MIDDLE EAST REVOLT

Middle East Revolt and Face book/Twitter

Middle East Revolt and Face book/Twitter

Introduction

Over the past few years, social networking has drastically affected the society and community. It is said the major drivers of revolt took place in Middle East during spring 2011, were the youth, new technology, and increased use of social media websites such as Face book and Twitter. This essay argues that Face book and Twitter had played a leading role in Middle East revolt, and it is correctly said that Face book and Twitter revolutions brought about the regimes of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak to their ends.

Discussion

As a growing technology, social networking has played an enormous role in modern society. The social media introduced the concepts of user participation, interactivity and real time communication (O'Reilly, 2005). Now days, the social networking websites, such as Face book have become a vital ingredient of our daily life activities. It is evident that social networking media has substantial affects that change society both positively and negatively. Except changing the people's behaviors of interacting with each other, the social media has also changed the ways in which people gather over the roads to raise their voice, against social and political issues.

The concept of social media and networking embeds with the digital age, in which every activity of our life depends on technology and gadgets. Using social media, people feel anything happen at other end of earth, to be happening locally (Srinivisan, 2012). In this age, where ever one is busy performing routine jobs or tasks, social activities highly rely on internet or social networking websites, such as Face book, Twitter and MySpace. Communication with friends, family and colleagues using internet and social networking websites has become popular. There are various reasons why people prefer the social networking websites for communication over any other communication means. A few years ago, people had limited means of communication in order to connect and keep in touch with others, such as telephone, telegraph, mail, etc. All of these technologies were costly in comparison to the internet, and also time consuming. Also, the older communication technologies such as telephone were not affordable for everyone or easily within reach. Today, people are able to connect with each other through web-based services that are proved to be efficient, fast, and powerful. Due to this fact, social networking has become a globalized phenomenon that could spur a revolution, mobilize a community for a proclaimed cause, connect like-minded people of similar interest or profession, or simply share news, opinions, debates and views among a group of people.

In spring 2011, Social media websites, mainly Face book and Twitter served as crucial factor during the Middle East revolt; this is the major reason why this revolt is sometimes termed as “Face book revolt” or “Twitter Revolt” (Channel 4, 2011). Due to the social media, the news related to the protests and events were able to reach thousands of people within few ...