Shortly after the beginning of the Arab revolution, the media began to fixate on the role of social media, ignoring other social and political factors. While important, there is no need to sensationalise the role social media played, treating it as if it were a silver bullet.
Namedropping social media networks became a cliché that reduced the totality of the transformation into revolutionary software. Though both the 2008 Iranian revolution and 2011 Egyptian revolution used new media to their advantage, only the latter succeeded in toppling the regime, while the Green Revolution failed. Why? Because of the many other factors that come to bear. Facebook doesn’t organise, people do. Twitter won’t govern, people will.
Western media’s constant referencing of the “youth” in the abstract, all the while ignoring other components of the revolution, became a cliché intended to fascinate and entertain, not inform. Indeed, packaging youth with Western technology became a media construct devoid of all social and political components. So while the young did encompass the majority of the protesting population, women, the unemployed, blue- and white-collar labour, the middle and upper classes, and activists were all pushed into a generational pigeonhole. Such categorisation, while fascinating, doesn’t say enough about the forces behind the revolution and how they would manage the future.
Regrettably, the fascinating David versus Goliath story of the people taking on oppressive regimes was translated by the Western media into a Hollywood narrative.
