If there were two things that defined 2011, they were the Arab Spring uprisings that threw the Middle East into turmoil and the Occupy Wall Street protests in North America and Europe. But Canadian Senator Romeo Dallaire, the former U.N. general lionized for leading the besieged peacekeepers during the Rwandan Genocide, says a third revolution connects the two movements — the communications revolution.
“We are in an era of conflict with a certain world disorder, a time of revolutions, with the communications revolution being one,” Dallaire tells Huffington Post Canada.
Dallaire begs to differ with author Malcolm Gladwell's argument in his essay “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted," that technology and social media play no real role in high-risk activism,
“It's starting. We are entering an era where the revolution in communications is empowering the under-25s and they're able to start realizing that they can coalesce in real-time around the world. They’re also getting more information about what's going on around them, whether they want it or not, because it's all being punched out every minute,” he says, adding that their power extends beyond protests.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2011/12...n_1172570.html