As the protests continue in the Middle East, and reporters and media experts from the West describe the situation, here are several interesting resources and responses I’ve run across. I hope you find them useful and informative.
Andy Carvin, a senior strategist on digital media at NPR and Nicholas Kristof, a reporter at the NY Times have been my two main sources of news from the Middle East. I get updates from both through their Twitter accounts, through blogs, and through Facebook.
- Andy Carvin on Twitter
- Nicholas Kristof on Twitter
- Nicholas Kristof’s blog
- Nicholas Kristof on Facebook
Clay Shirky has a fascinating interview video available from Wall-Street Journal,  “Facebook and Twitter are changing the Middle East”, where he “discusses the effect of Facebook, Twitter and other social media in the recent uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and what it could mean for the Middle East at large.”
Shirky also has two pieces in the January/February edition of the Foreign Affairs. Both are available after free site registration (at the time of this writing). The first, “The Political Power of Social Media” begins with the premise,
Since the rise of the Internet in the early 1990s, the world’s networked population has grown from the low millions to the low billions. Over the same period, social media have become a fact of life for civil society worldwide, involving many actors — regular citizens, activists, nongovernmental organizations, telecommunications firms, software providers, governments. This raises an obvious question for the U.S. government: How does the ubiquity of social media affect U.S. interests, and how should U.S. policy respond to it?
In the other piece, “From Innovation to Revolution” Malcolm Gladwell and Clay Shirky argue over the question,
Do the tools of social media make it possible for protesters to challenge their governments? Malcolm Gladwell argues that there is no evidence that they do; Clay Shirky disagrees.
On his blog, Henry Jenkins offers a post on “Media-Making Madness: #Arab Revolutions from the Perspective of Egyptian-American VJ Um Amel (Part One)”.
Finally, these are both a bit old, but in June 2009, Clay Shirky also spoke and wrote about the Iran revolution that also appeared to utilize social media tools with less amounts of success.
In his TEDTalk “How social media can make history”,
While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.
Finally, TED offered a Q&A followup with Clay Shirky related to his talk.
NYU professor Clay Shirky gave a fantastic talk on new media during our TED@State event earlier this month. He revealed how cellphones, the web, Facebook and Twitter had changed the rules of the game, allowing ordinary citizens extraordinary new powers to impact real-world events. As protests in Iran exploded over the weekend, we decided to rush out his talk, because it could hardly be more relevant. I caught up with Clay this afternoon to get his take on the significance of what is happening. HIs excitement was palpable.