• How Diverse is Facebook? | overstated
  Interesting paper on how Facebook estimates racial diversity of users by correlating surnames to US census data. 
  (tags: facebook race socialnetworking statistics data analysis diversity)

• Issue 1: Welcome to the City
  Beautiful webcomic about post WWII/pre-independence Kenya
  (tags: africa kenya comic graphicnovel webcomic history colonialism)
• Re: Connectivity status for Egypt
  Mailing list post from Arbor's Craig Labowitz, includes link to a graph of traffic shutdown in Egypt
  (tags: egypt internet censorship jan25)
• Watching Egypt disappear from the Internet – Internet – Committee to Protect Journalists
  Excellent Danny O'Brien analysis of internet shutdown in Egypt
  (tags: internet egypt MENA jan25 censorship)
• Egypt falls off the Internet | BGPmon.net Blog
  BGPMon sees a less sharp connectivity dropoff. Unclear if they've revised this assessment as shutdown went on.
  (tags: egypt internet censorship jan25 politics)
• Egypt Leaves the Internet – Renesys Blog
  Renesys on Egyptian government internet shutdown
  (tags: internet egypt censorship politics MENA jan25)

Protesters stop for prayer during January 28th demonstrations in Cairo (possibly 6th October Bridge.) Twitpic posted by @ollywainwright

Like many people, I’ve spent the day glued to Al Jazeera English’s coverage of the protests that have taken place all across Egypt. Egyptian friends had made it clear to me that today would be pivotal – the day the revolution took place, or failed to catch fire. I’m stunned by the bravery of the people who took to the streets, knowing they’d face police willing to use tear gas and rubber bullets to drive them back. I’m fascinated at how effectively protesters mobilized with communications (not just internet, but mobile phone and SMS) cut. And I’m deeply moved by the photos that show protesters praying in the middle of demonstrations, sometimes with police joining them, sometimes, as above, with water cannons trying to disperse them while they pray.

And like everyone else, I’m waiting to hear Mubarak speak… or to hear the news that he’s disappeared and that the military has taken charge of the country. It’s too early for analysis, of how the protests managed to be so massive, of the role (or lack of role) of social media, of implications for the broader region. Or maybe it’s the right time for more nimble pundits than me. All I can do is share my outbox with you – here’s some email I’ve sent to friends and colleagues answering questions that have come in today:

In response to a reporter’s question about the importance of Internet to the movements in Egypt and Tunisia, and whether internet access is a human right:

Both Tunisia and Egypt have experienced broad-based popular revolutions. The people who’ve taken to the streets aren’t just the elites using social media – they’re a broad swath of society, heavy on young people, but including a wide range of ages, incomes and political ideologies. It’s a mistake to link the protests too tightly to factors like Facebook, Twitter, Wikileaks – at the root, these protests are about economics, demographics and decades of autocratic rule.

But because they’re popular movements, it’s very much worth asking how they’ve been organized, and what’s convinced people to take to the streets. In both Tunisia and Egypt, it’s pretty clear that these protests have not been organized by existing political parties. (The Brotherhood in Egypt helped turn people out for the protests today in Egypt, but they are not the core organizers, and have been very careful not to claim leadership.) What motivates tens of thousands of people to take to the streets, knowing that they’re going to face severe reactions from security forces.

Media plays a role here. In Tunisia, protests started with the immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, and initially were confined to Sidi Bouzid, a small and relatively disconnected city. The protests got attention across the country and throughout the Arab world via Al Jazeera, which aggressively covered the protests, despite the fact that the network’s reporters had been banned from the country. Al J leaned heavily on social media, reproducing images and video from Facebook, which is widely used (19%+ percent of Tunisian population uses Facebook) in the country. Al Jazeera is widely watched in Tunisia, and images of people taking to the streets in Sidi Bouzid helped spark the protests that spread throughout the country and eventually to Tunis, where they toppled the government. I don’t think social media was the prime actor, but social media amplified by broadcast helped tell Tunisians that their fellow citizens were taking
to the streets.

