Social media, cellphone video fuel Arab protests

“It did not make the dissent movements successful – people did,” Ross told AFP. “They were not Facebook revolutions or Twitter revolutions.”

“Technology served as an accelerant,” he said. “A movement that historically would have taken months or years was compressed into far shorter time cycles.”

In Egypt, social media helped bring together people from diverse social, political and economic circles and merged them into a united force, Ross said.

“Having connected online they were more likely to come together offline,” said Ross, a leader of the State Department’s social media efforts.

Ross said the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia were notable for their lack of recognizable leaders, and networked communications helped make this possible.

“The Che Guevara of the 21st century is the network,” he said. “It no longer takes a single charismatic revolutionary figure to inspire and organize the masses.

“Rather, in the digital age, leadership can be far more distributed and that’s something that we clearly saw in Tunisia and Egypt,” he said.