Presentation: Defriending the Status-Quo: Translating Social Media onto Egypt’s Streets (Transcript)
Venue: Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo
Date: 19 September 2011
I would like to thank Professor Albert for the invitation, and the Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages, and the University of Oslo. From the outset, I would like to pay my condolences to the victims and loved ones of the horrific tragedy that struck Norway a few months ago. I was in Australia when it happened, and like many I was in shock horror at the carnage. However, my breath was taken away by the Norwegian spirit that came together in unity. You really did show the world the spirit of humanity, and why Norway always deserves its reputation as a promoter of peace. There was one scene on the news, seeing a Norwegian mother cry for the loss of her son, I was reminded by a weeping mother in Egypt, who was holding a framed portrait of her son who died during the revolution, walking aimlessly on the streets of Alexandria, asking anyone for justice for her son. The pain of our losses is immeasurable, yet the unity of our humanity is incomparable.
As you know social media has been a very hot topic this year, it has lended itself to explain the successes of the Arab Spring, to its dark side in the recent London riots.
The first Norwegian I ever met in my life was a visiting professor in Australia. He told me something very profound, he said if you want to know the mood of a country, listen to their jokes. Egypt has no shortage of jokes, yet the most common joke that circulated around Egypt this year was this one: Mubarak goes into the afterlife, and meets with former Egyptian presidents Nasser and Sadat. They asked him: “How did the Egyptians kill you?” By poison, like Nasser?, By gun, like Sadat?’. Mubarak said, ‘no, they killed me by Facebook.”
On the Friday 27 of May this year, I was observing the mass demonstrations in Alexandria, what was dubbed the second revolution. One of the lead protesters took out his smart phone to check the progress of demonstrations in Cairo, and announced to the crowds that our brothers in Cairo have reached a million. The implication being that Alexandria can beat that. The Alexandria protests got bolder, the chants got louder, the marches got stronger. The event, like many, encapsulates several factors.
There are key elements of social media and its relation to Egypt’s streets that I wish to discuss: social media in identity formation, imagery as an agent of change, social media in city to city relationships, and the recent developments and implications. But first I wish to discuss a report that just came out.
SLIDE TWO: The centrality of social media
Last week, the University of Washington released the findings of a study into the effects of social media in the Arab revolutions. Focused mainly on Tunisia and Egypt, this research included creating a database of information collected from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The research also included creating maps of important Egyptian political Websites, examining political conversations in the blogosphere, analyzing more than 3 million Tweets based on keywords used, and tracking the thousands of individuals Tweeted from during the revolutions.
The research produced three key findings:
- First, social media played a central role in shaping political debates in the Arab Spring.
Social media was used heavily to conduct political conversations by a key demographic group during and since the revolution – young, urban, relatively well educated individuals, many women as well. For the past few years, these individuals used Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to put pressure on their governments. The outcome was that by using digital technologies, pro-democracy advocates nurtured a freedom meme that took on a life form of its own and thus helped in the spread of ideas about liberty and revolution to a large number of people that surprised the proponents.
- Second, a spike in online revolutionary conversations often preceded major events on the ground.
The debate has often been whether online conversations were driving street protests or whether the presence of a large volume of people in the streets was feeding an ongoing online conversation. However, the report suggests that online conversations played an integral part in the revolutions that toppled governments in Egypt and Tunisia. The findings stated that conversations about liberty, democracy, and revolution on blogs and on Twitter often immediately preceded mass protests.
But the confirmation of social media’s centrality also comes from the governments themselves, who recognised the power of social media equipped opposition movements. Egypt attempted to choke off access to social media by shutting down the internet and found that the protestors in Cairo’s Tahrir Square were nonetheless able to stay connected as a social network.
- Third, social media helped spread democratic ideas across international borders.
The findings found patterns of democracy advocates in Egypt and Tunisia using social media to connect with others outside their countries, and with each other. Such connections informed Western news outlets about events on the ground, which in turn spread news about ongoing events throughout the region. In other cases, the findings found that democracy advocates in Egypt and Tunisia picked up followers in other countries, where comparable democratic protests would later erupt.
