Foreign Policy, Tunisia and the net

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[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

Foreign Policy has had two articles up in the last couple of days with somewhat similar headlines:

Links: Twitter – WikiLeaks

The site which specifically tracks WikiLeaks on Tunisia is TuniLeaks:

My rosette for best tweet of the week goes to Galrahn and all those who RT’d him:

What a world, eh?

2 thoughts on “Foreign Policy, Tunisia and the net”

  1. Well, Abu Aardvark [Marc Lynch] on Foreign Policy sees things in pretty much the opposite way to the one I suggest in my DoubleQuote above. He writes:

    An interesting discussion has already broken out over whether Tunisia should be considered a “Twitter Revolution” — a far more interesting and relevant discussion than whether it was a “Wikileaks Revolution” (it wasn’t).

    And Arabic media is his turf.

    For his further nuance, take a look:

    http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/01/15/tunisia_and_the_new_arab_media_space

    See also Zeynep Tufekci, “Tunisia, Twitter, Aristotle, Social Media and Final and Efficient Causes”:

    http://technosociology.org/?p=263

  2. This, from Youssef Gaigi, Tunisian blogger via Talk Morocco:

    January 15: Tweeting your revolution
     
    Wikileaks played a major role in fueling the anger / determination of Tunisians. However, the Wikileaks reports only put further light on what we already knew. They confirmed our doubts and detailed the different events.
     
    Twitter and Facebook played a very important role in our revolution, and I am confident that if we were not using social media we wouldn’t have accomplished our goals.
     
    Social media empowered our communication infrastructure.
     
    It countered the traditional media, the propaganda machine of our government. It allowed us to detect patterns that one would not notice if left alone, such as noticing that all the presidential police cars are rented (rented cars in tunisia have blue license plates). Social media fostered crowdwisdom, by sharing thoughts, feedbacks, and opinions. And finally on the battle field, we even used in the final hours of our government to share snipers’ positions. Then, the final demonstration was an event on facebook that everybody shared.
     
    And now we are using it to find the militias, and share their positions. There are volunteers working on developing web 2.0 applications to place events on maps.
     
    More importantly, we knew how to tweet and we were hooked to facebook. Something, that our ennemy, including the state run media, and the brutal yet illiterate “intelligence” lacked knowledge about.
     
    Other governments in the region are as blind as the ben ali’s regime. I hear Morocco blocked and contained a demonstration in front of the Tunisian embassy in Rabat, Syria is censoring what is happening in Tunisia. They didn’t understand that we do not demonstrate and we are not going to demonstrate in the streets until we know that we reached the critical mass, in the meanwhile we will be tweeting our revolution. And they can not beat us in our territory.

    My guess, totally uninformed, just a hunch — those into blogging, tweeting, etc, being in contact with the like-minded, might think WL, Twitter, FB or whatever had a major impact, while those not particularly involved, similarly knowing mostly their own kind, might think it was minimal: interesting set-up for some sociologist / social network analyst to look at.

    Paging Valdis Krebs!

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