Zeynep Tufekci is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill at the School of Information and Library Science with an affiliate appointment in the Department of Sociology. She is also a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Her research revolves around the interaction between technology and social, cultural and political dynamics, and she is particularly interested in collective action and social movements, complex systems, surveillance, privacy, and sociality. She blogs at http://www.technosociology.org.

Hosni Mubarak ruled Egypt for 30 years while Muammar Gaddafi dominated Libya for nearly 42 years. Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali reigned Tunisia for 24 years, and the ousted, but not-yet-out Yemen leader Ali Abdullah Saleh has been in power since 1978—36 years and counting. Bashar al-Assad has ruled Syria since 2000, when he took over from his father's 30 year reign, making it 41 years of Assad rule.

By all accounts, these regimes are/were deeply unpopular. While we have no reliable polls from when these autocrats were in power (because they did not allow them), a post-Mubarak poll, for example, finds, that 66 percent of Egyptians want him executed if convicted. When asked to describe his regime, the top choice of Egyptians is "Dictator" (48 percent) followed by "Corrupt" (46 percent). The real question, then, is not why Mubarak or the others faced a revolt; rather, how did these tyrants succeed in holding on to power for so long? How can one man or a very small group hold on to power over millions for decade after decade?

It's certainly not for lack of bravery on the part of the citizens. As we witnessed, many people are willing to take a stand for freedom and dignity at considerable risk. And, as John Pollock's article, Streetbook, discusses, there had been demonstrations and even large labor strikes in the region-the April 6th youth movement in Egypt derives its name from the strike it was founded to support, and the Gafsa labor unrest in Tunisia was sizeable, but it lacked the national vision later protests would have. What are the mechanisms which allow for decades of "durable authoritarianism"? How does the new media ecology alter this equation?

The short answer is that these regimes survive mainly by creating a "collective action" problem for their citizenry and by playing "whack-a-protest" to prevent cascades of action. (The long answer also includes networks of patronage, international power relations, sometimes natural resource wealth, and often ethnic and religious divisions).

"Collective action problems" arise when a problem can be solved only through cooperation by many, but when there are strong disincentives for any one individual to participate, especially if victory is not guaranteed. These problems can be seen as a society-level version of the "prisoner's dilemma," a well-studied model in game theory where two criminals in custody are told they will be allowed to go free if they confess and their partner doesn't or if neither confesses; however, they will be punished severely if their partner confesses and they don't. The logical option would be for both to "defect" and confess for fear the other one would; this seemingly logical outcome is actually to the detriment of both, who would have been better off if neither confessed.

A society-level collective action problem arises under an autocracy when costs of dissent are high for individuals and the means of organizing to overcome the dilemma are stifled. Thus, under autocracies, torture and arbitrary and lengthy prison sentences are not just expressions of capricious cruelty, but key mechanisms which allow these regimes to survive. When even a whiff of dissent is met with disproportionate response, this creates a strong disincentive for any individual to be among the first. And as Pollock's article demonstrates, "whack-a-protest," as exemplified by the Gafsa strike in Tunisia, 2008, allows these regimes to isolate and repress regions of unrest. Ben Ali's regime might have been cruel, but, like all states, it is a resource-constrained actor: it cannot be everywhere at once; it cannot arrest hundreds of thousands of people, and it cannot easily crush a mass uprising. Even if such an uprising can be crushed, often at great cost, tyrants certainly prefer a stable situation with a population that remains repressed and quiet while they plunder the country to a civil war. Thus, censorship and isolation of protests is a key mechanism of survival.

Collective action problems are hardest to crack if it's difficult for citizens to coordinate and communicate. Indeed, game-theorists have long known that communication between participants dramatically alters the dynamics of these "dilemmas" which appear rigged against the interests of the individuals. Indeed, "united we stand, divided we fall" is not just a corny motto, it's what arises from game theory calculations.

Another key dynamic is what's known as "preference falsification" to political scientists and "pluralistic ignorance" to social psychologists: when people privately hold a particular view but do not share it in fear of reprisal, punishment, or violating a social norm. In autocracies, this can cause a "spiral of silence" in which many wish for regime change, but are afraid to speak up outside of few trusted ties. Indeed, when I was in post-Mubarak Cairo, my hosts kept pointing in amazement to various street corners where fierce political discussions were being held and often whispered, before remembering they could now speak up and adjusting their voice, "You never saw this. Nobody ever discussed politics openly, ever." Then they would pause and add, "Well, except online, of course. We all discussed politics online." And this is exactly what these autocrats had been able to stifle for many decades: an oppositional information/action cascade.

Such a cascade doesn't just mean that people learn about each other's views—it's reasonable that many knew that these regimes were unpopular. Cascades occur not just because of information, but also when people assess an opening and a reasonable chance of success—and as Pollock reports when "people realize[d] it was now or never." There are few moments more dangerous to an autocracy.

