Smartphones in Arab Spring

IPI REPORT 53

Smartphones in the Arab spring

By Matt J. Duffy

While Twitter and Face-book grabbed all theheadlines, the increasedavailability of mobile

smartphones subtly made anunmistakable impact on the re-porting of the Arab Spring revo-lutions that rippled across the

 Mideast in 2011.Some even argue

the smartphone—pow-erful Internet-readycellphones such as theiPhone, BlackBerryor Android—couldprove to be the mostimportant innovationfor journalism sincethe development of 

satellite uplinks. While Twitterand Facebook are acknowledgedfor their unparalleled advancesin disseminating information,the smartphone has changed theway that information is collected,packaged and transferred for massdistribution.

During the January 25 pro-tests in Egypt, for instance, pro-testers would carry their smart-phones with them into the streets.They could offer first-handreports using their smartphonesconnected to Twitter, Facebook

and YouTube. Often their infor-mation was verified with shortvideo clips or photographs takenfrom their phones and effortlesslyweaved into Facebook or Twitterupdates.

Rick Sanchez, the formerCNN correspondent, said thesmartphone helped cover the Arab Spring in a way that tradi-tional journalism simply couldn’t.He called the smartphone “thebest piece of news equipmentever invented.”

Sanchez praised the smart-phone for its impressive range of functions.

“It’s a computer, word pro-cessor, still and video camera,recorder, editing system, phoneand satellite uplink all in one,”he wrote in the Huffington Post.“Best of all, it’s cheap and acces-

A revolution in gathering, reporting the news

The smartphone

helped cover the Arab Spring in

a way that traditional journalism

simply couldn’t.

MATT J. DUFFY teaches journalism and new media at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

IPI REPORT54

sible for everyone from the sub-urbs of California to the streets of Cairo.”

The relative low cost of thephones has led to greater use inthe Arab world—although they’restill too expensive for everyone. A low-end model can be pur-chased for around $250, puttingthe smartphone at the hands of middle-class Arabs throughout the Middle East.

Naila Hamdy, an assistantprofessor of journalism at the American University of Cairo,said she thought no more than15 percent of Egyptian protestersused smartphones. But she toldthe International Press Institutethat the organizers of the protestsused their smartphones wisely.

“Some of the key organizers of the revolution used smartphonesto tweet messages to mobilizeand organize protests,” she said.“They also used them to capturevideo and live streams of Tahrir(Square) moments.”

Protesters occupied TahrirSquare in Egypt for 18 days untilPresident Mubarrak agreed to stepdown. Hamdy pointed to videos—many shot from smartphone cam-eras and uploaded immediatelyto social media sites—as the mostinfluential.

“Video pieces had a wideimpact as they were re-broadcaston television news shows and talkshow programs, thus reachingmuch larger numbers of Egyp-tians,” she said.

The handheld cellulardevices even transformed theparticipants in the protests.Five years ago, these peoplewould have simply been “part of the crowd,” but their ability toeasily transmit what they wereseeing and hearing (includingtext and video) turned them

into “citizen journalists.”Blake Hounshell, the Doha-

based managing editor of  Foreign Policy magazine, called these citi-zen journalists “a fancy name forpeople with cell phone cameras.”

Protesters could even usetheir smartphones to roughlyedit their video, adding captionsfor locations or translations. Thesmartphone’s ability to quicklytransmit information from theground to the rest of the worldhad an indelible impact.

Hounshell spent time in Cairoduring the January 25 protestswhere he saw protesters listen-ing to a fiery speech while staringdown at their cell phones. Theywere live-tweeting the event.

“These weren’t revolutionariesso much as they were reporters,translating their struggle for therest of us,” he wrote in Foreign Policy magazine.

Of course, the raw mate-rial uploaded from smartphoneswouldn’t have the internationalimpact they did if not amplifiedby other outlets. But news outletssuch as Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya andthe BBC World Service wouldn’thave had access to footage of pro-tests and regime violence if notfor the smartphone videos takenby thousands of protesters. Theimportance of smartphone citizen

 journalism is particularly im-portant in areas such as westernLibya and Syria where govern-ments successfully controlled theactivity of professional journalists.These news outlets also helpedcull the reports from smartphoneusers and attempted to verifytheir accounts.

But the impact of the smart-phone videos and Twitter mes-sages to affect events on theground—not just internationalsentiment through news cover-age—shouldn’t be underestimat-ed. Technology-adept protestersin Tunisia and Egypt appealed toeach other through social mediaoutlets and text messages broad-cast from smartphones. As oneobserver put it: “The personaldecision to face rubber bulletsand tear gas is only ever takenwhen appeals for solidarity comethrough social networks.”

One unheralded use of smart-phones was their non-traditionaluse as a disseminator of ArabSpring information. Sultan alQassimi, a commentator fromthe United Arab Emirates, rapidlygained fame via his Twitter ac-count because of his exhaustivereporting of events. Time maga-zine named him in its list of mostinfluential Tweeters in the worldafter his number of followers sky-rocketed from 5,000 to 60,000 inthe first six months of 2011.

In addition to his Mac lap-tops, Qassimi covered the Egyptuprisings using his iPhone 4while watching and reporting onbroadcasts of various Arabic andEnglish language news outlets. Al Qassimi told the InternationalPress Institute that he used hissmartphone to take and uploadover 1,000 high-quality picturesof images from Arabic newsoutlets including Al Jazeera, Al

Smartphone

citizen journalism

is particularly

important in areas

where governments

successfully controlled

the activity of

professional journalists.

