I’m writing this column from Atlanta, Georgia, at the end of the Arab-US Association of Communication Educators (AUSACE) annual conference. AUSACE had been scheduled for Abu Dhabi but moved to the Peachtree State in September due to organizational problems. The 45 or so scholars who attended the three-day event at Georgia State University were evenly divided between those who work in the US and those who work in the Arab world. Both groups include Arabs and Americans who have done research on the Middle East but have no prior cultural connection. In the US group are Arabs who have studied at major universities around the country and now teach journalism, media, PR, and other communications disciplines there including Georgia State (GSU).
Seventeen years ago, some Arab and American scholars founded AUSACE at GSU to create dialogue between Arabs and Americans and to study communications issues that affect everyone. Annually AUSACE holds a conference usually in the Middle East, occasionally in the US. This is my third AUSACE conference. I was involved in hosting the 2007 conference at Zayed University in Dubai. Last year I attended the conference at the American University of Beirut. Already in 2011 social media was probably the dominant topic for research and discussion. This time there was no doubt. Social media was covered in almost every session where participants presented papers. It also stirred the most discussion, even heated discussion.
I’ve mentioned before in this column that I see the Arab Spring against the background of the East European revolutions of 1989 when I was ABC News bureau chief in Warsaw, Poland, and covered events in the region for American television. Then no one had cell phones; the Internet was not a factor. Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t yet invented an algorithm to classify the girls at Harvard. How did the demonstrations of 1989 begin? News spread by word of mouth, telephone, posters, and in meetings of dissidents opposed to the government. Major changes throughout history happened without social media. At AUSACE this weekend we argued about the importance of social media in toppling autocratic regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya and its influence in Syria and other current hotspots. Opinions varied but when it came to forecasting where social media is going, I saw a split between the Americans and the Arabs regardless of where they are teaching today. The Arab educators were very concerned about what they called behavior on Twitter and Facebook. One professor from the Gulf complained that students use Facebook for silly things like reporting what they ate for breakfast and sending love poetry. Others who teach in the US worried about the lack of control over Twitter.
No one prevents users from tweeting insulting or inappropriate messages, and they found many of them in social media and said there should be some kind of legal regime to control social media. The Americans generally didn’t agree and argued that the freedom of expression possible on Facebook and Twitter is important although it can sometimes be abused. But one solution to abuse lies in negative reactions from those who like or follow that person in social media, in other words, letting social media regulate itself. Regulation by journalist associations, national governments, or international organizations isn’t the only possibility.
After the 1989 revolutions, many local and foreign journalists were disappointed to find that the dissidents who had fought against the controlled press of their country’s Communist government didn’t turn out to be whole hearted supporters of press freedom. They claimed to want a free press and once in power did allow independent media ownership. However, they remained concerned about potential abuses by journalists and focused on making sure the press could be punished for going too far.
By Alma Kadragic