It is in this context Facebook "likes" of dissident pages such as "We are All Khaled Said," sharing of videos of regime brutality, online expressions of political anger, and acceptances of Facebook "invitations" to protest all matter as they help build a visible momentum which, itself, is a condition of success. A public is not created just because everyone individually holds an opinion but because there is multi-level awareness of other people's views leading to a spiral of action and protest. (I know that you know that I know that you know that we know ...).

That is why the new media ecology is a game-changer and that is exactly the process John Pollock's extensive on-the-ground reporting unravels. The new media ecology is not just the Internet but a potent combination of a politicized pan-Arab broadcast network, Al-Jazeera, mass diffusion of video and picture-capable cell phones, as well as social media—and all this in just a few years. Facebook in Arabic was introduced in March of 2009 and taken up quickly with about five million users in Egypt by the time the protests rolled around. As Pollock notes, there were only 28,000 Facebook users in Tunisia at the time of the Gafsa protests but there were more than a million when Bouazzizi committed his desperate act of self-immolation.

The very features of Facebook we sometimes gripe about—that it does not make it easy to segment audiences; that it seems to be brimming with the trivial and the mundane (see Ethan Zuckerman's "Cute Cat Theory"); and that it enforces/fosters a norm of real identities—made it an ideal platform for dissident politics under an autocracy (although, it increased risks for individual activists at times as in the case of Wael Ghonim). In Tunisia, Ben Ali censored all other platforms making Facebook even more potent as it became the de facto video sharing platform—and many people in the region tend to have large social networks online and offline. In fact, during my discussions in the region, I was repeatedly told that the norm was to "Facebook friend" all your cousins, people you met at work, people you met in weddings, outings, and elsewhere.

What more could a political activist wish for? Indeed, that is the ideal infrastructure to create the information/action cascade that Pollock's article so eloquently documents—especially since these regimes seemed unable to develop potent ways to deal with the political consequences of digitally enabled social networking (even at the end, all Mubarak could do was clumsily unplug the whole Internet which certainly was of fairly little importance by then: the uprising was well underway; the die was cast).

There has been a false debate. Was it social media or the people? Was it social media or the labor movements? Was it social media or anti-imperialist movement? Was it social media or youth? These questions are wrong and the answer is yes. The correct question is how.

These categories are not logical equivalents: people, youth, labor, and other movements can and do use social media. These uprisings are an impressive demonstration of that very fact. Social media is not a movement, it's a tool and it certainly did not jump out of the screen and cause Ben Ali to flee. However, as Pollock's extensive reporting demonstrates, it can be a potent tool for social change and as I tried to summarize here, there are strong theoretical reasons to think it alters collective action dynamics.

Contrary to Malcolm Gladwell's flip assertion, repeated in the article that "surely the least interesting thing about [the protests] is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of new media," the emergent media ecology is among the most important issues thrown up by this amazing wave of people-powered uprisings. This is not because the courage demonstrated by millions of people or the persistent efforts of activists for decades are unimportant. On the contrary, that will surely be remembered as among the most moving, amazing stories of the 21^st century.

The new media question is interesting and important not just because this is an intellectual curiosity (which I'll admit to finding fascinating) and not because academics (which I'll admit to being ) need a subject to study, and not just because many authoritarian regimes remain in the world (which I'll admit to believing are threatened by digitally enabled political activism), but because the most complex, the most crucial problems humanity faces are collective action problems. These range from the health of our democracies to global warming, from financial and asset bubbles to social unrest. The very survival of our species may depend on finding a way to organize our way out of situations in which there is a strong conflict between individual incentives and collective goods within our hierarchically organized societies. I think that qualifies as important, and I believe the new media ecology will be an inevitable part of the solution; that is, if there is one, and our fragile species manages to find it.

Is there still a debate on whether social media can cause revolutions? If this was ever a serious question, it was mainly an argument between straw men: on the one hand, wild idealists who saw the internet as an all-encompassing force for freedom and on the other, the crusty curmudgeons who fear technology and pooh-pooh the idea that social media is good for anything but posting pictures of cats. NYU professor Jay Rosen characterized the debate as "Wildly overdrawn claims about social media, often made with weaselly question marks (like: 'Tunisia's Twitter revolution?') and the derisive debunking that follows from those claims ('It's not that simple!')" and argued that these "only appear to be opposite perspectives. In fact, they are two modes in which the same weightless discourse is conducted."