IPI REPORT 55

 Arabiya and BBC Arabic. Theseimages would often document Arab governments’ brutal crack-downs on protesters. He wouldalso retweet information andpictures from key figures on theground in Egypt.

 Al Qassimi tirelessly kept uphis Twitter feed for several weeksfrom the beginning of the proteststo the fall of Egyptian president Mubarak. To keep up the pace, hesaid he would often use his smart-phone to continue Tweeting fromunusual locations—including anelaborate Emirati wedding.

“(The iPhone 4) comes withtwo ear pieces,” he said. “I putone in my ear under the ghutra(headpiece) and left the otherear unplugged so I could greetpeople.”

 Al Qassimi listened to several Arabic language news outlets

through iPhone applications.“I updated the Twitter feed

around ten times in the half anhour I was obliged to stand andgreet people,” he said. “I excusedmyself and left early so I couldcover the protests better.”

During this period,Qassimiprovided an important conduit of information from the Arabic-lan-guage news stations. Many pro-fessional journalists in the Arabworld follow Qassimi’s Twitterfeed (@sultanalqassimi) to stayabreast of current events.

He said that Blackberrysmartphones were also useful fororganizers on the ground in vari-ous Arab countries because theycan easily create private groupsthrough the Blackberry Messen-ger Service.

“These groups would includeonly people they trusted and can

share sensitive information withwithout being public,” Qassimisaid.

But Saddek Rabah, an associ-ate professor of journalism at theUniversity of Sharjah, questionsthe impact of smartphones in the Arab Spring.

“It is undeniable that thesetechnologies have been widelytapped into by a large numberof people to disseminate all sortof information,” Rabah told theInternational Press Institute. “Butthat did not mean they substitut-ed for people’s determination andwill to bring about the change.”

He said he watched manyamateur videos on YouTubefrom Egypt, Tunisia and Syriabut questioned how many couldhave been uploaded directly fromsmartphones at the scene sincethe cellular networks in most

A man takes pictures with his cell phone on Tahrir, or Liberation Square, in Cairo, Egypt. A new cell phone photography class at a suburban Philadelphia university

focuses on both the quality of the images and the ethical responsibilities that come with taking and publishing them. AP Photo by Ben Curtis 

IPI REPORT56

Rabeh’s doubts reflect a larger debate aboutthe role of technology in the Arab Spring. Smart-phones did not cause the ouster of Zine El AbdineBen Ali in Tunisia or Mubarak in Egypt. Bravessouls who filled the streets and battled the armedforces of those corrupt regimes had far more to dowith their departures. So, how important was therole of technology on these events?

Some communication observers downplay therole of smartphones and social networks in the Arab Spring. In a New Yorker article titled “SmallChange,” Malcolm Gladwell pointed out that revo-lutions have erupted long before today’s digitaltools existed. He criticized journalists for over-hyping the role they’d played in recent uprisingsincluding the Arab Spring. He noted, for instance,that many observers found that Iranian protestersin 2009 didn’t rely upon Twitter as a communica-tion tool as Western journalists and other insisted. Why, he asked, were all the updates organizingIranian protests written in English, not Farsi?

But Clay Shirky, a new media professor atNew York University, argues that technologicaladvances have clearly impacted events.

“Digital networks have acted as a massivepositive supply shock to the cost and spreadof information, to the ease and range of publicspeech by citizens, and to the speed and scaleof group coordination,” he wrote in  Foreign

 Policy magazine.Shirky and Gladwell don’t really disagree.

Gladwell asks whether the protests could havehappened without social media and digital toolslike smartphones. Shirky wouldn’t likely arguethat they couldn’t but simply suggests techno-logical advances definitely helped the cause of the rebels.

Smartphones on the ground, for instance,helped a global audience decipher events andcollaborate on journalism. In one example, NPR’s Andy Carvin helped debunk a regional myth thatLibyan forces were using Israeli munitions onprotesters. With the help of Libyans who tookpictures with the cellphone cameras, Carvin anda group of Tweeters helped show the weaponsweren’t from Israel after all. Similarly, when in-credulous observers asked Egyptians to prove thattear gas used against protesters came from Amer-ica, an apparent smartphone user quickly took aphoto and uploaded the picture to a photo-hostingsite to offer proof. In Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syriaand other Arab countries, protesters were drivento action after seeing pictures uploaded to You-Tube and Facebook taken by protesters on theirsmartphones.

Gladwell wouldn’t argue that these digital toolsweren’t influential. He’d just argue the uprisingswould have happened anyway.

How important is

technology, really?

 Arab countries generally don’tsupport use of high-bandwidthdevices. (Of course, smartphonescan also connect to the Internetvia WiFi networks and use thathigher-bandwidth Internet accessto upload video and pictures.)

Rabah said that the cellphonevideos recorded and uploaded toYouTube from “total blackout”countries such as Syria becamea crucial conduit for reportingthe news. Al Jazeera was the firstnews outlet to broadcast these

low-quality videos as a way toreport on events taking placein these countries. Other newsoutlets followed their lead, Rabahsaid, using YouTube videos tooffer glimpses of the crackdownon protesters occurring in areaswhere journalists weren’t allowed.

“This, in turn, posed theproblem of veracity and trustwor-thiness of such content,” Rabehsaid, adding that news outletswill need to work on techniquesto verify information obtained in

this manner.In the end, the debate is

largely academic. But, for journal-ism observers, the role of smart-phones should not be forgotten.The introduction of smartphonesrepresents a revolution in theability of a journalist—and anyother observer—to gather infor-mation and quickly disseminateit. For a new generation of jour-nalists, the smartphone will likelyreplace the reporter’s notebook asstandard equipment.