Media Meditation2: Tweet Like an Egyptian

Mubarak disconnected his citizens of Egypt from the Internet, but they managed to turn things around and disconnected him from the government. It wasn't done through violent protesters, suicide bombers, or attacks on his life. The people took the power of social media and used it to change their world.

I could name so many adults that dislike social media and say that its a waste of time, addicting, and can lead to cyber bullying.

Here are so definitions to explain what the three main platforms are-

Facebook:

It is a place to communicate with friends and family, to share photographs or funny links you find on the Web, to play social games like Farmville or Mafia Wars, search for long-lost friends or even chat interactively with your buddies.

Twitter:
It is many different things to many different people. It can be used by a family tokeep in touch, or a company to coordinate business, or the media to keep people informed or a writer to build up a fan base. Twitter is a micro-blogging. It is social messaging. It is an event coordinator, a business tool, a news reporting service and a marketing utility.

Tumlr:

Perhaps the best alternative to Twitter, solving many issues that the social messaging giant suffers from including the 140 character max message limit. Twitter was designed for text messaging, thus the limitation. Tumblr is designed for the web, thus Tumblr makes it easy to share text, photos, videos and links.

While you watch this video, I want you to think about other protests. You could say that its extremely similar to almost any other one, the people are passionate, they know who to trust and who not to trust, and they all have the same message... Just like other protesters have for other causes.

Now I want you to figure out how it got so big. How did thousands of people know what was going on? How and why did the media pick up on it with such intensity and passion when they have ignored hundreds of other ones in the Middle East and Africa. They picked up on it because the people wanted them to. They got the worlds attention through Facebook and Twitter. Once the media discovered so many people around the world researching and following Egypt they couldnt stay away. But of course many news reports didnt even talk about the struggle that happened through social networking.

Social media and networking started a revolution to change the government of an entire country. The January 25th revolution in Egypt gained a major foothold because of tools like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. People used social media to increase government transparency, spread news/photographs and show outsiders what was actually happening as opposed to what the government and media was showing.

Theres a very interesting story by Stephan Faris that is on Time's website: Meet the Man Tweeting Egypt's Voices to the World It just shows how small the world can become with social media and especially blogging/microblogging.

Whether or not you agree that the revolt would have happened with out media, you can not deny that todays real-time communication spread word of the protests and helped gain momentum that would have been a lot harder to achieve without social networks.

Maybe people will start using the media instead of weapons to change the world?