When dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia on Jan. 14, it was the first time in history that Twitter, Facebook, and other social media had helped bring down a government.
With Egypt now in its third day of Facebook-organized political flash mobs, it may not be the last.
Recent uprisings midwived by Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the cable news network Al-Jazeera might not be a "Twitter revolution." But the Middle East has been shaken, and social media have done some of the shaking.
"In the Arab world, this has never happened before," says John Entelis, director of Middle Eastern studies at Fordham University. "A dictator has been deposed by the people. That is an extraordinary first step, even if nothing else comes of it. And believe me, the whole Arab world is watching."
Mustapha Tlili, director of New York University's Center for Dialogues and himself Tunisian, says: "For the first time, we became a world moral community, thanks to Twitter."
Tlili says dictators in the region's other countries can block social media, but not forever, "so they must deal with the way social media make it easy to flout authority, organize opposition, and appeal to the moral conscience of the world."
In Tunisia, nothing happened overnight. Demonstrations had been widespread since December on issues including unemployment, economic conditions, and official corruption.
On Dec. 17, in Sidi Bouzid, deep in the interior, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself aflame in front of a government building, in protest after police confiscated his produce stand.
Horrible images of his act circulated lightning-fast on the Internet. Protests followed. The world witnessed what Neil Postman wrote in his prescient 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: "Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution."
"Thanks to Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, images of those first protests went around the world instantly, and everyone knew about it," says Tlili. "Even 20 years ago, you could have had those uprisings in the interior and few would have known."
