Online, Small Voices Become Sparks of Revolution

For most of the last century, the world operated on the big-man theory of politics: Towering personalities were required to drive big changes.

We now seem to have moved into the small-person era of history, in which seemingly insignificant people are setting off sweeping movements. This may be the most significant example of how the Internet is changing the world.

WSJ's Charles Levinson and Jerry Seib report on how public protests in Egypt have sparked protests throughout the Middle East, namely Bahrain, Libya, Algeria, Yemen and Iran.

Simply consider this. The most important figures in a Middle East undergoing historic ferment may well be the following people, all unknown until recent months, and all seemingly insignificant before then:

—Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old fruit vendor in Tunisia. He set himself on fire to protest humiliating treatment at the hands of the police in his hometown, Sidi Bouzid—the kind of treatment he and others accepted quietly before. Word of his act spread on the Internet, inspiring a street uprising that toppled President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, helping fuel a similar one in Egypt.

—Khaled Said, a 28-year-old businessman from Alexandria who had the temerity to post on the Internet a video of Egyptian policemen stealing marijuana after a drug bust. After doing so, he was grabbed by police officers at a cafe, dragged outside and beaten to death. When photos of his beaten body began spreading on the Internet, he, like Mohamed Bouazizi, became an inspiration for revolution.

— Wael Ghonim, 30-something father of two, and Google's head of marketing in the Middle East. He picked up the story of the beating of Khaled Said and began turning it into fodder for a people's uprising in Egypt by establishing a Facebook page devoted to the death, as well as working on other sites advocating political reform. Egyptian security forces tried to silence him by arresting him, but failed to reckon that his Internet following meant his power only increased with his disappearance.

—Neda Agha-Soltan, a young Iranian woman shot to death during a protest against the country's apparently rigged presidential election last year. (It isn't clear she was even protesting, or merely an innocent bystander). A 26-year-old, like the fruit vendor in Tunisia, she became the face of a still-churning political movement seeking change in the Iranian regime after a YouTube video of her lying on the street, dying, went viral.

What unites these disparate young figures is that the Internet gave their stories instant political power, the kind they couldn't possibly have acquired in an age when information moved slowly and bureaucracies had the ability to craft the narratives they desired for the masses to consume. The changed dynamic made possible a remarkable event: a broad-based revolution in Egypt in which there was no obvious individual leader.

This new 21st century reality stands in marked contrast to the way history was made in the 20th century, when outsized personalities or powerful political leaders often were required to set off big political waves. Mao Zedong leading a revolution in China; Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrowing a monarchy in Egypt; Mustafa Kemal Ataturk single-handedly forming the modern Turkish state; Fidel Castro taking power in Cuba; Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt battling Adolf Hitler in World War II: All changed the world as singular, charismatic leaders.

And for good reason. Making big changes required powerful figures running big movements or institutions to move minds or armies. Even then, change often was slow.

In a speech delivered Tuesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for the world community to adopt common standards for Internet use, while criticizing countries that suppress citizens with web-based tactics.

The paradigm affects not only international politics; it has parallels in American political life as well. Consider how individual Americans with small amounts of dollars are changing the campaign system. After the 2008 election, aides to then-candidate Barack Obama disclosed that he had gathered 6.5 million donations online from some 3 million individual donors. The average donation was $80, but the total came to more than half a billion dollars.

The power of big-money players was hardly eliminated, but it certainly was reduced by the rise of these small-person donors. Now, President Obama's supporters talk of raising $1 billion to finance the 2012 campaign, again counting on an Internet-based network of small donors for a lot of that.

Similarly, Sarah Palin has developed a wide following with virtually none of the traditional structure once required to build and maintain a national political base. She depends not on big-name supporters and power brokers but, to a large extent, on a Facebook band of individual followers, unattached to any political organization.

The same pattern opened the way last year for the rise of a tea-party movement made up of individual American citizens who still have no clear leader.

Where does all this lead? Who knows? Those who didn't fully appreciate the changing power structure until it was upon us shouldn't pretend they can see precisely where it is heading from here.

Write to Gerald F. Seib at jerry.seib@wsj.com