On 2011-02-10, at 4:38 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> What's different about this stuff is the immediacy and endless capacity to link, retweet, click, echo, etc. etc. It's not at all clear that it's good for social bonds. It can also be a means of alienation and displacement.
There's also an implicit class bias in the outsized coverage devoted to the role played by the electronic media. College educated, English-speaking, tech savvy commentators in the West readily identify with, and have the greatest access to, their professional counterparts in the demonstrations. So there's a tendency to exaggerate the leading role of the students and intelligensia in the uprising, and their mastery of these powerful new means of communication. The greater mass of workers and shopkeepers, who are less accessible and for whom the the Western media have less sympathy, are relegated to the background, and in more anxious moments, feared as an uneducated and potentially unruly anti-Western mob under the sway of the Muslim Brotherhood.
This is not to deny the vanguard role of the most educated and skilled layers of the urban working class, nor is it characteristic of all of the coverage, some of which has been excellent, but it is generally true of the American mainstream media, as Frank Rich describes in last Sunday's NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/opinion/06rich.html?ref=frankrich