How Facebook Changed The World The Arab Spring Summary

It seems unlikely that the founding fathers of social media had in mind a revolution of whatsoever greater magnitude than turning your teenager's bedchamber walls inside out and making themselves rich in the process. Still, here we are, less than a decade later, reeling from a series of very literal revolutions which have, over the past nine months, upheaved a vast tract of the Arab world and recalibrated the definition of people power.

Revolutions which, the BBC at present claims, were catalysed and facilitated by Facebook. The remit of How Facebook Changed the Earth – fronted by the aesthetically unimpeachable Mishal Husain – was, er, to demonstrate how Facebook had inverse the (Arab) globe. And if you lot embraced the pacy, 60 minutes-long narrative (and didn't ask besides many questions) and then that's kind of what happened.

Things have moved on a scrap since the days of humbly beseeching and the finding of truths to be self-axiomatic: and so nosotros watched as, helter-skelter, from Tunis in December to Cairo in February (the rest is not nevertheless televised), plucky liberal-democratic types took on the collective grubby dictatorships of North Africa – using merely their BlackBerrys and encrypted cyberspace chat rooms – and one by ane forced their ostensibly "elected" leaders to offering political terms, thereby albeit not very shamefacedly that yes, they had, in fact, been dictators all along.

The main fault of Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was, plain, to mistake Facebook for a purely "recreational" website, while busying himself censoring all sites that were avowedly political. In a country where 25 per cent of the citizens have broadband (and 90 per cent mobiles) this was an error. Of note. The 25 per cent turned out by and large to be French-speaking postgraduates with a developed understanding of their civic entitlements.

After thirty years at the top, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak cannot have been under whatever misapprehension that he was love of the people, either. Only when it came to credible threats to his grasp on power he "thought [and this is bright] that only factions that had a pyramid structure were dangerous".

The documentary was largely comprised of segments of phone-cam footage (some of it pretty graphic), stitched together with to-camera narration from Ms Husain (pictured below) and the occasional Google map. It didn't waste as well much time on historical context, or item. The result tended towards broad generalisations (all annexation in Cairo apparently the piece of work of Mubarak's agents, provocateurs, etc), and a slightly pedestrian "Internet 101" flavour to the whole business – as though a lot of blue-rinsers would be watching a program with "Facebook" in the title (and with New Tricks on the other channel).

HFCTW2 None of which is to denigrate the colossal achievements of the protestors in either country. The Arab Spring was, and continues to be, a triumph for several beleaguered citizenries, and an case to the wider region. But – and far exist it from me to point out that Zuckerberg, Inc has form when information technology comes to taking credit for other people's ideas – I'd like to humbly suggest that Facebook had rather less to do with all this than may have met the center.

In both Egypt and Tunisia, the complaints behind the civil unrest were the aforementioned every bit they have e'er been: dictators rigging elections, torturing dissidents, mistaking the National Bank for their personal ATM, and generally beingness incapable of taking a joke. The protests, also, followed the standard path. Certainly this path was cleared somewhat by the availability of 21st-century technology; but the database hacking, the broadcasting (past Al Jazeera) of incendiary images of brutality, the negotiations with the armed forces, the iconography, even the planning of protest tactics (maps: newspaper maps) – none of these had much to exercise with social media.

In Arab republic of egypt, where but a fifth of the population has access to the internet, what brought the mob to Tahrir Foursquare was activists handing out fliers, sending texts and dropping massive hints in front of the city's famously gossipy taxi drivers: less data state highway, more rush-hour traffic. And the defining moment of the protestation was The Battle of the Camels – which is low-tech, even for Egypt.

In fact, the only people actually invigorated by Facebook were Mubarak'southward secret law, purposely misinformed by the protestors. The authorities responded – every bit if to bear witness my indicate – past taking the almost unthinkable step, in the modern geopolitical context, of switching off the internet. What happened? Everyone went outside to find out WTF was going on in their metropolis. Angry mobs in the streets: merely what Dr Guevara ordered. (NB The kickoff thing Hosni Mubarak did when he turned the servers back on was send everyone texts extolling the virtues of peace and patience. If yous've not lived in a country where this sort of thing happens yous'll struggle to imagine how creepy it is to realise the president quite literally has your number.)

The movie-makers did not in any manner deny or misconstrue these facts, merely hurried by them to get back to the social media narrative. Simply by doing so – and notwithstanding the bloody frontline footage – they somehow concluded upward making the whole business organization of revolution seem faintly "virtual".

Revolution, quite unlike the web, needs focal points. Slogans, online or anywhere else, aren't enough. What you demand – if you'll pardon the expression – is bodies on the streets. Facebook does provide a sort of corral – on martyrdom pages, for instance (and accept we in the West not waited and waited for the "right" kind of Islamic martyr?) – in a way that a standard web page cannot; merely information technology's not real. It's not blocking whatever tanks and it doesn't stop bullets. It cannot prevent radical Islam from infiltrating liberal-democratic protestation movements across the region, nor volition it guarantee successful post-conflict regime. The Yanks were notably cagey when it came to Mubarak's ousting, and it'due south besides early – in realpolitikal terms, anyway – to say that they were incorrect. In the end, the winner volition non exist the ane who had the most Friends, but the one who was prepared to get shot.

What social media did do, of grade, was speed everything upwardly. Historians nonetheless tin't agree on the length of the French Revolution; but the Tunisian i took 28 days. Revolutions need momentum, and if Facebook did goose egg else it strengthened the protestors' belief that they were non solitary, at home or internationally. That'southward non worth a Nobel, but it's a legitimate contribution.

All in all, though, How Facebook Changed the World was a pretty shameless attempt to sex up a adequately ordinary documentary on some extraordinary events – and unless it transpires that iii out of five revolutions prefer social media, I think the jury'south still out on Facebook. Part two is on Thursday, next week. Meanwhile – and lest we needed proof that there are worse means to modify the world – at that place was Syriana on ITV.