We Americans tend to take our presidential campaigns lightly. We see them as fodder for Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show, and we become so enamored with the incessant polling that we watch the candidates as if they were race horses approaching the finish line.

Indeed, the elections that took place in Egypt and Tunisia have demonstrated that the young, multilingual and Internet-savvy spokesmen for the revolution who had become prominent on Al Jazeera and CNN television coverage from Tahrir Square lack any strong base of electoral support.

This isn’t an accident. Forget the non-existent “Twitter revolution”: information simply spreads faster than it used to do, in myriad ways. Around the world, the poor own mobile telephones. The middle class has internet access...Countries and cultures do change...

On a "win-loss" scale, Hamas features more as amongst the "winners" not "losers" of the Arab Spring. Ismail Haniyeh's current diplomacy "shuttle" around several Arab capitals is designed, amongst other things, as a declaratory policy embracing the Arab Spring

While Twitter and Facebook gave rise to the Arab Spring, websites like "Egypt Votes" offered valuable opportunities for open communication by ordinary citizens with untold millions of Egyptians, worldwide, holding the greatest promise for ushering the Middle East to a period of true and lasting democracy.

When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, perhaps no newspaper's coverage generates more passionate and emotional reaction from the Jewish community in America and around the world than that of the New York Times. There has been an increasingly troubling imbalance in the way that the Times presents stories and opinions on the Middle East conflict.

The Arab Spring has provided a platform to the unsung heroes of the Arab world. While the top two uses of social media were raising awareness and spreading information about events related to uprisings and revolutions, a slightly larger percentage of men than women used social media for these purposes.