From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media.

I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

This is what popular uprising looks like.

Protests over corruption and unemployment were sparked after a man set himself on fire.

You might remember the song from the 1970s that said, The Revolution will not be televised.

More modern lyrics might read, The Revolution will be tweeted.

Amid the protests in Tunisia, there has been much talk about the activity of Tunisians online

and the role that new media are playing in the uprising.

Some have called it a WikiLeaks revolution,

attributing the unrest to leaked diplomatic cables about corruption in the Tunisian government.

Others have called it a Twitter revolution because of all the social media activities surrounding the protests.

But political scientists and foreign policy blogger Mark Lynch has assiduously studied the Arab press and says it's not so simple.

He says the Internet, Social Media, and Al Jazeera have collectively transformed the information

environment in the Arab world. Welcome back, Mark.

Thanks for having me.

So you've been following the evolving Arab media landscape for the last decade.

What's the big change in that time? Well, there have been two big changes. One, of course,

was the rise of Al Jazeera and satellite television. That had the effect of really making it

very difficult for Arab government to control the flow of information. And the next big change has been

the rise of mass participation in social media, which has really increased the ability of

individual citizens to circumvent all efforts to control the media. A remarkable portion of the

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