As a result, social media brought a cascade of messages about freedom and democracy across the Arab world, and thus helped raise expectations for success of political uprisings. Twitter offered the clearest evidence of where individuals engaging in democratic conversations were located during the revolutions. Over the course of a week before Mubarak’s resignation, the total rate of tweets from Egypt – and around the world – about political change in Egypt ballooned from 2,300 a day to 230,000 a day.
SLIDE THREE: Social Media in identity formation
To understand the significance of the social space in Egypt is to understand the weight of social media in Egypt. The traditional social space for a hyper-social society like Egypt’s was the coffeehouse, but over the past decade internet cafes grew as a rival. Some places physically merged the two, where you could smoke sheesha and surf the net. Six years ago, social networking sites like Friendster, Myspace and the aging mIRC were the popular choice. When I asked the youth what they used the internet for, it was mainly for job hunting and girl hunting.
In 2004, there was an estimated 250 social protests, most dealing with rising food prices. A watershed moment came when the movement Kafeya (Enough) burst onto the scene, in which they demanded that Mubarak had ruled long enough and it was time for him to go. It was an exciting prospect, but my observation was that it seemed limited to university students who were out of touch with Egypt’s masses. Social media had not fully matured to the level that could facilitate an effective form of civic activism. Yet over the years, with the rise of social media tools, there began an experimentation with these fabled applications as a form of civic protest. Egyptian youth started utilising Facebook, Twitter, as a way, for example, to create flash protests and decoy protests.
Social media in the Egyptian revolution and beyond fashioned a decentralised horizontal resistance movement pitting it against security forces that only understood hierarchical structures which they then took out the streets and looked for the same sort of structure in the protest movements.
SLIDE FOUR: Image as an Agent of Change
Social media did more than just enabling social networks, it aided in the proliferation of images which have had a profound impact on the Egyptian psychological mindset. It was Lenin who said “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen”. He had a point, in Egypt’s case, you could also apply the speed to hours infact. With revolutions, what tends to take place is that everything speeds up and you don’t have time to read news analysis. And any analysis you read becomes obsolete in a matter of hours. So the fastest and enduring form of communication is the visual image.
SLIDE FIVE: Cascading Effects
It would be misplaced to say the Egyptian masses reacted to corruption, abuses, and rising food prices alone. In oppressive regimes, there will be a mismatch between what someone believes in private and what they say in public. There is considerable evidence to show that Egyptians reacted when the relationship between their private beliefs and public lies were no longer sustainable, and a perception of a fracture in the status quo enabled the galvanisation of cascading effects, this by far and large, could be seen to be the modus operandi of the Arab Spring.
In the book, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, Timur Kuran explains the consequences of expressing support for an opinion that isn’t one’s actual belief, or making a choice against one’s actual desire. He calls it preference falsification:
“Where the status quo owes its stability to preference falsification, there are people waiting for an opportunity, and perhaps others who can easily be induced, to stand up for change. Some eye-opening event or an apparent shift in social pressures may cause public opposition to swell. The public preferences of individuals are interdependent, so a jump in public opposition may be self-augmenting. Under the right conditions, every jump will galvanize further jumps.”
In the 1940 classic novel, The Heart is a Lonely Wonder. One underlying message that comes from the reading is that people see what they want to see, and in the era of social media, digital cameras, satellite TV, and the rapid transmission of images, they are given plenty to see and act upon.
Slide Six: Perceptions Shape Reality
Part of my research that I have been looking at over the past few months is how social media works in city to city relationships. Revolutionary events in Cairo and Alexandria fomented a mutual cascading effect between both cities, amplified by satellite TV and social media, which helped to break down each other’s sense of isolation. The Arab Spring within Egypt illustrated that protest movements in its major urban centres were galvanised by each other’s images and discourse, leading to a spiral of civil disobedience in which one city attempted to, inadvertently, outdo the other. Firstly, it’s crucial to get a sense of how perceptions and stereotypes of the other city will eventually shape social media narratives.
Cairo perceptions of Alexandria: Often a romanticised view of the coastal city that is associated with escapism, summer, sea, and vacation.
Compared to other Egyptian urban centres, Alexandria is given a higher number positive stereotypes such as “Bride of the Mediterranean” and the “courageous people”. Egypt’s popular arts and regional soft power has helped engender Alexandria with this generous image.
