Social Media Sparked, Accelerated Egypt’s Revolutionary Fire

---If three decades of violent repression and despotic rule were kindling for the Egyptian revolution, social media was both a spark and an accelerant for the movement.

Did social media like Facebook and Twitter cause the revolution? No. But these tools did speed up the process by helping to organize the revolutionaries, transmit their message to the world, and galvanize international support.
“In the same way that pamphlets didn’t cause the American Revolution, social media didn’t cause the Egyptian revolution,” said Sascha Meinrath, Director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative. “Social media have become the pamphlets of the 21st century, a way that people who are frustrated with the status-quo can organize themselves and coordinate protest, and in the case of Egypt, revolution.”
It is a truism in political science that successful revolutions are born in the streets — from the Boston Massacre of March 1770 and the storming of the Bastille in Paris in July 1789, to the streets of Cairo in 2011. What has shocked most observers of the current Egyptian scene is the sheer speed with which the regime fell — 18 days.
And that’s where modern communications technology has had the most potent impact---

WIRED.

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