Revolutions aren’t what they used to be. Connectedness has changed everything. News and analysis of historic events now unfolds in modules of minutes/hours, not months/years. And it is delivered by instantaneous media; no waiting for the history books to be written.
Here’s some history — news and analysis — from the past 24 hours:
NEWS: Egyptian army won’t fire on protesters: The Egyptian army announced on Monday it would not fire on the tens of thousands of protesters calling for President Mubarak to step down. An army spokesperson made the announcement on state TV saying, “freedom of expression through peaceful means is guaranteed to everybody”.
ANALYSIS: This almost certainly means the end of the Mubarak regime, because without uncompromising army support the president has no power base.
NEWS: Syria’s president talks about reforms, but claims his country is stable: The Middle East is diseased with stagnation and its leaders must “upgrade” themselves and their societies to keep up with the demands of their people, Syrian President Bashir al-Assad said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.”Real reform is about how to open up society and how to start dialogue,” he said, insisting that “Syria is stable … because you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people. This is the core issue. When there is divergence between your policy and the people’s beliefs and interests, you will have this vacuum that creates disturbance.”
ANALYSIS: Another Middle East dictator, desperately watching the dominos fall around him, tries to defend his own position, which may well prove to be, like that of his co-dictators, indefensible.
NEWS: Google invents a technology to help Egyptian demonstrators: Over the past weekend Google’s boffins came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service — the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection. It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on an international phone number and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. “We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time,” Google engineers said on their blog.
ANALYSIS: How can repressive regimes, fighting a popular uprising, compete with this kind of real-time technology innovation?
Imagine how the French or Russian revolutions would have unfolded, in speed and outcome, in a world of speak-to-tweet.
CRIKEY: Apologies for the tardiness of the Daily Mail over the last two days. We’ve been battling technical difficulties, but in a sign of our undying dedication to you loyal reader, we’ve managed to assemble our daily publication with a combination of sticky tape, bubble gum, spit and moxy.
Well done Crikey. At least you got it out on the net.
P.S. Next time use more moxy and less bubble gum. 🙂
Blue tack is better than bubble gum and can be re-used 🙂
Speak-to-tweet – no only extraordinary inventiveness in an instant, but it also says a great deal about Google. Very interesting development.
Crikey,
Prey tell, what is moxy
Bill
I have to disagree with the comment about Syria.
Last year travelled through both Syria and Egypt and even back then there was a level of discontent in Egypt that we’re seeing the results of now. Many were unhappy with the obvious corruption, lack of jobs and the servile relationship with the US. There was just a lot of very unhappy people…
Syria on the other hand was very different. The standard of living seemed higher, there was no seething mass of young unemployed people and pretty much everyone I spoke to were really happy with Bashir the dentist (he was training to be a dentist in London when his brother passed away and his father became ill). Quite a few remarked on the simple house that he lives in Damascus that was really rather modest by ‘Dictator’ standards.
Of course just don’t mention Israel to them… but yeah Syria was by far my favourite Middle East country that I travelled though.