Chicago Humanities Festival

Lecture

It was the Tweet heard round the world—during the uprisings of the Arab Spring, protesters have used social media to organize and fuel political change across a region. As tools like Twitter propel eyewitness accounts to the attention of journalists and audiences around the world, important questions follow: What’s the value of social media—sometimes called “liberation technology”—and how does it circumvent censorship and fuel democracy? In a discussion moderated by Washington Post political writer Peter Slevin, a panel of foreign journalists including Al-Jazeera (Arabic) Washington Bureau Chief Abderrahim Foukara, New York Times reporter Nadim Audi, and Saudi blogger and multimedia journalist Ahmed Al Omran convene to exchange ideas about social media, revolution, and the Middle East.

Read a column by Rania Al Malky on the CHF Blog.

Read the CHF Blog post about this program by Peter Slevin.

This program is generously underwritten by Bill and Penny Obenshain.

The 2011 programs at the UIC Forum are sponsored in part by the Chicago Community Trust.

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Featured Profile

Judith Miller is an author and a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter formerly with The New York Times. She is now an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of its magazine, City Journal. Since 2008, she has been a commentator for Fox News, speaking on terrorism and other national security issues, the Middle East, American foreign policy, and need to strike a delicate balance between protecting both national security and civil liberties in a post-9/11 world.