Tuesday I attended the lecture "When Egypt Went Dark" led by Dr. Mohammed El-Nawawy. He spoke of the growing role of the media and its influence on the ongoing revolution in his country. Apparently there are about 160 000 political bloggers in Egypt. The majority is against the president and some of the most popular bloggers have become celebrities.
Social networking has been the opposition’s main tool to communicate and attract followers to their cause. The negative opinions concerning the government first spread via Facebook groups and many anti-Mubarak demonstrations were organized through the social network.
El-Nawawy explained that “Even older people who don’t use Facebook got the information from their Facebooking kids”.
As the demonstrations turned violent, people started using twitter to inform other people about locations of the military, roadblocks, and other places to avoid.
Social networking led to such great problems for the Egyptian government that they decided to shut down all the internet services in the country.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/the-internet-goes-dark-in-egypt/613
Mark Zuckerberg talked about how he wanted Facebook to change the world. You can certainly say that Zuckersberg’s wish has come true as Facebook added their latest feature: to start revolutions.
He has truly changed the world. It seems as though the whole world is run by the communication between people on Facebook and also twitter.
SvaraRaderaNice post. I wonder if Zuckerburg had any idea that these kinds of things would spring from his brainchild, or if he was talking about a different kind of changing the world. He kind of started a revolution himself though, simply with the creation of facebook, so enabling revolutions fits nicely with fb's histroy.
SvaraRadera