A new kind of resistance movement?

I was going to wait until the weekend to talk about this, but the previous posts have provoked me to say something sooner. As you can imagine, I'm very interested in the events in Egypt, Tunisia, and other resistance movements in what you might call the "democratic dictatorships" of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA.) Although I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the role of new technologies in creating the resistance networks that brought down Milosevic in Serbia in the 1990s, my current focus is not on bringing down governments, but in the role of social media and new technologies in building up civil society, political parties, and government institutions. Click on the title of this post to get to the Facebook page my students at Fletcher and I are maintaining on what we call 21st Century Resistance Movements.

The great thing about this emerging field called social network analysis is that what we discover in one domain, e.g. political organizations, is almost-always useful in others, e.g. businesses.  So it's not just OK, it's very useful to use examples from one field to help understand or explain things in another.

OK, now let's get back to business and the the theme for our weekend--thoughts about where this is all leading us.