Global Justice
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MM18_STIL4639_07_SE_C18.indd18_STIL4639_07_SE_C18.indd PagePage 309309 25/11/1125/11/11 11:5611:56 AMAM user-t044user-//Volumes/201/PH00516/STILES4639/9780205854639/MaintV04o4lumes/201/PH00516/STILES4639/9780205854639/Main PART IV Global Justice MM18_STIL4639_07_SE_C18.indd18_STIL4639_07_SE_C18.indd PagePage 310310 25/11/1125/11/11 11:5611:56 AMAM user-t044user-//Volumes/201/PH00516/STILES4639/9780205854639/MaintV04o4lumes/201/PH00516/STILES4639/9780205854639/Main CHAPTER 18 The Information Age: Rebellion in the Arab World CONCEPT INTRODUCTION Almost as soon as it was possible to carve images and text into stone, politi- cal leaders ordered the erection of massive monuments that were designed to deliver propaganda to their subjects. Egyptian rulers carved pictures of battles and conquests—not to mention the texts of laws and treaties—into flat rock. King Ashoka of northern India erected pillars covered with Buddhist philoso- phy a thousand years later. It was the first form of mass communication. The cost of mass communication for much of human history was so prohibitively expensive that it was limited to states and governments, much like building aircraft carriers and freeway systems. Today, however, the cost of mass com- munication has become increasingly cheaper and, therefore, available to more and more people. As a comparison, consider the transmission of one page of text to one thousand people over the course of history—how long did it take and how much did it cost? Table 18.1 provides a rough estimate of the amount of time and/or labor required to generate a message of five hundred modern words and how long it would take to disseminate it to one thousand people. From that we can estimate the cost to the producer and consumer. Consider that a stone tablet required a year’s worth of work by several skilled craftsmen using primitive tools. They would then have transported the stone (often weighing many tons) across undeveloped roads or down riv- ers on hand-built barges. Even today stone carving is not inexpensive. The Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., which features the names of more than fifty thousand American dead (around two hundred pages of text), cost roughly five million dollars (or around fifty dollars per word) and took six months to complete using all the latest modern grinding, polishing, and sand blasting methods. Until the development of the telegraph, all written messages—whether mailed, posted on walls, or spoken orally—could only 310 MM18_STIL4639_07_SE_C18.indd18_STIL4639_07_SE_C18.indd PagePage 311311 25/11/1125/11/11 11:5611:56 AMAM user-t044user-//Volumes/201/PH00516/STILES4639/9780205854639/MaintV04o4lumes/201/PH00516/STILES4639/9780205854639/Main Concept Introduction 311 TABLE 18.1 Estimates of Communication Costs and Speeds of Disseminating a 500-Word Message to 1,000 People over Time Method/Year Man- Hours Man-Hours/Time Cost Per Word to Construct to Disseminate or Cost of the Message to 1,000 People Transmission Device in 2010 Dollars Stone pillars/ About 6,000 About 1,000 $250 500BCE Town crier/ 15 minutes About 4,000 $200 Middle Ages Letter-writing/ 220 hours 6 weeks $10 1700s Printing/ 6 hours 6 weeks by $5 if by mail early 1800s mail, one day by poster or newspaper Telegraph/ 25 minutes 1 day if by $130 if by 1850s newspaper/ transatlantic 2 years if cable 1,000 separate messages are sent Telephone/ Instant Instant $6 a call 1900 Radio/1920s Instant Instant Radios cost $500 Television/ Instant Instant Televisions 1950s cost $2,000 Linked 15 minutes 20 seconds Computers computers/ cost $5 million 1960s E-mail/1980s 15 minutes One-fifth of a Computers second cost $6,000 Internet/2000s 15 minutes Instant Computers cost $1,000 Smart phones Instant Instant Phone comes and wifi/2010s (real-time) free with a typical $50/month contract MM18_STIL4639_07_SE_C18.indd18_STIL4639_07_SE_C18.indd PagePage 312312 25/11/1125/11/11 11:5611:56 AMAM user-t044user-//Volumes/201/PH00516/STILES4639/9780205854639/MaintV04o4lumes/201/PH00516/STILES4639/9780205854639/Main 312 CHAPTER 18 The Information Age: Rebellion in the Arab World KEY FIGURES Rebellion in the Arab World Mohamed Bouazizi Tunisian fruit vendor who kills himself as a protest against unemployment and government corruption. Wael Ghonim Google marketing executive who participated in Egypt’s uprising. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali Leader of Tunisia, 1987–2011. Hosni Mubarak Leader of Egypt, 1981–2011. Muammar Gaddafi Leader of Libya from 1969 until his death in 2011. Bashar al-Assad President of Syria, 2000–present. Abdullah II King of Jordan, 1999–present. Mohammed VI King of Morocco, 1999–present. Hamad ibn Isa Al Khalifa Emir, 1999–2002; King of Bahrain, 2002–present. Abdullah King of Saudi Arabia, 2005–present. Ali Abdullah Saleh Leader of Yemen, 1990–present. CHRONOLOGY Rebellion in the Arab World 1919 Maghreb rebellions occur. 1952 Gamal Abdel Nasser comes to power in Egypt. 1967 Nasser is kept in power. 1979 Iranians revolt. 1982 E-mail becomes widely available. 1996 DSL becomes widely available. 