The success of Tunisia’s revolution (and let’s pause to point out that, while they removed a hated dictator, it’s still not clear what comes next) has inspired people throughout the region, in ways that are good an bad. There’s been a rash of immolations, people following in the footsteps of Bouazizi, which is truly tragic. But there’s also a pervasive sense that change is afoot throughout the region. The success in Tunisia mobilized existing activist groups in Egypt, like
the April 6 Youth movement, Kefaya and the Brotherhood, who used a wide variety of tactics to bring people to the streets on the 25th and now on the 28th. Everyone knows that Egypt is not Tunisia – the Egyptian security forces are a much nastier beast, in no small part because they’re well trained and well armed, with extensive US support. But the possibility of victory in Tunisia, heavily amplified on Al Jazeera and other international media, has helped people decide to take to the streets.

It’s clear that social media had at least some impact in organizing the Egyptian protests – we saw tens of thousands of people signing up to participate on Facebook groups used to organize protests. It wasn’t the chief medium used to plan protests – SMS and even paper flyers were likely more important – but it did give people outside the region a chance to see what was coming. On 1/23, we were reporting about the forthcoming 1/25 protests in Cairo – that’s why it was so surprising to see much of international media, including Al Jazeera, caught flatfooted that day. By 1/28, plans had been widely disseminated, online and offline. When Mubarak ordered mobile phone networks and the internet shut off late last night, it was too late – people knew where they were going, what they were going to do and the interruption in
comms wasn’t sufficient to stop the protests.

The shutdown is significant because it means the pictures we’re getting of events on the ground are coming largely via journalists – i.e., our picture of the protests today are very much a pre-internet form of reporting. As I hang out on Twitter, my friends are doing what I’m doing – listening intently to Al Jazeera English and discussing what we see. The implications of this shutdown, long term, are pretty massive. Cutting a nation of 80m off the internet is a pretty clear
admission of fear and panic from the Mubarak government. The main implication, I think, is that it’s going to be very hard for things to return to “normal” in Egypt. The internet shutdown is a small, but telling, part of a larger picture: nothing will be the same tomorrow morning.

Is access to the internet a human right? The right to speak, to be heard, to organize, to air grievances are all rights protected under the universal declaration of human rights. When we defend those rights nowadays, we defend them online as well as offline, because the public sphere includes the digital as well as the physical. I think the notion of an internet shutdown is viscerally uncomfortable to US audiences because it suggests a thuggish government willing to silence all dissent if possible. But human rights are being much more enthusiastically violated by the riot police beating demonstrators, dragging them into vans and leaving them by roadsides in the desert. If an internet shutdown is what it took to get Americans to realize that Egypt – a nation we support with $1.3b of military aid a year – has a serious human rights problem, then we just aren’t paying attention.

To a group of political scientists who study politics and internet, looking for realtime coverage and analysis of what’s taking place in Egypt:

It’s been a pretty extraordinary couple of weeks. The events in Tunisia were a stunning surprise – it took a very long time for the protests in Sidi Bouzid to turn into a nationwide movement, and it wasn’t clear that the unrest would spread from that small, disconnected city to the whole nation. Now, it feels a bit more like watching an avalanche – there’s incredible instability and power, and it seems very clear that Egypt cannot return to business as usual
after today’s events.

My friends and I are staying glued to AJE, which is doing an excellent job of streaming coverage from Cairo, especially impressive as there’s been such a strong government crackdown on communications, and because it’s clear that the police have been targeting journalists.

Twitter was hugely useful in following the protests on January 25, but it’s much less useful today, as the internet is mostly shut down, and mobile phone networks are disabled in most areas where protests are taking case. Still, it’s worth paying attention to Alaa Abdel Fateh, an Egyptian dissident living in South Africa, who’s acting as an aggregator and router for reports from the ground. One of the most interesting initiatives is a project designed to get reports out via landline phone and onto Twitter – someone is literally taking phonecalls, translating and posting on @Jan25voices. I’m also getting some very
interesting news from friends who work for Jazeera, who’ve often got the best news from the ground – Mohamed Nanabhay (@mohamed), Abulrahman Warsarme (@abdu)

AJE’s liveblog is excellent -
Guardian and NYTimes also doing the same, but I haven’t found them as helpful.

As for deeper reporting and more context, I think Foreign Policy has done the best work thus far, especially on their Mideast Channel. I trust Marc Lynch’s analysis – he’s incredibly smart about both the region and the power of traditional and social media. Foreign Policy has been one of the main places we’ve argued about issues of media influence – here was my contribution to that debate, and a very smart reaction to that piece from Zeynep Tufekci.

Of course, Global Voices has been all over the story – we were able to predict the Jan 25 protests on Jan 23 based on what we were hearing in social media. Here’s the link to our Egypt coverage.