I think we can safely put that debate aside. While Malcolm Gladwell made a lot of noise last October by declaring that "the revolution will not be tweeted," reporting like John Pollock's "Streetbook" demolishes the idea that there is some intrinsic and impassable barrier separating "street" activism from the kind of "slacktivist" organizing of which Gladwell is so dismissive. But it's worth noting that even the most visible "cyber-utopians" and "cyber-pessimists" seem to be converging on a point somewhere in the middle. In March, Clay Shirky significantly qualified the kinds of claims he makes for the centrality of social media—arguing that it is access to each other, not access to media, that makes revolutions—while Evgeny Morozov has pointed out that both he and Gladwell have been clear that the internet can be an effective tool for political change, as long as it is "used by grassroots organizations (as opposed to atomized individuals)." If you can see the fundamental divide between these arguments, you see more clearly than I do.

What's different, I suspect, is that we can now ask the question in the past tense, and the answer is that middle ground onto which both sides are converging, a very middling "kind of, but not completely." What happened in Egypt and Tunisia were revolutions, but they were obviously not caused by Facebook or Twitter: as Ramesh Srinivasan pointed out only 15% of Egyptians have Internet access, and only a small percentage use social media sites. But along with reporting like Pollock's, the work done by people like Zeynep Tufekci, Samir Garbaya, and Ramesh Srinivasan allows us to stop talking, hypothetically, about "technology" and "revolutions" in the abstract, and to start looking at what it was about these revolutions and these regimes that gave these social media tools such potency, visibility, and usefulness. Which is all to the good. Talking about the technology risks making Facebook or Twitter the hero of the story, thereby turning our attention away from the courage and commitment of face-to-face organizers and masses in the street.

But while Malcolm Gladwell may still think that "the least interesting thing [about the protests in Egypt] is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media," it still seems undeniable that social media has achieved a unique kind of visibility in the story of the "Arab Spring." You cannot tell the story of Khaled Said, after all, without talking about social media: he was dragged out of a cybercafé and beaten to death for posting a video showing police corruption, whereupon pictures of his battered face became a mobilizing point for the Facebook group "We Are All Khaled Said," moderated by Google executive Wael Ghonim. Ghonim's declaration to Wolf Blitzer on CNN that "This revolution started online...on Facebook" is not really credible, of course; at most, Facebook organizing managed to build on and enhance the Kifaya movement, which started years ago. But if Facebook is not the whole story, it is certainly part of the story. And what are we to make of the story of the Egyptian newborn named "Facebook"? Or of photos like this one?

It seems to me that there are two significantly different perspectives from which to ask the question of what social media technology does. On the one hand, what Pollock documents in the streets of Tunisia is the way social networking can enhance and enable forms of organizing that are utterly precedented: groups organized around Facebook merge seamlessly with groups organized around football. And as I think both Shirky and Morozov would agree, the important thing is the groups themselves, the grass-roots organizing and access-to-each other that could start with something like football, but which could also be maintained and expanded by something like Facebook. In this sense, "social media" is only one medium of revolution among many.

But the medium is also a message. After all, to join a Facebook group like "We are all Khaled Said" is not the same as joining the group for Hosni Mubarak's National Democratic Party. To "like" Hosni Mubarak would be to endorse a leader—the leader, in fact—but the extremely visible leaderlessness of "We are all Khalid Said" seems to be exactly the point. In other words, instead of the personality cult by which Presidents-for-life like Ben Ali and Mubarak have ruled for decades, the masses of nameless Cairenes and Tunisians—assembled on Facebook and in the street—represents a kind of anti-personality cult. When everyone is "Khaled Said" (or "Mohamed Bouazizi" in Tunisia), after all, the story being told is not only about that the nation is united, but that it is united by the common experience of having suffered at the hands of the state. In this sense, instead of "leaderless revolutions," perhaps we might think about how Facebook helped facilitate a "revolution of leaderlessness"?

If we pull back from the level of the street, in other words, and think about the story being told by people like Wael Ghonim about the revolution, "Facebook" doesn't just represent a medium of street-level organizing. It's also a media messaging strategy, a way of branding and identifying the revolution for the millions who were watching. And it's always worth remembering that these revolutions didn't only succeed in the streets: Mubarak and Ben Ali both lost power when their own militaries (and world opinion) turned decisively against them, siding instead with the nation united in opposition. But how did "the nation" come to seem so completely united? What happened to the ethnic, sectarian, political, and regional divisions that supposedly made it necessary for a strong man dictator like Mubarak to hold the state together? Remember, this has been the argument made for years (and by Mubarak, quite explicitly): Egyptians are so fundamentally divided that without a strong leader, the state would come apart at the seams, would explode into chaos. A Facebook group like "We are all Khaled Said" not only makes exactly the opposite argument—that Egypt is a nation united by its victimhood at the hands of the state— but it demonstrates, quite visibly, that this is the case.

