Terror threat

The Flip Side of the Arab Spring

Pollock’s reporting in “Streetbook” (September/October 2011) showed that there would have been no Arab Spring without Facebook, because social media “connected people to each other and to the world” and those connections allowed people to organize and protest on the street, “where history happens.”

But Pollock’s main insight was that we shouldn’t be too surprised that a youth revolt used the preferred tools of the young: “The young make up the bulk of these movements, and inevitably they bring youth’s character to their fight for change … Organizing or attending protests gets fitted between flirting, studying, and holding down a job. Action for this generation is as likely to be mediated through screens … as face to face.”