I’ll hope to take some of our upcoming meeting to talk through some of the theoretical issues these events raise. Some very quick thoughts on the relationship between new media, old media and mobilization:

- Understanding how protests spread from Sidi Bouzid through Tunisia probably means analyzing the relationship between social media and Al Jazeera. Jazeera covered the protests intensely and in detail, but as they’d had their bureau in Tunis shut down, and as the country prevented reporters from going to Sidi Bouzid, they leaned heavily on social media for footage of the protests. By broadcasting those protests via AlJ, which has very wide viewership, Tunisians got the
message that they could take to the streets – that it was risky, but could happen across the country. It certainly wasn’t a media led revolution, but it’s quite possible that social media plus broadcast helped reinforce the impulse to protest.

- There’s been a strong role for social media in planning protests in Egypt. It’s clearly not the only, or even main, tool for mobilizing, but we saw tens of thousands of people committing to the January 25 and 28 protests via Facebook groups, and the April 6 Youth movement, a Facebook-based movement, seems to be one of the prime actors.

- Censorship is the sincerest form of flattery. While Ben Ali lifted restrictions on the internet shortly before his government fell, Mubarak has gone in the other direction, and effected a pretty thorough internet shutdown late last night. Too late – the 28th protests were very well planned and couldn’t be stopped by shutting
down comms. But fascinating to think about the implications of taking the largest nation in the region offline.

Lots to think about, lots to analyze, but for now, just fascinated watching this unfold.

• Largest Cities Through History
  The largest cities at moments in time, from Tertius Chandler's (somewhat controversial) compilation of the population of cities throughout history, Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census.
  (tags: history cities population geography statistics urban)

• Food for Thinkers: The Rise of White People Food – Food – GOOD
  Critique of the NYTimes for overfocusing on a small subset of NYC restaurants, missing more authentic cuisine in outer boroughs. Interesting to think about in the context of serendipity, discovery.
  (tags: cities urban exploration nyc food serendipity)

• ?!
  Mission-based game platform that encourages kids/teens to explore the real world and find answers to complex questions through experimentation. Team includes the SF0 guys…
  (tags: games education learning collaboration ARGs SF0 seriousgames serendipity)
• What Future Does Facebook Have? – Grasping Reality with Both Hands
  The Facebook approach to search: "You need to know what your friends and your friends of friends already know that you do not." Brad DeLong looks at the idea that Facebook could displace Google and takes an early glance at the idea of friend-informed search.
  (tags: facebook socialmedia search web business echochambers homophily businessmodel)
• Facebook Wins Relatively Few Friends in Japan – NYTimes.com
  Article suggests that Facebook has had a tough time in Japan because it refuses to let people participate anonymously. Mixi, vastly more popular, is highly private and users report using it very differently than US social networks – far more interaction with people they don't know offline, not a replication of online social networks.
  (tags: facebook internet japan web2.0 socialmedia mixi homophily)

I’m happy to announce that W. W. Norton & Company has agreed to publish my first book, Rewire: Rethinking Globalization in an Age of Connection. Should all go well, I hope to turn in the manuscript late this year for publication some time in 2012. I’m very grateful to my agent, David Miller of The Garamond Agency, for his hard work in helping me bring this book to the world. And I’m greatly looking forward to working with Brendan Curry at Norton.

My book asks whether the internet is leading towards more contact across boundaries of language, nation and culture and, if not, how we could rewire the tools we’ve built to increase international connection. The ideas will be familiar to many of the readers of this blog – the book is a chance to explore ideas like cultural bridging, pervasive translation, structured serendipity and xenophilia at length. For those who haven’t read posts where I’ve talked about those ideas, my TED talk is a good introduction to the ideas I’ll be exploring.

I have high hopes of writing less online and more offline, but won’t stop work on this blog. I would expect to be posting more bookmarks and short pieces and fewer essays, but you never know. And I’m posting extensively on my twitter feed, and will try to update folks on the book’s progress there and here.

This week started for me with a huge event in my family’s life – after six years of study, my wife was ordained with a rabbi, and our family celebrated with her in Colorado. It ended joyfully as well, as I watched in awe as Tunisians took to the streets and kicked out a widely despised dictator. I’ve had the honor to work with Sami ben Gharbia, a passionate Tunisian activist, for the past five years, and I’m excited for him, for all my other Tunisian friends, and for everyone brave enough to take to the streets and demand change.

