Read the excerpt from "The Role of Social Media in the Arab Uprisings" by Heather Brown, Emily Guskin, and Amy Mitchell.Now, research is emerging that reexamines in a more detailed way the role that social media played in the Arab uprisings.In July 2012 a report was published by the United States Institute of Peace. . . . The authors came to some conclusions that countered the initial assumption that social media was a causal mechanism in the uprisings.Instead, the study suggests that the importance of social media was in communicating to the rest of the world what was happening on the ground during the uprisings. . . .Data from the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project at least somewhat supports this conclusion with its findings that the majority of Egyptians are not online. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of the total population do not use the internet. When looking specifically at those with a college education, use of social media for obtaining political information is more prevalent than in other segments of the population. Though most of the country is disconnected from the internet, 84% of those who are online say they visit social networking sites for news about Egypt’s political situation. These findings point to social media’s important role in spreading information, but do not necessarily indicate that social media was a mobilizing force in the uprisings.Read the excerpt from "The Truth about Twitter, Facebook and the Uprisings in the Arab World" by Peter Beaumont.As commentators have tried to imagine the nature of the uprisings, they have attempted to cast them as many things: as an Arab version of the eastern European revolutions of 1989 or something akin to the Iranian revolution that toppled the Shah in 1979. Most often, though, they have tried to conceive them through the media that informed them—as the result of WikiLeaks, as "Twitter revolutions" or inspired by Facebook.All of which, as American media commentator Jay Rosen has written, has generated an equally controversialist class of article in reply, most often written far from the revolutions. These stories are not simply sceptical about the contribution of social media, but determined to deny it has played any part.Those at the vanguard of this argument include Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker (Does Egypt Need Twitter?), the New Statesman's Laurie Penny (Revolts Don't Have to be Tweeted) and even David Kravets of Wired.co.uk (What's Fuelling Mideast protests? It's More Than Twitter). All have argued one way or another that since there were revolutions before social media, and it is people who make revolutions, how could it be important?Except social media has played a role. For those of us who have covered these events, it has been unavoidable.Precisely how we communicate in these moments of historic crisis and transformation is important. The medium that carries the message shapes and defines as well as the message itself. The instantaneous nature of how social media communicate self-broadcast ideas, unlimited by publication deadlines and broadcast news slots, explains in part the speed at which these revolutions have unravelled, their almost viral spread across a region. It explains, too, the often loose and non-hierarchical organisation of the protest movements unconsciously modelled on the networks of the web.