Winds of Change?

"...something is going on in the Middle East today that is very new. Pull up a chair; this is going to be interesting...."

In this New York Times Op-ED column, author Thomas L. Friedman contrasts the Middle East’s political and citizen activism processes in his history of covering the region with Lebanon’s election of June 7 2009 and Iran’s election of June 12 2009. He highlights the diffusion of technology and its role in horizontal communication, political mobilisation, and criticism of government leadership.

Friedman notes that the internet, blogs, YouTube, and text messaging via cellphones, particularly among the young, including the 70 percent of Iranians who are under 30, are tools of choice for activism, enabling them to monitor vote-rigging by posting observers with cellphone cameras, among other communication possibilities.

The author describes two experiences showing the depth of information and communication technology (ICT) diffusion in Middle Eastern culture: first, his meeting with a friend who is an 80-year-old Lebanese historian who is a Facebook user; and, second, his interview with the “March 14” party opposition leader in Beirut, Lebanon, who monitored the elections on a wall-size television screen and 16-flat screens connected to laptops feeding breakdowns of voting from every religious community, village by village, and projecting them onto electronic maps on the screens. He says, claiming that former elections were controlled to the point of predictability, "When I reported from Beirut in the 1970s and 1980s, I covered coups and wars. I never once stayed up late waiting for an election result." He suggests that political space has opened through a series of historical forces that have created the space "for real politics" and that ICT has widened the communication possibilities within it.