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Arab Information Revolution

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By FAROOQ MITHA

Special to the Tribune

Published: March 15, 2009

A colleague who was in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf war told me that when the war started, people in Riyadh and Jeddah had no idea the war had begun until three days after it started.

Saudi government television stations initially acted as if there was no war going on and, at the time, this was all the access to news people had; satellites were expensive and illegal in the country. This was and continues to be the state of Arab media. Tightly controlled, censored messages that allow Arab regimes to stunt political and social progression in their countries.

However, since the mid-1990s, Arab regimes have found it harder to control the flow of information. The satellite revolution brought significant change to the way the Arab world receives information, and the rise of the Internet has expanded this, influencing the new generation in ways that could affect how the United States carries out its policies in the region.

Al Jazeera's Effect

In 1996, Al Jazeera was started in Qatar as the Arab world's first 24-hour news channel and included open debates, discussion with dissenting opinions and controversial views unheard of in the Middle East. Al Jazeera injected a level of journalistic freedom into a region that was and continues to be largely dependent on censored media.

This has created a problem for Arab regimes, which are slowly losing control over how their citizenry obtains information. Today, government officials must defend their policies on the air, and ordinary people have the opportunity to comment on current events.

The satellite revolution also played a part. Now, across the Middle East, even in the most remote villages, the majority of people have satellite dishes, which they use not only to watch Arabic language television, but also to watch channels such as CNN.

Since 2000, increased usage of the Internet has further increased the flow of information. Statistics show that while the region accounts for about 3percent of the world's Internet users, between 2000 and 2008 the usage growth exceeded 1,000 percent; the rest of the world's usage growth was about 300 percent.

Internet tools such as Facebook, MySpace and blogs allow the new generation of Arabs to be more informed than previous generations. This generation looks to the Internet and independent news sources to keep informed and rely less on state-controlled media, which has lost its tight grip on the dissemination of news. These tools have ignited the Arab world and allowed people to become more involved within their societies than they have been in the past. For example, during the recent conflict in Gaza, Facebook, MySpace and independent web-based media sites such as Jordan's 7iber.com quickly spurred the organization of protests, drives for blood, food and clothing, and candlelight vigils across the region.

Consequences Of Change

While this technological revolution is good for the region, it has significant consequences on policy and politics. Internally, the increased flow of information continues to cause concern for Arab governments whose citizens will no longer simply swallow information fed to them daily by the tightly censored media. Regimes in the Middle East have taken steps to try to restrict the usage of Internet sites and the activity of bloggers. Egypt and Saudi Arabia, for example, have harassed and arrested bloggers in the past and Syria has taken steps to block the use of sites such as Facebook.

These changes also bring consequences for the United States and its allies. Conflicts such as the Iraq war and the Arab-Israeli conflict further entrench the harsh realities of the political situation in the Middle East into Generation Y and intensify ill feelings toward U.S. policy in the region.

If the United States hopes to be an honest broker in the region, we must consider the impact of these new modes of disseminating information. As the Arab world turns to a variety of sources for news and information, our policies will be increasingly scrutinized, and incidents such as those at Abu Ghraib will be ingrained in people's minds.

Thus, as we seek to win hearts and minds across the Middle East, our policies must be carefully thought out and implemented in ways that can be used to gain the trust of the Arab street.

Farooq Mitha is an international policy specialist and is a Fulbright Fellow in Amman, Jordan.

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