The old ways catch up to the new, and the more things change...
As a recovering political junkie, I’ve been following the events in northern Africa with some interest. Anyone who studies history knows that revolutions are the way of the world, and while they thankfully occur relatively infrequently, they do, and they will. It’s pretty easy to understand the issues at stake in Tunisia and Egypt, which are fundamentally economic in nature. We’ve seen it all before in France, Russia, and, hey, didn’t something like this happen in America a while ago? The masses get pissed off at their station in life, and the government falls. And we move on.
It’s been interesting, though, to listen to the cable news guys go all ga-ga over Facebook and Twitter via mobile handsets as vehicles of communication among said masses. I may be missing something here, but why is this at all surprising? And why would anyone be surprised that a tyrannical government under siege would attempt to control said vehicles? Egypt actually shut off the Internet in that country, no mean feat, the Internet being what it is, and some cellular systems as well. But, as V reminded us in that absolutely wonderful film, people shouldn’t be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people. Such is certainly the case when a government disables large-scale communications systems, and, IMHO, becomes illegitimate in the process.
So it’s not a surprise to me, anyway, and getting back on topic here, that mobile communications has become so powerful in the revolution biz; after all, it is already such in just about everything else we do. Had these events taken place 10 years ago, it would have been all about e-mail on PCs; 20 years ago, the channel would have been faxes; 50 years ago, all about landline telephones; and 250 years ago, pamphlets and letters written in longhand (with marvelous penmanship, no doubt). We take advantage of whatever the technologies of the day might be to accomplish our goals, if really getting the job done with optimal productivity is our goal.
So, no surprises here. But a cautionary note: just as information can now flow at lightning speed, so can misinformation. Decisions that previously would have been the result of thoughtful contemplation are now based on 160 characters or less from unauthenticated or questionable sources. Hmmm… Hmmm, indeed.
