In a column for the International Herald Tribune headed "When Arabs Tweet", Rami Khouri takes issue with the US State Department's efforts to promote the internet and other digital technologies as a vehicle for political change in the Middle East.

Western policymakers, he says, need to "grasp more accurately the fact that young people use the digital media mainly for entertainment and vicarious, escapist self-expression". In the meantime, the west should "lower the contradictions" in its policies towards Middle Eastern governments and activists.

Contradictory policies are certainly a problem, but I think Khouri is wrong about the internet. He writes:

My impression is that these new media today play a role identical to that played by al-Jazeera satellite television when it first appeared in the mid-1990s – they provide important new means by which ordinary citizens can both receive information and express their views, regardless of government controls on both, but in terms of their impact they seem more like a stress reliever than a mechanism for political change.

The birth of al-Jazeera 14 years ago, along with other satellite channels, was a major development in its own right, especially in the way it opened up political debate. To a limited extent, it also gave ordinary people a voice, through phone-ins, etc. In Arab terms, al-Jazeera has also benefited from an unusual measure of editorial independence – though ultimately it is still controlled by the ruler of Qatar.

The internet does not in any sense play a role that is "identical" to that. It is a different creature altogether – the major difference being that it is unmediated: people can say anything they want, and be heard by anyone who is interested, without the need for intermediaries. That is why some Middle Eastern governments have put large amounts of money and effort into trying to control it – efforts that will most likely prove futile in the long run.

Khouri laments:

We must face the fact that all the new media and hundreds of thousands of young bloggers from Morocco to Iran have not triggered a single significant or lasting change in Arab or Iranian political culture. Not a single one. Zero.

Factually, he's correct, though the internet did become a hugely important tool for protesters in the aftermath of the dispute Iranian presidential election. In addition, there are plenty of examples where Arab bloggers' exposure of wrongdoing by officials has forced the authorities to take some action, even if it has not changed the political culture.

I'm also reminded of a conversation with Hossam el-Hamalawy, the Egyptian blogger/activist a couple of years ago. As far as Hamalawy was concerned, one of the most memorable videos on YouTube was made by two kids in the Egyptian city of Tanta, with a mobile phone. "They were filming the police assaulting a street vendor," he told me, "and you hear one of the kids telling the other: 'Send it to Wael Abbas, send it to Wael Abbas!' [Abbas is a famous Egyptian blogger] and the other says: 'No, no no, I’ll upload it to YouTube tonight' – and it’s there online."

The point of that story is that the youngster recognised he could publish the video himself, without help from anyone else – including bloggers.

Of course, if you look around internet cafes in the Arab countries you may well find that most of the customers are either chatting with friends or browsing the dating websites. But that, too, should not be underestimated. It's happening outside the traditional social cocoon where contacts with the opposite sex are highly regulated, and dating websites undermine the whole idea of family-approved and family-arranged marriages.

Khouri does accept that a social revolution is under way but he doubts that the new digital and social media are "a credible tool for challenging established political orders".

That may be too much to expect at the moment, but in the Arab countries social change and political change can't really be divorced from each other. As I argued in my recent book, What's Really Wrong with the Middle East, if you want political change you've got to have social change too.