This was going to be the week I stopped writing about what was going on in the world and focused on longer writing projects, but it was simply too exciting to watch history unfold without weighing in. I’ve offered some reactions on the events in Tunisia and the role of social media in a post for Foreign Policy.

The punchline of that post: assuming the events in Tunisia end up with a transfer of power, and (we all hope) a democratic and fair election, you’re going to hear any number of theories crediting Tunisia’s revolution to Twitter, to Wikileaks, to Anonymous and so on. Be skeptical. A shift this momentous doesn’t come from a single factor – it comes from millions of people, frustrated and pissed off, who find ways to come together and demand change. Oversimplified explanations do a disservice to the bravery of the people who risked – and in many cases, lost – their lives to take to the streets, and disrespect the people who’ve worked for decades for change in their country.

I hope Tunisia finds its way from overthrowing a dictator to building a stable, democratic government. I hope Sami can go home for the first time in many years. I hope people find inspiration in the actions of the Tunisian people and understand that change – real change – doesn’t come just from a new technology or leaked information, but from blood, tears, bravery and struggle.

George Brock (Professor and Head of Journalism at City University London, long time writer and editor for the Times of London) has a thoughtful and helpful response to my previous post on the protests in Tunisia and my perception that they’re getting far less media attention than the “green revolution” protests in Iran. Before addressing his helpful intervention, a quick update:

Protests are continuing throughout Tunisia. President Ben Ali is looking increasingly desperate. In a speech yesterday, he promised to cut prices on some major foodstuffs, remove restrictions on the press and the Internet and to step down in 2014, rather than standing for re-election. Today, he’s dismissed his entire government and called for elections in six months. It’s unclear that these concessions will be accepted by protesters, who appear to have unified around calls for his removal.

While media attention is rising on the story – especially from responsible outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, PRI’s The World, Foreign Policy and others who’ve been covering it throughout – it still hasn’t captured public attention (at least in the US) the way the Iran protests did last year. To explain attention disparities regarding Tunisia, Brock offers several useful explanations for the disparity in attention:

- The disparity is greater in the US than elsewhere – Tunisia is big news in the French and Arabic media
- Tunisia’s always going to be a smaller story in the English-speaking world – it’s historically and culturally aligned with France
- The story hit the news dead zone between Christmas and New Years
- There’s less geopolitical significance for Tunisia than for Iran, and long-term American involvement in Iran (and guilt over proping up the Shah) contributes to interest.

I’ll push back against one of Brock’s explanations, that being a foreign correspondent in Tunisia is a dangerous job. While that’s true, Iran made it virtually impossible for foreign correspondents to cover the protests – in an essay last year, I argued that the difficulty in covering the protests directly led to the heavily reliance on social media.

But I’ll agree with Brock’s other points, for the most part. There’s more attention in French-language media than in English – this graph compares searches and news coverage for “Tunisia” and “Tunisie” to offer a rough English/French comparison. The bottom graph, which measures news attention, shows a lockstep rise between French and English terms, suggesting that both English and French outlets are taking interest in the protests. Search volume shows a sharp difference – there’s a pretty clear rise for “Tunisie” and a much more gradual rise for “Tunisia” – to me this suggests either lots more Francophones interested in the story, or perhaps more Tunisians searching in French (which we’d expect) for news and coverage. It does help illustrate the point I offered in my previous piece – for whatever reasons, the Tunisia story hasn’t captured the imagination of Anglophones in the way the Iran story did.

This graph is helpful for understanding the intensity of interest in Iran during the election, recount and protests – while Iran routinely gets roughly 4x the attention of Tunisia, during the Green movement protests, attention spiked to roughly four times the normal intensity. The green movement was one of the rare international news stories to register as a top story on Project for Excellence in Journalism’s news coverage index – I’ll be interested to see whether Tunisia registers this week. And while important cheerleaders like Andrew Sullivan have started waving their influential pompoms for Tunisia, it hasn’t captured the imagination of the Twittersphere in nearly the same way (likely due to some of the reasons Brock outlines.)

Where Brock and I agree completely is that social media is having some sort of role, probably an important role, in the protests. Brock’s language is a bit stronger than what I would use:

This has been a social media revolt, both in the mobilisation of middle class intellectuals and in the gathering and distribution of detailed information about what was happening on the ground. Much inflated hyperbole is talked about the effect of social media on politics and society in Europe and the US. But here in the Middle East, it is impossible exaggerate the importance – actual and potential – of informal media. (An earlier post of mine on this here).