What social media debunkers like Malcolm Gladwell have always argued is that platforms like Facebook are poorly suited for producing strong consensus on a program of action; for Gladwell, the Civil Rights movement was a social movement that could not have been tweeted. And this may be true. But if the movements to oust Mubarak and Ben Ali had been led by a single charismatic leader, or by a party with a clear platform, it would have been much easier for Mubarak or Ben Ali to divide the opposition, to make it seem not like a nation united in opposition to its leadership, but as a particular party or demagogue striving to supplant him. If the Muslim Brotherhood had taken a clear leadership role, after all, Mubarak would have received much more support from those leery of Islamist terrorism. But if the movement had taken on an exclusively secularist character, substantial portions of the population would have been alienated from it. In other words, what Gladwell flags as a weakness of social media—the difficulty of producing strong commitment to a single idea or plan—might actually be what makes it uniquely valuable. By uniting around the crimes of Ben Ali and Mubarak, the much more difficult political question of what kind of government was to succeed him could be deferred until later.

Aaron Bady is a PhD student in African Studies in University of California Berkeley's Department of English, and the author of the blog zunguzungu.com.

Most children start typing on cell phones and computers long before they take keyboarding classes, so many schools, noting this trend, have stopped teaching typing. "The kids already know how to type," the staff at my son's school told us at curriculum night, "so we have decided to use computer time on something else."

But how are kids typing? Most develop idiosyncratic, personalized hunt-and-peck methods. Many do not touch type, or type without looking at the keyboard by placing the fingers on the home keys (asdf jkl;). As one of my undergraduates at Oberlin College put it: "People from my generation grew up with a computer so they knew how to use one before entering junior high school. However, I think most of us never learned how to type. I see many young people typing pretty fast, but some of them only use two fingers and no home keys...if there's one "right way" to type...I don't think many of us know it."

There has been, since the late 19^th century, a "right way" to type. In 1889, there was a "duel" between two teachers who claimed to have devised the best methods. The winner, who used something called "home keys," typed a then-astonishing 126 words per minute. Afterwards, the inventor, Frank McGurrin, toured the country, performing his feat in front of large crowds. Over the next few decades, international typing races—a sort of So You Think You Can Type? trend—were the craze. Touch typing was eventually taught in high school.

Those classes are gone. Ironically, in our era of keyboard ubiquity, typing has fallen out of the curriculum.) Nor has anyone invented a rival to the home keys method (that we still cling to the QWERTY keyboard, despite the advantages of other layouts, is yet another puzzle). Since most students come to school familiar with keyboards, including cell phone keypads, educators are letting the ad hoc habits of six-year old computer gamers stand, although these same teachers spend hours laboriously showing their pupils how to hold a pencil and the correct way to write a cursive capital G—skills that the kids will likely rarely use once they get to high school, when typed assignments are the norm. (Not to mention how little handwriting will figure into their adult lives). As a K-3 technology teacher in a Philadelphia area public school explained to me, "I only see students at most for one 45-minute period per week, and it may be the only time the students have on a computer that week. With various other projects, there is no time for real keyboarding instruction and practice."

Does it matter how we type? Yes. Touch typing allows us to write without thinking about how we are writing, freeing us to focus on what we are writing, on our ideas. Touch typing is an example of cognitive automaticity, the ability to do things without conscious attention or awareness. Automaticity takes a burden off our working memory, allowing us more space for higher-order thinking. (Other forms of cognitive automaticity include driving a car, riding a bike and reading—you're not sounding out the letters as you scan this post, right?) When we type without looking at the keys, we are multi-tasking, our brains free to focus on ideas without having to waste mental resources trying to find the quotation mark key. We can write at the speed of thought.

Many of us, and particularly digital natives, have practiced elaborate hunt and peck methods enough for them to be automatic and allow us to look at the screen, not our fingers (it requires about 400 hours of practice to achieve the reflexes to become a skilled typist, another 600 to be expert. However, the home keys method is, as far as extant research goes, the fastest technique. And it is not going out on any limb to suggest being able to type fast without looking at the keyboard is a 21^st century basic skill.

But the letters keep shifting below our fingers. Keyboards morph, and smart phones and tablet computers render the home keys method almost impossible. Most iPad users hunt and peck: the technologies so many Americans are clamoring to adopt are far less effective for writing than previous devices. Strangely, we are adopting new devices at the cost of cognitive automaticity. On the iPad, tweeting, e-mailing and Facebooking takes more time, requires lots of looking down at the touch keypad. Hopefully someone out there is tinkering with a new typing system for the iPad, as Frank McGurrin did for the typewriter (although then we may have to practice it for 400 hours to master it).

There was a 15-year lag between the development of touch typing and when the neologism "touch typing" entered the English language. Perhaps we need another duel—a reality TV iPad typing show? —to spur new keyboarding innovations. Until then, even the littlest ones should be taught why the "f" and "j" keys have those funny bumps on them.

Anne Trubek, associate professor of rhetoric and composition at Oberlin College, is the author of A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses.