Earlier yesterday, I was mesmerized by the wonderful sights on television of exuberant crowds in Tahir Square, yelling and smiling in joy. They'd protested for eighteen days, using a variety of sources in the face of extreme government suppression--social media on Facebook, Twitter, the Internet, and even when that was shut down, they fought to keep communicating along these lines and also used traditional means of outreach to their fellow protestors. The world helped them as well in keeping the lines of communication open on the Internet.
The effect of social media on the revolution in Egypt has been hotly debated, with one famous author, Malcolm Gladwell, saying, "The revolution will not be tweeted." Oh, but it was.
Malcolm Gladwell made many waves—and enemies—with his New Yorker essay doubting the power of social media in political organizing. "The revolution will not be tweeted," he declared in October, and the revolutionaries tweeted back, sparking a heated and often predictable debate about the web. Since then, of course, people in the Middle East have been Doing Things that are more significant than anything one might say to rebut skepticism about web activism and "weak ties." On Wednesday, however, Gladwell resurfaced in an apparent response to the idea that digitally networked activists are exceling in Egypt—in contrast to his famous thesis. Gladwell's blog post is brief and thin, but it is also important for the ways he gets Egypt wrong.
Ari Melber does a wonderful take-down of Gladwell's premise in doubting the power of social media here at The Nation:
The overarching problem here is the false premise, frequently employed in these disputes. No one is arguing that this is the first protest in world history. Very few people think the Internet is an essential prerequisite to revolution. Instead, they're exploring whether the web and networked communications open up new and effective ways for citizens to converse and organize each other in repressive societies. (Access to mobile phones and text-messaging, for example, may have helped young people organize in Egypt and Tunisia in a different way than landlines or websites.) We can engage these issues without taking anything away from the French Revolution. Now, whether people "always" communicate grievances in authoritarian societies—a dubious claim—is less important to foreign policy than what comes of those communications.
Wired.com also has a good take on the role that social media played in Egypt's revolution.
Rafat Ali, a social media expert and founder of PaidContent, said Facebook and Twitter played different roles in the uprising. Facebook helped to organize the activists inside the country, he said, while Twitter functioned to help get the message out to the broader world.
“Facebook definitely had a role in organizing this revolution,” Ali told Wired.com. “It acts like an accelerant to conditions which already exist in the country. Twitter and YouTube serve as amplification for what’s happening on the ground. And they directly affect Western media coverage.”
“One of the things that social media does is transmission of hope across these countries,” Ali added, referring to Tunisia, Egypt and other repressed countries in the Middle East.
For how the Egyptian protestors were able to bypass the blocks on Twitter and Facebook, there's a good summary found over at Mashable.com.
It was very fascinating to watch the Egyptian revolution develop in realtime on Twitter and on Facebook. I'd gotten at least sixteen wall posts alone on the issue of Egypt on the day when the revolution first started, and then Egypt became a trending topic on Twitter. Word about the revolution was getting out all over the entire world through social media and traditional media.
Words have so much power, and even in print or digital, they convey a multitude of messages--hope, fear, love, despair, determination, strength, weakness, and so on. In Egypt, the digital word was all about determination against a dictator, and they used the digital word to organize.
Organize they did, young and old, male and female, all over the country with the focus on changing their political landscape. The dictator hiding in his palace tried to shut down social media, but the world helped the people of the Egypt out, and he was powerless to stop the power of the digital word "REVOLUTION!" as it rang out around the world. He didn't understand how effective social media could be in supplanting traditional uses of organizing.
And it was too late for him.
What the people of Egypt did is a testament to online organizing. They merged social media with traditional organizing and street protests, and it worked.
Can we do the same here in organizing for effective change? I think so. There's an old saying that says:
The pen is mighter than the sword.
That quote still holds true today for the people of Egypt when they used their smartphones, and computers to get the word out, and in expressing their ideas about the revolution.
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