Recommended podcast: Capturing Egypt's neverending story (9:54)

Brooke Gladstone of On The Media interviews Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim, the producer and director of The Square, an Oscar nominated documentary on the Arab Spring. They speak of the Arab Spring and the global paradigm shift social media is causing.

Producer Karim Amer on the importance of social media:

And we look today at what’s happening in Kiev, we see the same exact image. We look at Caracas last week, and the same thing is happening. We look at Istanbul. And we start to realize that this isn’t just the Arab Spring, Winter or Summer. This is a global paradigm shift. When it started off in Egypt it was a very lonely fight between the Egyptian dictator versus the Egyptian protester, but when all of you and the rest of the world started watching what was happening, you leveled the playing field. Your witness provided protection for us. And that’s the way that we can change the world today.

(For what was perhaps the first example of political citizen journalism on the Internet, see this discussion of Usenet during the 1991 Soviet Coup attempt).

Global Voices and The Guardian review the Arab Spring

Global Voices has posted an extensive retrospective of the Arab Spring.

They've pulled together their coverage of the events in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions and the protests in Bahrain, Morocco, Syria and Yemen.

The retrospective includes pictures from and overview articles on each country and links to hundreds of chronologically organized posts that appeared on Global Voices during the year.

Global Voices is an international community of over 500 bloggers and translators who report on blogs and citizen media from around the world. Founded at Harvard in 2005, they emphasize content that is not ordinarily seen in international mainstream media.

For another year-end overview of the Arab Spring, check out this interactive timeline from The Gaurdian.

The Internet was an important tool during the Arab Spring, but politically oriented citizen journalism has been with us for many years. Perhaps the first example was the during the 1991 Soviet coup attempt, which was reported in real-time on Usenet. Before the Twitter revolution, there was the Usenet revolution.