Abstract:

For the last decade, a debate has raged over the place of social media within popular uprisings. The 2011 Egyptian revolution shed new light on this debate. However, while the use of social media by Egyptians received much focus, and activists themselves pointed towards it as the key to their success, social media did not constitute the revolution itself, nor did it instigate it. Focusing solely on social media diminishes the personal risks that Egyptians took when heading into the streets to face rubber bullets and tear gas, as well as more lethal weapons. Social media was neither the cause nor the catalyst of the revolution; rather it was a tool of coordination and communication.

Preface

In the vlog she posted on YouTube on 18 January 2011, 26-year-old Asmaa Mahfouz asked viewers to join her in the streets on 25 January (a date that was to become symbolic) to protest government corruption rather than ‘sitting at home and following [her] on the news [and] Facebook’ or self-immolating, as four Egyptians had already done (QueenofRomance83 2011, Iyadelbaghdadi 2011). Her video, which quickly went viral, exemplifies the role of social media in the 2011 Egyptian protests. She used these tools to encourage her fellow Egyptians to leave their computers at home and join her in the streets. The posting of the video itself did not constitute the main act of rebellion, but it did help to coordinate and instigate those acts.

Around the same time, after seeing the success of the Tunisian protests in bringing down that government, Wael Ghoneim, a 31-year-old Egyptian Google executive and the anonymous administrator of the Facebook group ‘We Are All Khaled Said’, set up an event for 25 January – a holiday that traditionally celebrates a police revolt against the British, and which had been the date of minor protests by the ‘April 6 Youth Movement’ for the previous two years. He told followers of his Facebook group that a protest would be held if 50,000 people agreed to attend (Kirkpatrick and Sanger 2011). Within three days, more than 100,000 people had signed up. Ghoneim, however, was still sceptical as to whether the protest would actually take place, as clicking ‘attend’ on a Facebook event and protesting on the streets require two radically different levels of commitment. Ultimately, it is estimated that on 25 January tens of thousands of people gathered in Cairo, with thousands of others protesting across Egypt (Kirkpatrick and Sanger 2011).

For the last decade a debate has raged over the place of social media within popular uprisings. By social media I mean ‘a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content’.1 Key examples include Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Some scholars and journalists, including Frank Rich and Malcolm Gladwell, suggest that the emphasis on social media within popular uprisings has been misplaced – the product of a lack of understanding of the intricacies of the situation and a bias towards Western-created media. Others, including Larry Diamond and Clary Shirky, claim that while social media does not cause these uprisings, it can be a key catalyst and tool of coordination. They are, however, careful to say that uprisings tend to come at the end of a long process of incremental change.

The 2011 Egyptian revolution shed new light on this debate. Numerous articles were written on the role of social media in the uprising. As one activist tweeted, ‘We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world’ (Howard 2011). However, while these mediums certainly were used as the activist suggested, they did not constitute the revolution itself, nor did they instigate it. Focusing solely on social media diminishes the personal risks that Egyptians took when heading into the streets to face rubber bullets and tear gas, as well as more lethal weapons. Social media was neither the cause nor the catalyst of the revolution; rather, it was a tool of coordination and communication.

This article will survey the two sides of the debate surrounding social media. It will then examine the particulars of social media within Egypt, and how that media was utilized during the 2011 uprising. Finally, it will explore some of the implications of the use of social media on the revolution.

 

Read full text here  ‘Suleiman: Mubarak decided to step down egypt jan25 OH MY GOD’: examining the use of social media in the 2011 Egyptian revolution

 

Keywords:

Egypt

January 25

Facebook

Twitter

social media

YouTube

revolution

Al Jazeera

 

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