Probably one of the most astounding things about the demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt were the fact that they were organized through the social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. There is, however, disagreement amongst pundits over the extent to which social networks and the Internet played a role in toppling Mubarak. Malcolm Gladwell, the popular writer for The New Yorker and author of the book, The Tipping Point, writes,
"Right now there are protests in Egypt that look like they might bring down the government. There are a thousand important things that can be said about their origins and implications: as I wrote last fall in The New Yorker, “high risk” social activism requires deep roots and strong ties. But surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another. Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along."1
However, Sam Graham-Felsen, an American blogger and journalist who was the blog director of the presidential campaign of Barack Obama in 2008, thinks that the cyber skeptics are wrong in their rejection of the influence of social media and the Internet. Graham-Felsen thinks that the Internet played a vital role in the protests that evolved into the revolution that brought down Mubarak. He credits a Facebook page called "We Are All Khaled Said" that initially called for and organized the January 25 protest, as the catalyst that led to Egypt's revolution. Khaled Said was a 28-year-old from Alexandria who was pulled out of an Internet café and beaten to death by police who suspected him of releasing videos of police corruption online. "What started as a campaign against police brutality grew into an online hub for young Egyptians to share their frustrations over the abuses of the Mubarak regime."2
The Facebook page was used by organizers of the protest to distribute downloadable flyers and detailed instruction manuals on how to protect yourself against tear gas. Apparently this level of organization gave everyone a sense of security. Dalia Ziada, a long-time human rights activist and blogger, was one of the core activists. She told Graham-Felsen,
"The fact that everything was very organized from the beginning made people feel safe and more willing to participate. For example there were maps to the protest locations and how groups should move and who should be in the front row," says Dalia. "This gave some sense of safety for the participants. In other words, it was not a random or spontaneous upheaval. No, it was well planned and organized."3For Graham-Felsen there was not doubt that the Internet played a vital role in the protests to end the rule of Mubarak:
"It's worth taking a step back to consider that for most ordinary people living under repressive regimes, nonviolent public protest is an absurd, laughable notion. The risk of being beaten, jailed, tortured or killed — as many Egyptian human rights activists have been over the past three decades — is terrifying. The only way a street protest becomes a remotely tenable proposition is if you know that you're not alone — that many, many people not only share your anger but share your desire to do something about it. And when you see that your fellow protesters have a plan — that they are knowledgeable, organized and prepared — it gives you the confidence that your participation won't be in vain. This is why the "We Are All Khaled Said" page — and the online organizing through private Facebook messages, e-mail list serves and Google Docs that sprung out of it — was so important for first-time activists."
"When these young activists took their collective confidence into the streets — in numbers that hadn't been seen for decades in Egypt — they showed that nonviolent mass mobilization was possible. Only then did the hundreds of thousands of older and non-connected Egyptians, who silently shared their grievances all along, feel compelled to act, too."4
Are we witnessing a new form of press freedom? Are we seeing the free press, which in Jefferson's day was instrumental in providing citizens with the information they needed to make decisions about their government, i.e. informing democracy, now becoming part of creating democracy? To better understand the revolution that is taking place with the free press we need to go back to an earlier revolution. Not the fight for the independence of the North American colonies from Great Britain, but to the revolution that was the Penny Press. When Jefferson penned his famous words quoted above the average American could not afford to buy a newspaper. Even though a newspaper costs just six and half cents and was printed weekly, it was only the upper class citizen that could afford to buy one.
However, on July 24, 1830, the first penny press newspaper came to the market in the form of Lynde M. Walter's Boston Transcript. The paper cost just one penny. Hence, the reason these newspapers were called the penny press. The first big paper of the penny press movement was The Sun, published in New York in 1833 by Benjamin Day. Another penny newspaper, The New York Herald, was established by James Gordon Bennett in 1835.
Up to this point newspapers relied on documents for stories. Bennett introduced the concept of observation and interview to provide stories with more vivid detail. The papers began to hire "reporters" to roam around an assigned beat and interact with the locals to obtain the latest news. Thus the concept of objective journalism started with the penny press.
Another new concept introduced with the penny press was using advertising to support the printing of newspapers, rather than relying on the subscription price or the support of political parties; although Horace Greeley's The New York Tribune was a platform for the Whig party.5
Basically, the penny press newspapers gave Americans the ideal of a free press that the founders of the nation wanted. It was essentially free of the government, political parties, old money or whatever other influence wanted to control the news that the population needed to form proper opinions in a democratic society. Of course, it is a bit of a Utopian idea to think that newspapers are completely free and impartial, without any opinions to push. No one probably believes today that there exists a completely impartial paper, just as there probably never has been one, even in the days when the penny press first began. But that newspapers have been a force for democracy is supported by many examples, such as the Washington Post's exposure of the Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of a sitting President for the first time in American history.
The times are changing, however, and many people are gloomy about the prospects for the future because the Internet seems to be challenging the funding model that newspapers have used from the beginning of the penny press. Space does not permit a detailed discussion of the problem of advertising in this article, but the gist of the problem is that people are turning to the Internet more and more for their news, which is causing advertisers to reduce the amount of money they spend on newspaper advertising because they are beginning to think it is putting their money in the wrong place. Papers have tried to fight back and have gone with online editions of their content, but they haven't figured out a good model to create revenue from that content; because most Internet users are reluctant to pay for it.
However, I don't think the advertising model is the big issue. I think that until the newspaper fraternity wakes up to the fact that the future of news is the Internet, they will be like Gladwell and brush off obvious ways in which it is both reporting and making the news around them. Indeed, I think a new model of journalism is being created by ordinary people who use the Internet everyday to shop, study, share photos, and occasionally organize a protest against a corrupt and unpopular government.
I think the Internet is the new penny press with a new way of doing journalism. Indeed, maybe we could modify Jefferson's words to be, "...were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without the Internet, or the Internet without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
- Does Egypt Need Twitter? Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, February 2, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/02/does-egypt-need-twitter.html#ixzz1CqneJJOu
- The Nation: The Cyber World Brought Down Mubarak, Sam Graham-Felsen, npr.org, February 14, 2011, http://www.npr.org/2011/02/14/133743332/the-nation-the-cyber-world-brought-down-mubarak
- Ibid
- Ibid
- The Founding of the Penny Press: Nothing New under "The Sun,""The Herald," or "The Tribune.", Williams, Julie Hedgepeth, Education Resources Education Center (ERIC), 1993, pg. 20, http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED360650.pdf