Alexandrian Perceptions of Cairo: A mixture of awe, envy and resentment. Cairo is referred to as Masr (Egypt).
Alexandrians tend to have a slightly less favourable view of the Caironese. Much of this resentment arises from the capital city’s centralisation of power and job opportunities. The most common complaint Alexandrians make is the traffic problems caused by Cairo holiday goers in summer. Recently, it has manifested in a grudge of Cairo taking credit for the Egyptian revolution which Alexandrians believe started in their city.
Now not too much should be read into this, they are not so serious so as to prevent marriage and trade between the two cities. But what it does do is provide a contextual backdrop as to why cascading effects and social media interplays with each other.
Slide Seven: The city behind the City
In mid-July, protesters from Tahrir Square went to Alexandria, the Lotus Revolution Coalition representative Ahmed Bahgat addressed the Alexandrian protesters, saying, “It is a great honor to be here in Alexandria, from which came the first martyr, Khaled Saeed…Your sit-in here gives us protesters in Cairo the motivation to continue our sit-in as you lend us emotional support. If you disperse, we cannot continue, as we draw our strength from you.”
Now at first glance, this might come across as self-serving rhetoric employed by revolutionaries to safeguard a national consensus and momentum, but Bahgat’s statement is not without some considerable merit. The images here highlight a sense of urban identity that matters to Alexandrians that you would rarely see in Cairo.
With the exception of the intensity of the 18 days of the revolution, Alexandria before and after the event, has provided much of the narratives and myths, while Cairo has provided the power backing.
In my months of research between the two cities, I have attempt to document how and why one city is influenced by the other. The relationship between Egyptian cities are complex and mixed, but the ones that do have a sizeable impact are the gravity centres of Cairo and Alexandria. They both share passions, envies, hopes, and stereotypes. All when channelled through the social media sphere, distorts the picture by fomenting an amplification of the other city’s situation.
In the course of the revolution and despite the many deaths of protesters in Alexandria, the coastal city’s inhabitants largely reacted more vehemently to coverage of events in Cairo’s Tahrir Square than to events in their own local vicinity. In post-Mubarak Egypt, protests in Alexandria have been partially fuelled by the social media-enabled perception that Cairo is receiving better reforms than Alexandria. In turn, Cairo’s protests are further encouraged by the sight of protesters in Alexandria, therefore giving the impression of a national movement that has yet to lose momentum.
Now many Egyptians will tell you that the revolution was about overthrowing tyranny. Yet the road taken was heavily dependent on how Egyptians perceived each other in who will first crack the status quo.
SLIDE EIGHT: Constructing the myth of Khaled Saeed
The script of social media went out to look for an actor. Khaled Saeed is the 28 year old Alexandrian who died at the hands of police last year on the 6 of June and was the inspirational face of the Egyptian Revolution. Now Khaled was my neighbour in the suburb of Cleopatra Hamamat. His death undoubtedly affected all our friends. Yet no one on our street was prepared for what was to come: His mythologization.
So why Khaled Saeed and not the countless others who suffered at the hands of the regime? Well let’s look at the most commonly repeated version of his death: a young blogger enters an Internet cafe to upload an expose video of crooked police sharing the spoils of drugs to YouTube. He was then beaten by the police and died at the Internet café. Here you have a powerful figure that can now encapsulate the young generation: young, social media savvy, and anti-authoritarian, and he was martyred at an internet cafe. This is the young and wired Egypt! On top of that, his name is given to one of the largest activist Facebook groups: “We Are all Khaled Saeed”.
Now the version I just narrated of Khaled’s death I find it at odds with what I’m currently researching into, but it has been seized by the pro-democracy movements and human rights activists and reported as factual in the world’s respectable mainstream press. Yet whatever is said, it will not matter. A marriage of youth activism and social media had given birth to a poster child. Khaled Saeed’s myth was set in stone.
Had Khaled died in prison, or in the slums or if the exact same circumstances of Khaled Saeed’s death took place in a different part of Egypt such Luxor or Sohag, the chances of Khalid rising to prominence post-mortem would be doubtful. Yet with the backdrop of an innocent Alexandria, Khaled’s youthfulness, middle class tech saviness, catapulted Khaled to prominence.
Khaled Saeed was rapidly adopted by Cairo based social media groups, and the further you go away from Khaled’s Saeed’s neighbourhood, his larger than life image grows. Alexandria had in effect laid the foundational myths of the Revolution and set the tone for change.
Activists actively hunt for a unifying symbol, just like the black civil rights movement actively sought out Rosa Parks who could legitimise the struggle in 1955, the Egyptian activists found their Rosa Parks.
SLIDE NINE: Writing the social media narrative
The notion of Thawrat Al-Shabab (youth revolution) has nurtured a discourse that has transformed social media into their defining hallmark. In Egypt, the deification of Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and other tools has cultivated a self-perpetuating belief and bandwagon effect that such tools are instrumental to enacting positive change, and hence the more people will use such technologies despite not having placed much importance on them before. Moreover, online identities become intricately linked to the Revolution. For example, it is not uncommon for the youth to change their birthdays on Facebook to 25January 2011 (The start date of the Revolution).
Like Bahgat’s statement, in Cairo, it’s not uncommon for the Tahrir protesters to tell you they are inspired by Alexandria. When you press them for a concrete answer, they might say that it’s the place that Khalid Saeed died or Alexandrians are always going out there and protesting. None of which are satisfactory answers.
Revolutionary and social media artwork tends to be more commonplace in Alexandria than Cairo, and this could lend clues as to the sources of inspiration, and the answer I believe is partially the outcome of Alexandria’s socio-geographic layout.
SLIDE TEN: The Socio-Geographic Perfect Storm
What makes Alexandria’s situation peculiar is the close proximity of the protest epicentre, university campuses, and the Library of Alexandria which serves as a venue and hub of intellectual debates and special events. Such a close proximity enables charged up youths to unleash a creative energy into the nearby social movements. The campus is what I call the stronghold of the digital youth. The University of Alexandria has its faculties spread out across the city. Yet the ones that would have the most politically charged up students happened to be coincidentally placed closer to the epicentre of activism: The faculty of arts, law and commerce. This triangular zone becomes a sort of incubator for the revolution’s creative angle.
SLIDE ELEVEN: The Alexandrian Long March
Yet protest activity will translate into long marches that crosses 11 suburbs. Starting at the Qaed Ibrahim courtyard, they will march through the major roads of the city. Alexandria’s protests are what I call take away revolution. Where unlike Cairo, you need to go to Tahrir to witness demonstrations, in Alexandria, the revolution comes to your doorstep. Literally.
SLIDE TWELVE:
The implication is that a large swathe of people is exposed to political activism that they may not otherwise have joined. Also the protests foment a bandwagon effect, in which people viewing from their balconies would come down to join the protest. The most common chants heard in the streets, “Come down oh Egyptians”. Yet the numbers coming out into their balconies translates into a multiplier effect causes another phenomenon.
SLIDE THIRTEEN: The initiation point of Social Media: The Camera
I lost count with the number of Alexandrians who took out cameras to photograph the marches. The outcome is that Alexandria’s social media angle is inserting a disproportionately a high number of images and commentaries into cyberspace that is sustaining the post-revolutionary activities. Of course this does not mean everyone snapping a photo with their camera phone is going to upload it to social media tools. Yet the probability increases dramatically.
SLIDE FOURTEEN: The Prayer of the Matriarch
To give a snapshot of how this one photo of this woman that was snapped during protests and uploaded to the “We are all Khaled Saeed” facebook page. On the comments section, people claimed to be inspired by the photo, that it had given them hope once again, but what this all does is feed the appetite for the post-revolutions hunger for symbolisms. Then a debate ensued as to where this photo was taken, I went through my photos that I took, and I located her.
SLIDE FIFTEEN: The Prayer of the Matriarch photos
Social media is nurturing the rise of mini-icons, and once again, the power of the visual image resonates strongly in the current conditions.
SLIDE SIXTEEN: Scripting the Alexandria Playbook
The number of images is one matter, but there also comes a story with Alexandria’s protest styles, which I have yet to confirm to what extent it is planned. At every point in the protest movement, you’ll come across scenes in which stories are told. (Explain the images)
I wish to add that the linear movement of the city’s roads and transportation system enables the youths to move from one part of the city to the other side at relatively low cost and on a predictable route. Hence the youth are not only able to organise on social networking sites, but to also spread their activities, especially protest style marches, through a large swathe of the city’s cornice. Whereas Cairo, with its distant, costly, hazardous criss-cross network of roads, often only sees its protests limited to Tahrir Square.
