Arab Spring 3.0: what's more revolutionary in the Middle East: Facebook or porn?

• Author: Russell, Thaddeus
• Position: Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People is Greater than the People in Power - A Memoir - Book review

Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People Is GreaterThan the People in Power: A Memoir, by Wad Ghonim, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 308 pages, $26

ARE NEW FORMS of communication inherently revolutionary? Do technologies that enable greater interaction among people necessarily subvert traditional norms and political regimes? When more people can speak, do more rulers fall?

For many, the Arab Spring provided the latest and most compelling answer to this line of questioning. Without Facebook, Twitter, and cellphones, we have been told, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and Muammar al-Qaddafi would still be safely ensconced in their palaces, and Bashar al-Assad would not be clinging to power by his fingernails.

The man who has come to personify this argument is Wael Ghonim, the "Facebook Freedom Fighter," an Egyptian Google executive whose social media activism is often portrayed as the spark that lit the fire in Tahrir Square. The very title of Ghonim's new book recounting his participation in the rebellion, Revolution 2.0, suggests that the Internet determined the nature of the upheavals in the Middle East, creating a fundamentally new political phenomenon in the process. According to Ghonim, the Internet is "a new force" in the history of social change, destined to "change politics." Thanks to modern technology, he writes, "the world is less hospitable to authoritarian regimes" and "the weapons of mass oppression are becoming extinct" But the long relationship between communication technology and politics--as well as the recent history of the Middle East--suggest that the Internet itself and Ghonim's celebrated use of it are less revolutionary than the unseemly, politically unconscious ways in which most people in the region are using the new forms of communication.

There is little doubt that most of the communication facilitating the Egyptian uprising passed through the channels of the Internet, or that Ghonim's Facebook page was a hub for activists. Ghonim created the page in June 2010 after seeing a photograph of the corpse of a young man named Khaled Said who had been beaten to death by police in Alexandria. Called "We Are All Khaled Said," the Arabic-language page grew from 300 members in its first two minutes to 36,000 by the end of its first day. Within six months, Ghonim's relentless postings calling for reform of the police and the State Security Investigations Service attracted more than 300,000 new members.

The political demands were simple and unremarkable. "Together," Ghonim writes, "we wanted justice for Khaled Said and we wanted to put an end to torture." But to Ghonim, the page represented something entirely new. It showed that modern communication could make revolution easy. "Social networking offered us an easy means to meet as the proactive, critical youth that we...