Power to the internet?

Reading “After Egypt: The limits and Promise of Online Challenges to the Authoritarian Arab State” left me both amazed and terrified of the amount of power the internet actually had over people. On the one hand, the internet served as a means to get the people of the Arab states to come together and protest the regime that they were under through social media networks. One of these “Facebook Protests” proved to help the cause against the regime.

But on the other hand, it’s scary to think just how much information the internet actually holds. The reading stated that they Egyptian government, in cohorts with Vodafone were able to track pro-regime text messages between people and googling passengers at the airport was a completely normal practice. Even closer to home, New Zealand, with the new Government Communications Security Bureau law that was passed recently in parliament recently. In a nutshell, it’s saying that the GCSB has the ability to spy on people under the jurisdiction of agencies such as the Security intelligence service, police and defense. They could easily tap into people’s text messages and search history on their browsers. Facebook is somewhat public anyway even if you set your page to private so it’s not that much of a concern as opposed to the other two issues. 

However the point is; do we really understand how much power the internet holds over our lives? Or rather, the information that the internet provides us?  Would the Arab uprisings have happened if they did not know about other political regimes out there? Would the rest of the world have backed up the uprisings without the internet? As stated in the reading “twitter doesn't cause revolutions, but revolutions are tweeted”.