Anyone doubting its importance to the events in Tunisia should look at the actions of the authorities. At first, traditional reflexes operated. Newspapers were disrupted and journalists detained. Then the authorities realised that the printed press was a nuisance but not the real problem: they went after the bloggers and the web. This sequence of events is well summarised here by IFEX.

I’m not ready to declare a revolution until Ben Ali steps down and Tunisia holds elections. And even if that happens, I’d argue – as I have previously - that social media’s a part of the equation, not the whole. But it does seem like those who are enthusiastic about the role of social media in mobilizing and promoting protest, but aren’t watching Tunisia closely, are missing something big here. The protests in Tunisia have already yielded concessions that would have been hard for most Tunisians to believe a few weeks back, and have served as a profound warning to other autocratic leaders in the region.

On December 17, a 26 year old Tunisian man named Mohamed Bouazizi reached the end of his rope. An unemployed university graduate, Bouazizi had become a seller of fruits and vegetables in the southern Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. When authorities confiscated his wares to punish him for selling without a license, Bouazizi set himself on fire. He died in hospital on January 4, 2011.

Video of protests in Sidi Bouzid on YouTube

Bouazizi’s suicide struck a chord with other frustrated Tunisians. Thousands took to the streets in Sidi Bouzid to protest widespread unemployment, government corruption and lack of opportunity. Another frustrated youth in Sidi Bouzid, Lahseen Naji, killed himself by climbing an electricity pylon while crying out “No for misery, no for unemployment!” before grasping the high voltage line. The Tunisian government responded by sending baton and teargas-wielding reinforcements to the city and by promising future economic development projects. But riots have spread from Sidi Bouzid across the country, and the government has responded by closing the high schools and universities, arresting those they perceive to be ringleaders and imposing a curfew. Global Voices contributor Slim Amamou was one of those arrested on January 6th – we’ve not heard from him or been informed of the charges.

Despite the crackdown, it seems increasingly possible that the Ben Ali government might fall. The New York Times reported that members of Ben Ali’s family have been leaving the country. And it looked like a coup might take place last night, as the army took to the streets of Tunis. Rob Prince of the University of Denver, who is following the situation closely, speculates that the army deployed itself to protect citizens from the security police (who’ve been violently suppressing dissent) not in an attempt to seize power. There’s good reason to believe the Ben Ali government could fall – trade unions and lawyers have both gone on strike in support of the protests, and the situation appears to be rapidly spiraling out of the government’s control.

If you’re in the US, there’s a good chance you haven’t heard what’s going on in Tunisia unless you follow news from North Africa and the Middle East closely. The story of the ongoing protests has received very little media attention. Google Trends (below) shows a spike of attention that’s lower than the attention Tunisia received for losing to Ukraine in the first round of the 2006 World Cup.

One explanation is that the tragic shooting in Tucson has (understandably) captured the US’s attention at present and that the Christmas and New Years’ holidays prevented the early chapters of the story from gaining attention. (Below, a comparison of news and search volumes for “Tunisia” and “Tucson”.)

I think there’s more to the disparity than that. Tunisia is a deeply authoritarian state, but it’s one that’s masterful at public relations. Despite being an aggressive censor of the internet, Tunisia was chosen to host the World Summit on the Information Society in 2005, apparently convincing the rest of the world that they’d use the opportunity to loosen the restrictions on online and offline speech that keep Tunisian opposition groups in check.

Global Voices attended the summit with the support of Dutch foundation Hivos, and we ran a workshop titled “Expression Under Repression” – the Tunisian government removed our workshop from the program, chained the doors of the room where we were to meet and relented only when the Dutch government threatened a diplomatic incident if we weren’t allowed to speak. When we convened, Tunisian security police flooded into the room and began photographing and videotaping the attendees, a technique designed to intimidate anyone brave enough to attend our session. (They also ate all our cookies.) When I led a workshop on internet security, a senior member of the intelligence services introduced himself to me and sat in the front row, taking copious notes, while his associates confiscated the open source software we were attempting to distribute to attendees. Some of the people who met with our team were later detained by authorities. It was a memorable introduction to a country that maintains a network of secret prisons, controls the press and the NGO community and systematically suppresses dissent, all while managing to maintain an image as a comfortable tourist destination and a (sometimes) cooperative partner in US anti-terror efforts. (Some notes from my Tunisian trip in 2005 here and here.)

