The active role of Social Networks in the Middle East Mobilizations

Social media has maintained a high profile in the last week’s revolutions, becoming one of the principle factors on those. Facebook has decided not to talk about the increasing importance that its platform is taking in the uprisings that are affecting different countries of Magreb and Middle East. The direction of the company pretends to avoid that the prominence acquired in the recent mobilizations ends up becoming a subversive tool; and also evade that in consequence the government ends up with the commercial growth that has recently had in that area.

The fact that the organization of many of those revolutions is happening via Facebook is a matter that has recently created a great controversy. Besides, as a group of young Tunisians said; "This is how we tell the world what's happening," "We are photographing ourselves. Our revolution. And then, we put it on Facebook."

According to recent sources, the social network will still require their users to register with their authentic identity, as that is indispensable to avoid frauds and safeguard the set of users. However, Facebook disregards the demands of some organizations of human rights that encourage them to provide higher protection to its users, after some activists used Facebook to organize themselves.

As we can see on the image below, thousands of pages have been created in Facebook in order to defend or reject the activism in those countries:

By the way, the vice president of Facebook’s Communication and Marketing segment, Elliot Schrage, has declined the offers of making public pronouncements about the leadership of the social network in the revolutions of the last weeks in Tunis and Egypt. Facebook has been the most used social network in the multiple manifestations in Algeria, Morocco, Iran, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain, above Twitter or Google. All those companies helped the egyptian activists to mock the blocking of the authorities on the internet.

After those happenings, several organizations of politic activism and human rights’ defence have encouraged Facebook to join the Global Network Initiative, a voluntary code for technological enterprises that was created in 2008.

References:

http://www.periodismociudadano.com/2011/03/02/facebook-y-twitter-en-las-revueltas-del-norte-de-africa/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/25/twitter-facebook-uprisings-arab-libya
http://www.culsans.com.ar/?p=21523
http://www.lavanguardia.es/internet/205510216/5411550/facebook-se-desmarca-del-papel-de-las-redes-sociales-en-las-revueltas-arabes.html

New's Canalization

                As the internet is more and more frequently being conceived as the new monopoly of news, social networks are having a more relevant position every day. News provided by the internet increasingly expand through social networks, contributing to reach an even larger public.

            News that swell that way, also reach a specific type of audience; a younger and disinterested audience who wouldn’t be informed of those facts if it was not thanks to those networks.

                As an example of this I could mention Austin Bice’s issue, where the catalytic effect that social networks had could be perfectly appreciated; one day after his disappearance was denounced to the authorities, dozens of events run through Tuenti, Twitter or Facebook, begging people to contribute to the search of the missing student. Those events offered information of the theories and presuppositions on this matter, and actualizations of the latest progresses made in the case.

                Many students of the university where he had been studying for the last months, the University Carlos III of Madrid, realized of his disappearance through those networks, and so did when his body was finally found on the Manzanares River next to the Riviera, the club where he had gone with his friends the night he disappeared.

                Nowadays, there is evidence that social networks are becoming an important tool in the world of communication as we can flawlessly see on the example above. That’s the reason why the relationship between actuality, news and social networks should be presently taken into account. And still eventually take advantage of it.

                 

Social Networks' Rampant Expansion

            When talking about social networks, the first thing that comes to our mind is undoubtedly Facebook, the web application that has created an empire based on social interaction. Facebook, with 350 million users, was created by Mark Zuckerberg (to read his biography click here: http://www.biography.com/articles/Mark-Zuckerberg-507402) who now is one of the youngest billionaires in the world. Facebook is constantly launching new applications that contribute to its nonstop updating and modernization (check the following interview made to Mark Zuckerberg about a new function on this social network: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX5pWRVkwsk&feature=fvsr). Also, the trials, disputes, money issues and property right matters that form the chaotic origin of this page, contributed to increase its worldwide fame and unbelievable benefits.

            However, social networks aren’t limited to this kind of web pages, there are may others, even though most of them are quite similar. Blogging for example is a wide-spread way of communicating and expressing personal opinions freely. Blogs can be conceived as online diaries, a form of participatory journalism, a two-sided communicative model… and they consist of brief posts on any topic frequently updated by its owner. In what comes to the content, we can describe it as self-generated.

            One of the main characteristics of Blogs is feedback, due to its public nature, every individual can leave a personal comment or critic on what has been published, it is thought to be up to 126 million blogs. Hyperlinking, that is, the capacity to interpret the world through the blogger’s eyes, is also a relevant attribute offered in blogs; a powerful device that helps represent the world. Upon, the more blogs that link to your own, the more chance you have of receiving visits and making your blog more popular and recognisable.

            Apart from all this, we can also comment that blogging provides a self-directed emission of content in a format that is easy to set up and maintain. Thanks to its personal nature and its diary appearance (as an example check the following blog: www.swankheights.com), the blogger is able to maintain a close contact with his readers in a way that a self-selected reception is created.

           

            Lately, blogging has increased its fame, coming to be a prominent and powerful tool for the public opinion. Anyway, its popularity can still not be compared to Facebook’s, Tuenti’s (the Spanish condensed version of Facebook) or Twitter’s (with up to 300.000 logs in per day) rampant growth. The analysis of this huge amount of online followers makes us consider its harmful addictive aspects, which certainly would end up being a public domain problem in some year’s time.

References:

Online bibliographies:

http://www.biography.com/articles/Mark-Zuckerberg-507402

Personal Blog by Julie:

www.swankheights.com

Information about Facebook:

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook