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What Ethan is saying in his piece is that social media facilitated the events in ways that were crucial (material cause), but the revolution was made by the people of Tunisia at great human cost (the efficient cause) and it was aimed at overthrowing to corruption, unemployment and tyranny (the final cause).

I find it hard to believe that the ability to disseminate news, videos, tidbits, information, links, outside messages that easily, transparently and without censorship reached one in five persons (and thus their immediate social networks) within a country that otherwise suffered from heavy censorship was without a significant impact.

Social media helps strengthen communities as it is the antidote to isolating technologies (like suburbs and like televison)

hey have added their own new hashtag, #CN4Iran, and even built a new site to support the struggle of the Iranian people, titled CN4Iran.org. Global Voices interviewed one of the cyber activists behind this initiative.

Our site was created in Dec 28, 2009, hosted by Dreamhost.com (US). Our objective is to support the Iranian people for liberty and democracy, learn from them and spread the experiences to Chinese people.

Our target is the Chinese cyber citizen, firstly the Chinese users on twitter.com, and then other Chinese Internet users who read our information. Also, we infrequently have some worldwide readers, and we tell them the reaction in China (by translating some Chinese news into English)

But the government’s philosophy of not paying much attention or restricting online access stems from the fact that Internet penetration is very low in Cambodia. As per 2007 statistics, only an estimated 0.3 percent of the population is connected to the Internet. This is due to the high cost of Internet connections as well as computer hardware and software that not many can afford. Besides, the level of computer literacy is also very low.

So Internet censorship by the government is minimal, as Cambodia’s Internet community is relatively very small and spending on technology does not benefit the government or the majority of the population. Besides, the current level of Cambodia’s technological knowledge is still limited

With the government encouraging e-government and e-communication on the Internet, there is hope that there will not be another “great firewall of Cambodia” like China has for filtering Internet content, although the same is practiced by neighboring countries like Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam.