Berkley Center

Though experts have been careful to point out that each set of popular protests has arisen in its own circumstances, at this point it is quite clear that the protests which have broken out in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere are not just protests which coincidentally arose simultaneously. The connectedness is clear, even if it is as simple as the fact that potential protesters in Egypt knew that protesters in Tunisia had successfully toppled their president. Since the middle of the past decade, Egypt had been experiencing a wave of protests, but these protests were fairly small, not nearly large enough to remove Hosni Mubarak from power. After January 14, a powerful example of the potential strength on popular revolt was sitting in a Jedda hotel room: Tunisian ex-president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, forced out of office by the force of street protests and the impression they placed on Tunisia's military establishment.

Since Mubarak's resignation on February 11, there have been two examples, and many Arab countries have experienced protests calling for the end of their autocratic regimes. An obvious, but under-discussed point, is the fact that the protests have been almost exclusively in Arab countries. The lesson which has apparently been drawn from Egypt and Tunisia is not that autocrats can be forced out of office, but rather that Arab autocrats can. Both the media narrative and the spread of significant protests support that message.

Much has been made of the impact of the media in the success and spread of protests throughout the Arab world this winter. In the United States, these discussions have focused on Twitter, Facebook, and Al Jazeera. I don't know anyone with a Twitter account, and I only use my Facebook account to comment on my friends' witty status updates, so I cannot say much about the impact of either on the protests and revolutions of 2011. Basically, their impacts probably have been exaggerated, especially because journalists use Twitter much more than the average person in any country, even more so in a country like Egypt where internet penetration is less than 10 percent.

The interconnectedness of Arab media may be a broader story left out of most American analysis over the past month. I have been living in Amman, Jordan for the past three weeks, and one of the most noticeable differences between the United States and Jordan is that there is just so much more television in Jordan. Restaurants, cell phone stores, carpentry workshops, and otherwise empty storefronts all are very likely to have a television on at any hour of the day. As I arrived in Jordan just two weeks after Ben Ali fled Tunisia, most of the televisions have been tuned in to news channels—Al Jazeera, Al-Arabiya, Jordanian news, or one of a large number of news channels that I can't recognize.

Televisions are ubiquitous, and their programming is international. The range of culture available in many other countries is something that is difficult to appreciate in the United States. Mostly because the United States is an enormous, wealthy country with a major film and television industry in Hollywood, Americans are just not exposed to very much foreign cultural output.

Jordan (and I expect, the rest of the Arab world, to varying extents) couldn't be more different in this respect. Because Jordan is a fairly small country, with a small television industry, most of the hundreds of channels available via satellite are imported from across the Arab world. News, sports, sitcoms, dramas, and documentaries are available from many different Arab countries. When it comes to watching, the Arab countries constitute a shared media space.

The game show Arabs Got Talent is a clear example of that shared media space. Filmed in Beirut and broadcast on Saudi-owned Middle East Broadcasting Center, which is headquartered in Dubai (and which also owns the news channel Al-Arabiya), the show features contestants who compete for a cash prize. This show is based on the format established by Britain's Got Talent, and it is notable that “Arabs” replaces “Britain” or “America” in the Arabic-language version of the internationally popular franchise. Each contestant is noted by his or her country, be it Palestine or Morocco, but the show is ultimately about Arabs and for Arabs, which the audience sees as a reasonable demarcation of a talent pool.

What does this have to do with revolution? I have only been in the Middle East for a few weeks, but I think it is very much worth noting that the successes of protests in Tunisia and then in Egypt have inspired protests elsewhere in the Arab world, and not very much elsewhere. I think it has something to do with the centuries of Arab culture, compared to the few decades of today's state boundaries. At the present moment, I think the shared media across the Arab world, particularly television, helps to sustain the sentiment of Arab unity which has allowed Arab protesters to be inspired by the successes in Tunisia and Egypt.