SLIDE SEVENTEEN: Tahrir Square
Now the role of Tahrir Square and Cairo plays a paramount importance, there is much credibility to the saying that he who controls Tahrir, controls Cairo, and he who controls Cairo, controls Egypt. Mubarak would not have cared as much if the protesters had taken over the Pyramids.
Tahrir Square does not have the same coincidence of design, it has the AUC, but that cannot be said to be representative of Egypt’s mainstream youth. Yet Tahrir’s layout makes up for it with intensity and symbolism. The centralisation of protest movements enables an intensification of human movement, crowd issues, and notably, the social media spectacle it provides.
The international media spotlight on Tahrir Square has given the square legitimacy in Arab eyes, during the Revolution, Tahrir Square galvanised Alexandrians in which many attempted to reach Cairo only for the regime to cut all rail links to the capital.
Although some Alexandrians can argue with some justification that the seeds of the revolution started in Alexandria, the revolution could not have been accomplished without the entry of Cairo.
More often than not, we have seen a dependency in which one city depends on the other for myth building and narrative construction, and the other depends on it for power and shaking up of the system. It is for this reason that Cairo is what I call an actor without a script, and Alexandria is a script without an actor. There are exceptions, the city of Suez played a big part in the initial stages of the revolution, images of torching the premises of the NDP party, police stations and murals of regime figures, galvanised much of Egypt. Suez is what I call the mouse that roared.
SLIDE EIGHTEEN: The Al-Jazeera Effect
Now this may seem a little off-topic but it does explain something that is often overlooked in studying politicised social media movements, and that is the Arabic language. The role of Al-Jazeera in the uprisings cannot be emphasised enough and has been discussed elsewhere. Yet Al-Jazeera and Arabic satellite TV in general has played a subtle role in fashioning the Arabic language.
Now on the screen we have the various dialects of the Arabic language. The literary standard that is taught in all schools throughout the Arab world is the Fus-ha Arabic or the modern standard Arabic (or MSA).
In the 20th century, certain Arab populations often faced a problem after school, unless their work required MSA Arabic, such as diplomacy, banking and the clergy; they drifted further away from the use of MSA and resorted to the colloquial dialect. Now this was fine if it was limited to their cities and towns, but transnationally it was a different story. 50 years ago, if someone living in Lebanon went to Morocco, they would struggle to communicate with each other as neither would understand each other’s dialect, and MSA might not have been practiced in years for it to be effective.
So one way to get around this was to communicate in the Egyptian dialect, due to the widespread Egyptian popular arts. So you had this tiny geographic space influencing the linguistic abilities across the Arab world.
What the rise of satellite television did, and Al-Jazeera in particular, was to push forth the MSA standard, and this re-engaged Arabic viewers with their MSA. This is not to say that Arabic viewers could never comprehend MSA before that, but satellite TV invigorated the debates, callers to shows, panels, quiz shows, as now viewers were engaging with each other across national boundaries, while state TV receded into the background.
So the Arab youth are a generation that have been raised in the era of Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya, and other stations that strengthened their post-schooling MSA. For those of the lower-socio economic backgrounds, the saturation of Al-Jazeera and pirated satellites enabled a basic relative understanding of what is occurring in the world.
To understand this quasi standardisation of the Arabic language, is to understand the social media driven transmission of perceptions and influences throughout the Arab world’s current upheaval.
A cross-pollination of Arab people discourses started to ask the hard questions to each other. Questions like why does Spain have a bigger GDP than the entire combined GDP of the Arab world. How did China, India, and Brazil move ahead in the world, and Egypt was left behind. Bit by bit, day by day, a common grievience was established over the past few years, the idea that Arabs have been swindled by high politics started to gain traction more than ever before.
SLIDE NINETEEN: Social Media and the Unfinished Revolution
Now to look at recent developments.
Activists are still struggling with the digital divide when it comes to mobilizing masses against the army and the remains of the old administration.
