Changing the world with the touch of our Blackberries

Rebecca AsoulinStaff WriterIn the wake of the Jan. 25 revolution, Egyptian protester Jamal Ibrahim named his baby girl “Facebook,” in honor of the essential role the social media outlet — along with Twitter and YouTube — played in the recent Egyptian revolution.The revolution coalesced when 31-year-old Cairo-born Google executive Wael Ghonim created a Facebook group that called for action against the brutality and corruption of the Egyptian police and government.Within months of creating the Facebook page, nearly half a million followers joined the group and began sharing videos and other stories of the violence in Egypt. After 18 days the protesters succeeded in ousting Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s long-standing president.As a result of the victory in Egypt, protests in the Middle East have spread across the Arab world in the past month, to Bahrain, Yemen, Iran and Libya.Many of these protests have unfortunately turned bloody, especially in Libya, where Muammar Gaddafi’s regime responded with brute force. In Libya, social media has allowed people to film atrocious acts of violence and instantaneously show the world these acts via the Internet.In a Jan. 27 YouTube interview, President Barack Obama went as far as to compare social networking to universal liberties such as freedom of speech.According to Marko Papic and Sean Noonan of Stratfor Global Intelligence, social media alone does not instigate revolutions. Rather, social media is a tool that allows revolutionary groups to lower the costs of participation, organization, recruitment and training. Papic and Noonan qualify the social media’s strength and state that like any other tool it its own inherent weaknesses, and that its effectiveness rests solely on how effectively leaders use them and how accessible they are.The main weakness of social media boils down to the simple fact that it is easy to “like” something on a Facebook page, but its another thing to actively work for it. Being a member on a group on Facebook allows one to hide behind the relative anonymity of the web.Even if a leader can effectively use the social media, these protests do not always work out. For example, Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister of Thailand and telecommunications magnate, used his skills to hold video conference calls with stadiums full of supporters, and launched two massive waves of protests involving some 100,000 supporters against the Thai government in April 2009 and April and May 2010. Yet he still has not succeeded in taking power.Although, as Papic and Noonan point out, social media cannot be relied on as the only strategy for a revolutionary, there is no denying that it is an important and powerful tool. Facebook-based campaigns have succeeded in getting Betty White on Saturday Night Live to sparking a revolution.Baby Facebook, albeit saddled with an unfortunate name, is the symbolic start of a new era — one that will hopefully shed light on the darkest parts of the globe one status update, Flickr upload and Tweet at a time.rasoulin@thesamohi.com