2008 April 6 Movement is formed in Egypt. 2010 November Hosni Mubarak steals election. December 18 Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolates in Tunisia. Demonstrations begin shortly afterward. 2011 January 14 President Ben Ali leaves Tunisia. (Continued) MM18_STIL4639_07_SE_C18.indd18_STIL4639_07_SE_C18.indd PagePage 313313 25/11/1125/11/11 11:5611:56 AMAM user-t044user-//Volumes/201/PH00516/STILES4639/9780205854639/MaintV04o4lumes/201/PH00516/STILES4639/9780205854639/Main Concept Introduction 313 January 25 “Day of Rage” protests take place in Egypt, Yemen, and Lebanon. February 1 President Mubarak offers a gradual transition to democracy in Egypt. It is rejected. February 11 Mubarak leaves Egypt. The military forms a transitional government. February 14 Protesters clash with Bahrain police. February 16 Protests erupt in Libya. Its leader, Muammar Gaddafi, uses force to crack down on demonstrators. March 18 The UN Security Council declares a no-fly zone in Libya, which is immediately enforced by NATO. On the same day, Bahraini security forces crush the protests. March 19 Protests erupt in Syria. June 6 Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh suffers injuries from a bomb explosion. He travels to Saudi Arabia for treatment and is silent for a month. June 29 Egyptians fight with police over the future of the regime. July 1 Moroccans vote for a power-sharing arrangement that keeps the king in power. August 21 Libyan rebels seize control of Tripoli. October 14 Death toll in Syria reaches three thousand. October 21 Gaddafi is killed outside of Sirte, Libya. travel as fast as a human being on horseback (the Pony Express set the pre- locomotive land speed record by traveling the two thousand miles from St. Louis to Sacramento in ten days). The telegraph was a dramatic breakthrough, of course, but was generally limited to one message per cable at a time and required trained experts to compose and translate the Morse code. A one-page message from Europe to New York in 1870 cost the modern equivalent of sixty-five thousand dollars in 1870 (PBS.org 2011). Telephones, radios, and television each provided instant long-distance communication that could reach many people at a time, but the receivers were priced far beyond the typical family’s budget when they first appeared. The first attempts to link computers were the stuff of high-end government-run laboratories in the 1960s since each computer cost upwards of five million of today’s dollars. But as the price of computers declined and high-speed DSL and cable links were developed, e-mail, faxes, and ultimately the Internet came within the reach of ordinary people (Federal Communications Commis- sion 2011). Ultimately, satellites, cell towers, wifi hot spots, and the rest have allowed individuals to access the Internet and upload content at very little cost via a wide range of mobile devices. Social networking sites integrate websites, e-mail, bulletin boards, and twittering and have made possible instant global communication at virtually no cost to those with the proper device. The cost of such devices has declined to the point that they can now be found in the jungles of Papua New Guinea and the rice paddies of Bangladesh. MM18_STIL4639_07_SE_C18.indd18_STIL4639_07_SE_C18.indd PagePage 314314 25/11/1125/11/11 11:5611:56 AMAM user-t044user-//Volumes/201/PH00516/STILES4639/9780205854639/MaintV04o4lumes/201/PH00516/STILES4639/9780205854639/Main 314 CHAPTER 18 The Information Age: Rebellion in the Arab World The implication of all of these changes is that, whereas in the past infor- mation about public affairs and politics was often transmitted vertically from the government to the public, more and more information is now available horizontally from person to person. It is easy for ordinary people to fact- check a campaign speech, upload the latest antigovernment conspiracy theory, announce a flash mob, read a friend’s political commentary, and donate to a political movement. As we will see, even the most autocratic regimes could not entirely control person-to-person communication. This is not the first time communications technology has threatened the powers that be. The Catholic Church’s dominance of European politics crumbled in part because of the availability of printed Bibles in the 1500s. The British colonial rulers were undone by a lone man on horseback named Paul Revere and dozens of revolutionaries who mailed pamphlets to each other thanks to Benjamin Franklin’s postal service (Shirky 2011, 32). Anti- Shah activists listened to the sermons of Ayatollah Khomeini on new-fangled “cassette tapes” in Iran in the 1970s (Ignatius 2011). Russians sent out the word that the generals were in the process of staging a coup via fax machine, helping to forestall the event and bringing about the final collapse of the Soviet Communist Party. Private individuals communicating with each other poses a serious threat to dictators. Per a recent encyclopedia on the Internet, “If free speech is the hallmark of democracy, totalitarian regimes have more to fear from the Internet than any other form of communication .