• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, February 1, 2011

Lest anyone take offense, I should clarify at the outset that I don't view the revolution in Egypt as simply a media case study -- it is obviously an event of earthshaking importance, for Egypt, the Middle East and the whole world. But it also perfectly encapsulates a number of media trends -- and I'd like to focus on those, if I may, without trivializing the broader event.

First of all, it seems clear that social media has, in fact, played a role in the Egyptian revolution and the upheavals in Tunisia and Algeria which preceded it. The fact that the Egyptian government banned Facebook and Twitter, then proceeded to shut down the Internet, is surely a recognition of the threat posed by digital communications. (This week also brought the alarming news that Google's chief sales executive in the Middle East and North Africa, Wael Ghonim, has been missing for a week after tweeting his plans to take part in protests -- and telling followers how they can evade the Internet ban).

Of course highlighting the role played Facebook, Twitter, and other social media isn't meant to diminish the role of traditional media -- especially TV -- in helping move the events in North Africa along. The effect is clearly cumulative, with different channels complementing and reinforcing each other -- TV broadcasts inspiring viewers to take to the Internet and organize protests, which are reported on TV, which helps inspire more protests, and so on. On that note no one can deny the huge role played by Al-Jazeera -- virtually the only independent Arab-language TV news source in many parts of the Middle East, which contributed to the spread of dissent by broadcasting almost continuous coverage of protests (including a series of self-immolations) in Tunisia and Algeria.

Indeed, the real story is the way broadcast and digital media are working together. After the Egyptian government shut down Al-Jazeera's Cairo bureau, the broadcaster called on citizen journalists inside Egypt to file stories via the Internet (which isn't entirely inaccessible, despite the regime's earnest efforts, as illustrated by Ghonim's tweets shortly before he disappeared) for broadcast via satellite. Between news beamed from space on one hand, and the Hydra-like, ubiquitous Internet on the other, the Egyptian authorities will have a hell of a time cutting off their countrymen from independent sources of information.

Of course, as some comments on my previous column also pointed out, it's important to remember that media (of whatever type) are merely adjuncts to human events. In the first place, Al-Jazeera would never have had anything to report without the protestors putting themselves in harm's way in Tunisia and Algeria -- and while these reports might have helped influence people in Egypt to take to the streets, individual viewers still had to summon their courage and consciously choose to risk their lives in confrontation with the security police.

But all this is something of a truism, to the effect that "only human beings can do what only human beings can do." And this position, however irrefutable, is useless for furthering our understanding of historical events: if you dismiss technology (and other external forces) as secondary, marginal factors in history, you can basically reduce the entire historical record to "stuff happened because we did it"... which isn't exactly illuminating.

True, it's always humans beings who do the doing, but the way events unfold is undoubtedly influenced by their technological context. Among other things, the role of media in dissent and political change is attested by the lengths dictatorships go to suppress it, and the lengths dissidents go to circumvent these restrictions -- from Russian intellectuals circulating hand-printed samizdats, to Iranian revolutionaries sharing audio tapes of Khomeini,to Egyptian bloggers using virtual proxy cloud servers to keep on tweeting, all at great personal risk to themselves.