Reach Out And "Friend" Somebody In The Middle East
In The Middle East Revolutions: A Framework for Analysis, political scientist Dr. Catherine Claxton-Dong suggests that the emotional connection people make with protesters through websites like Facebook plays a crucial role in sustaining them.
- New York, NY (1888PressRelease) March 21, 2011 - Dr. Catherine Claxton-Dong, in The Middle East Revolutions: A Framework for Analysis, the first book in her Working Class Rising series (available on kindle for $2.99), reviews past mass mobilizations of the working class, and reaches some surprising conclusions about the chances of demonstrators in the Middle East succeeding in bringing about democracy.
Claxton-Dong's data suggests that in revolts like these, what sustains people to continue to fight is not an intellectual conviction about the importance of civil rights, but an emotional up-welling of feeling. A sense of emotional bonding for a higher purpose.
How many of these revolutions began with people on Facebook and Twitter promoting a "Day of Rage"?
But rage is hard to sustain. And if the sense of an emotionally supportive community also feels like it is drying up, people lose heart.
Yet in today's world, anyone with an internet connection can help to provide this emotional support to protesters like the besieged people of Libya.
With the tragedy of the tsunamis in Japan, followed by the fear of nuclear disaster, attention has shifted from the people in the Middle East. People in the Middle East who want something that so many of us take for granted - democracy.
Make a friend on Facebook in the Middle East. It may be more important than you think.
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