Tunisia was widely praised for its successful hosting of the summit and the ITU’s organizers deflected questions about whether the event would have any lasting change on the restrictive media environment in the country. And the country often gets a free pass on human rights issues from business leaders and governments who praise the social stability of the Ali government and the concomitant business opportunities.

What’s fascinating to me is that the events of the past three weeks in Tunisia might actually represent a “Twitter revolution”, as has been previously promised in Moldova and in Iran. There’s been virtually no coverage of the riots and protests in the thoroughly compromised local media – to understand what’s going on in their country, many Tunisians are turning to YouTube and DailyMotion videos, to blogs, Twitter and especially Facebook. The government hasn’t made it easy to access these sites – not only are several social media platforms blocked, they appear to be conducting phishing attacks on users of Gmail, Facebook and other online services. (Slim Amamou reported on this issue for Global Voices Advocacy in July of 2010 – others have picked up the story more recently, as it developed a Wikileaks/Anonymous connection…)

So why isn’t the global twittersphere flooding the internet with cries of “Yezzi Fock!” (the rallying cry of the movement, which translates as “We’ve had enough!” in local slang)? Perhaps we’re less interested because the government in danger of falling isn’t communist, as in Moldova, or a nuclear arm seeking (perhaps) member of the “Axis of Evil”, Iran? Perhaps everyone’s read Evgeny Morozov’s new book and followed his path from celebrating the Moldova twitter revolution to concluding the internet is most useful for dictators, not for revolutionaries? (I recommend Zeynep Tufekci’s thoughtful review of the book.)

My hope is that we’re getting collectively smarter about concluding that social media will or won’t act as a catalyst for social change. There are complex economic forces at work in Tunisia – a demographic bulge, increasing economic inequality, a reduction in government subsidies, shrinkage in the tourism and textile sectors. Was social media the catalyst that helped frustration turn into protest, or helped protest spread from one corner of the country to another? It’s the kind of question that keeps scholars busy for years, as my colleague Henry Farrell wisely noted in a reaction to Malcolm Gladwell’s dismissal of the power of social media for protest. In the case of Tunisia, we need to understand whether information about the protests in Sidi Bouzid helped convince other Tunisians to take to the streets, and to understand how that information reached them – I’m far from ready to declare this a victory for social media, but I’m looking forward to studying it and understanding it better.

What’s frustrating is that there are ways we know social media could be helpful to those people in Tunisia who are trying to overthrow 23 years of dictatorial rule. Tunisia relies on relationships with Europe and the US to maintain its economy, which is one of the reasons Ben Ali has so carefully build an internal and externally-focused propaganda machine. If more people in the US were paying attention to the protests, perhaps Secretary Clinton wouldn’t get away with declaring – absurdly – that Washington won’t take sides in the conflict, but hopes for “a peaceful solution”.

Not everyone is ignoring the events in Tunisia. My friend and colleague Sami ben Gharbia has been exiled from his homeland for years, but is covering the protests with great intensity on his personal blog and on groupblog Nawaat.org, where content is in a mix of Arabic, French and English. Global Voices has a special coverage section with links to all the stories we’ve run on the events. Andy Carvin, social media strategist for NPR, has been aggregating a great deal of news and asking for help in translating from Arabic via Twitter – his Twitter feed is extremely useful. Jillian York – who’s written movingly about her frustration that Tunisia isn’t getting more coverage, recommends Brian Whitaker’s blog, which is tracking events closely. Tom Trewinnard is trying to translate #SidiBouzid tweets from Arabic to English using curated.by, and the folks at Meedan are translating as well, using a mix of machine translation and human correction. Al Jazeera English is covering the story in great detail and mapping where protests are taking place. PRI’s The World has an interview with Slim Amamou and several Tunisia focused stories. Foreign Policy’s Mideast Channel has in depth coverage as well. I hope people will keep pointing me to great online and offline coverage, but I think these laudable examples don’t change my core argument that Tunisia is getting far less attention than other “revolutions” like Iran.

I don’t know whether most people are missing the events in Tunisia because they don’t speak French or Arabic, because they don’t see the Mahgreb as significant as Iran, because they’re tired of social media revolution stories or because they’re mourning the tragedy in Tucson. I’m disappointed and frustrated, not just because I care deeply for Tunisian friends who have been working for justice in their country for years, but because real change in the world is a rare thing, and it’s a shame that people would miss the chance to watch it unfold.