Philip Potter: Media coverage of the events in Egypt has been unusual; in that they have been self-sustained. We've seen sort of wall-to-wall coverage on CNN for literally days on and CNN has got a significant bump in ratings out of this. The effect of this has been an interesting one. I think that it has really have taken some options off the table for the Obama administration; it's not really possible for the Obama administration to take sort of a very real political approach to this.

It's pushed sort of the Egyptian people front and centre in the mind of the American people. In a lot of ways, this is the first sort of sympathetic lengthy coverage of the Arab street that we've seen arguably since 9/11. As a result, you end up with a situation where Obama, when he gives his first speech on the Egypt situation, he uses the term, 'the Egyptian people' eight times in five minutes.

Barack Obama: -- enormous demonstrations by the Egyptian people.

Philip Potter: So I think it shows sort of a reorientation in opinion which may in the long run reflect a reorientation in policy.

Nadine Naber: Before answering the question, it's important to recognize what's happening on the ground. It's that people lead Grassroots movement made up of all sectors of Egyptian society, millions of people are taking the streets, demanding democracy an end repression an end torture and end to state violence. Therefore, if people in the United States really care about democracy in Egypt then they would support and stand in line with the calls for democracy that are coming from the ground in Egypt and their demand is end of the Mubarak regime; Mubarak, step down now!

So what is needed that people in the United States to put pressure on the Obama administration to participate in pressuring Mubarak to take that step down. If Mubarak stays, we will see a continuation of what Egyptians have experienced for the past 30 years, which is dictatorship, lack of any freedom of speech, control of the state media, torture, attacks against journalists, human rights activists.

Philip Potter: There is a lot of attention to sort of the role of the new media in these revolutions sort of across the region. A lot of people have sort of in a very casual way say, oh, you know, it's the internet. But I think there is sort of a distinction here to be drawn between the hard news that you can get on the Internet and what's really changed in the last couple of years in terms of social media.

What's happening here is that there is an interaction between where people go to get their entertainment, where they go to socialize and where they get their political information. So it becomes much more of a mass phenomenon where going to distant blogs and using masked IP addresses to do that is certainly not mass activity.

A call to action set through Facebook is something that is much more easily spread to a much larger number of people.

Nadine Naber: There are many possible scenarios and at this point, it's still unclear that people who are on the ground, holding down Tahrir Square or Liberation Square as we speak, are calling for a transition government followed by a democratic governing system where every sector of society has equal participation.