The View From the Phlipside - A Social Revolution

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, radio, the movies and more.  I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View from the Phlipside.

It's very easy to sit back and make fun of the social networks phenomenon and the people who are deeply involved in it.  It's a kind of current cheap and easy superiority.  At least it was easy until you heard the news out of Tunisia last week.

In case you missed it Tunisia, a country on the northern edge of the continent of Africa, changed government in the most fundamental way.  The former president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, who had held absolute power in the country for 23 years was driven out by massive demonstrations by the Tunisian people.  Now that's a real nice feel good kind of a story.  If you take a look at the details you realize that it's a rather amazing media story along the way.  Think about it, one of the advantages of being the ruler of a third world country is that it is very easy to control people's access to information.  For most of the last century you just needed control of three things - TV, Radio and the press.  The first thing most autocratic regimes do is make sure that TV and Radio are in control of the state.  Nationwide type broadcasting requires big, expensive equipment and permanent locations so they're hard for the opposition to create on their own.  Printing is a little easier but you still are tied down to your printing presses.  Just keep hunting down the printing press and you can put the alternative newspaper/magazine/pamphlets out of business.  The system has worked for dictators for decades now.

Well there's some bad news on the horizon.  Early word out of Tunisia is that much of the organization of the massive demonstrations was done by way of social media.  That's right a national government was brought down by things like Facebook and Twitter.  The government did everything it could to keep people's access to these kinds of sites but on the side of the opposition was an entire generation of young adults with considerable computer skills.  They hacked the firewalls and kept the information flowing.  The very nature of the web worked to the advantage of the opposition and the detriment of the previous regime.  I think we can rely on the fact that other dictators the world over are taking very close notice of this new concept.  That people can freely communicate, that videos can be shared showing what's really going on whether the government likes it or not.

Think about that the next time you sign in to your Facebook account.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010