversation, for broadcast rather than bonding. That was until today. This morning I heard the inside story from the bloggers who were at the heart of driving the revolution in Tunisia, Egypt and now Libya, as well as one from China. Their take being that Gladwell's viewpoint is quite a western one. In Europe and in the U.S. online communications are an add-on, an additional instrument to other ways of meeting and communicating that have been readily available to anyone for any use since anyone can remember. However, if you take a look at for instance Egypt, people could not safely meet in public or express themselves visibly. And by relaying information online anonymously for years on end, not only could people spread their thoughts on social change, they definitely did feel a bond amongst themselves. They felt supported in their cause not by personal connections but by the sheer tangible volume of anonymous peer support. The ensuing build up of consensus around the need for change culminated in the people actually moving from online to the street and collectively dropping the veil of anonymity in unison. Talk about ties that bind and unravel...
Click here for live videostream of the Al Jazeera forum.
(photo: traditional fishing boat, in the background the Qatar Jet Ski Grand Prix at the conference venue, the Doha Sheraton.
