On April 4, 2014, I attended a talk on The Revolution Will Be Televised: Social Change and

Technology by Donald Fantozzi from University of Hartford. This presentation was about how
the effect of everyday technology on the revolutions. The technology is cheap, readily available
and very widespread. This has a huge effect if used in the right way on both sides of a social
change. The speaker gave many examples about Egypt, Syria, Iran. He showed that there are
more Facebook users in Egypt than newspaper readers. In Iran the government has imposed ban
on almost 5million websites. He explained that in 2008 almost 10,000 protest blogs were found
on the net which were then seen as a threat were banned and military action was taken. In Syria
at first there was similar action taken. Many were arrested and many social websites like
Facebook, Twitter, BlogSpot, YouTube and many more were blocked from being used. But
afterwards they were unblocked as a sign of good will and then attacked back using the
technology by putting up what was the effect of rebels on normal population in the country.

Most of the countries where the revolutions are small scale and are tightly contained are where
the lack of infrastructure for the internet has restricted the social media. The talk was an
interesting method of looking at the use of social media as a changing force on the peoples
perception in the world by the spread of knowledge and ideas.