Wael Ghonim’s description of seeing the picture of Khaled Mohammed Said’s brutalized body resonated in a strange way with me. The random happenstance, the fascination, the violence, the denial. I’ve felt the same things when seeing videos of American police kill black men posted on my Facebook feed. I will not attempt to liken the Black Lives Matter movement with the dynamics of the Arab Spring beyond this initial comparison – it did get me thinking. The proliferation of social media platforms and the groundswell of information reporting – people publicizing the events of their lives with the ease of a click of a button – does mean that any user can experience the same outrage nearly first hand. Realistically, this has to have some impact on the way people become activated and involved in social movements. Prior to the last decade of technological advance, many people could live in blissful ignorance to so much of the world and what happens in it. The likelihood that I would ever see an actual police altercation, or that Wael Ghonim, in Dubai, would see the Egyptian police brutalize a young man is slim. While we might be told what had happened, it would be easy to deny or turn a blind eye. Now, if I wanted to, I could probably pull up the images of Khaled Said that helped foment a revolutionary change of regime.

 

Ghonim’s facebook page wasn’t the cause of the Arab Spring, Basem Fathy gives a clear chronology of the forces that were bubbling in Egypt for a decade before it. And Ethan Zuckerman also makes a compelling argument about attributing social change solely to the rise of social media. However, he also points out that given a previously formulated concern or grievance, the social media tools are the simplest and easiest for people to use and get their message out. So all this makes me wonder if the advent of wide exposure doesn’t at least speed up or catalyze what would have previously taken decades or generations to boil over. If those who might before have had no idea that something was amiss in the country, suddenly are getting that information casually when they are bored, shouldn’t that amplify and drive so many more to action? And by that same token, does it also lower the bar for what can build and spark change?

 

But maybe the opposite is true? That having more and more dramatic exposure to many issues numbs people to its importance? Or maybe it dilutes the process – in my class on American politics and public policy, we talk about a policy process model where a problem is identified and then coalitions form to build a solution, the solution is implemented and feedback is created for evaluation. It’s just a model for how things should be, obviously policy is rarely made in an orderly feedback-looped process, but it’s the notional idea. If everything becomes radicalized through the population’s facebook feed, what chance is there for measured, compromised policy change? Even in the case of the Arab Spring, where there were truly terrible atrocities going on, can we even argue that the outcome of the social media prompted uprising resulted in the most desirable outcome? Maybe some ignorance on the part of the electorate does provide some leeway for better policy – maybe transparency and urgency somehow makes things worse.