A digital campaign against military trials for civilians is on. Activists are posting comments on the Facebook site of the Egyptian Armed Forces. The campaign was announced on a Facebook page which led to around 8,000 participants joining. After bombarding the SCAF’s site with comments for 15 minutes. I think SCAF disabled the comments section now.
“We are all Khaleed Said”, has surpassed 1.6 million followers, are used for spreading the message about protests and campaigns.
On this site, it is often the starting point for everything that goes viral. Yet the difficulty activists are facing is translating online activism to street protests.
The April 6 Movement, one of the central organizations behind the revolution, arranges protests in several parts of Cairo. Not far from Tahrir Square, young Egyptian activists gather for TweetNadwas, a series of online and offline meetings, to discuss the next steps in campaigning.
In the latest TweetNadwa, the topic was citizen journalism, and in the warm evening in Cairo, seasoned tweeps and bloggers shared tips for efficient use of mobile phones for footage and pictures. Among the participants was an influential group of Egyptian bloggers, many who write under pseudonyms and are largely known solely by their Twitter handles.
Some among the digital elite are concerned about the small amount of Egyptians following Twitter and Facebook. An estimated 10 percent of 80 million Egyptians are on Facebook.
Activists gather pictures of accused human rights violators on Piggipedia, which is a Flickr collection of pictures of policemen, soldiers, and other officialdom.
One strategy for the change is to make wrongdoings in society visible, known as “crowdpower” as a way to make this happen; there is a TortureMap for crowdmapping torture and another one for corruption. Crowdmapping by the way is the accumulation of crowd-generated inputs such as social media feeds and text messages with geographic data to provide real-time, interactive information on events such as wars, humanitarian crises, crime, elections, or natural disasters. If properly implemented, crowdmapping can bring a level of transparency to fast-moving events that are difficult for traditional media to adequately cover in real-time, or to longer-term trends that may be difficult to identify through the reporting of individual events.
The Development & Institutionalization Support Center in Egypt has set up crowdmapping efforts by using the open-source crowdmapping platform U-shahidi. In Egypt, it has set up a site for citizen monitoring of the elections. It allows citizens to report from their polling stations by SMS or online.
Crowd funding initiatives in Egypt also have been organized through social media. In an online event called Tweetback, Egyptians gathered funds for humanitarian projects. Companies, non-profits and individuals were invited to donate.
In return for funds, the most prominent Egyptian digital activists tweeted about the companies’ charity initiatives to their hundreds of thousands of followers. Tweetback raised 2 million Egyptian pounds, and the money was directed to support an impoverished neighborhood in Cairo.
SLIDE TWENTY: Implications
- The implications are broad and require a redefining of social networks, and measuring the alignment of popular sentiments between urban centres in the wired world. The question should not just be how did the Egyptians view the Tunisians, although that is important, but how are they viewing each other. How do perceptions of the other in affect perceptions when revolutionary activities are speeded up.
- The other factor is that social media needs to be recognised as social networks like any other. It should not matter if social mobilisation happens to be a face to face meeting over a shisha in a coffee house, a phone text message, or wall post. Phillip Howard, from the University of Washington, notes this to be a false dichotomy that to describe face to face meetings as strong ties and text messages as weak ties. Images of protesters being beaten up alone were enough to bring people into the streets, or Wael Ghonim crying on TV was enough to give the uprising a new lease of life.
- Following the fall of the Tunisian dictator, and before the fall of Mubarak. Many specialists went on record saying that Mubarak will not befall the same fate as Tunisia. Specialists need to reframe their paradigms so as to be more accommodating of digital media and its relationship to collective identities, shared grievances, and, ultimately, perceptions that provoke cascading effects.
- There are questions that remain to be answered?
- If social media plays a role in narrative formation from Alexandria’s end, what does this mean for groups like the Muslim brotherhood who have their strongholds in Alexandria, or the Coptic Christians, in which the coastal city holds historical significance as the seat of their faith and hence the title of Pope of Alexandria.
- Does Cairo’s population volatility make it difficult to measure public opinion due to the millions who travel daily to and from the capital city, could this make it susceptible to Alexandria’s constant factors.
- Finally, does Tahrir’s intense circular style of protesting versus Alexandria’s forward linear style affect how social media interprets developments and how images are ported through the media sphere.?
These issues need further study into the future. I thank you for your time.
