For 18 days in early 2011, millions of people took to the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, Suez, and elsewhere in Egypt to demand that their president, Hosni Mubarak, step down, refusing to live in fear any longer. The initial call for a nationwide protest against corruption and abuse on January 25 was via a Facebook event created on the hugely popular âWe are all Khaled Saidâ fan page. The page was named after a young Egyptian businessman who had been beaten to death by police earlier in the year and whose violent death was caught on video and posted on social media, and all of its 350,000 âfansâ were invited to join.
The week prior, Tunisiaâs ruler of 23 years left Tunis for Saudi Arabia after being driven from power by a popular uprising. Inspired by what happened in Tunisia, a young Egyptian man named AbdelRahman Mansour 1 posted the call for a popular protest on the groupâs Facebook wall and asked his friend who worked for Google in Dubai, Wael Ghonim, to help him promote it. At least 56,000 people RSVPed to attend within the first 24 hours, with more than 50,000 more signed on by January 17. Cautioning that people needed to communicate about the protests to a broader swath of society, cyberactivists coordinated their activities with on-the-ground grassroots organizing to bridge the digital divide between the 24.5 % of Egyptians online and the rest of Egyptâs 80 million citizens. Egyptians turned out in the streets in numbers not seen in decades. Inspired by the success of Tunisiaâs citizens in ousting their president, Egyptians snatched the moment, building on several years of grassroots organizing, digital activism, and political awareness-raising that were indelibly shaped by the information and communication technologies (ICTs) of the era. But who were these people who risked violence and incarceration to take to the streets and to their blogs? Why did they risk life and limb to engage in collective action? And how did an ad hoc group of youth topple an entrenched dictator and start a revolution?
This book goes beyond the tired argument about whether or not social media caused the revolution, and instead, examines the particular ways in which Egyptians adopted, adapted, and integrated these new ICTs to enable political participation, pioneering new forms of cyberactivism and creating a youth movement that was inextricably bound up with and shaped by these new media. It moves beyond the anecdotal approach that has driven much of the research about the Internet and social media in the Middle East, often driven by breathless press coverage of the latest Internet-based platform, by providing a theoretically grounded framework for analyzing how the confluence of the right technology used in the right ways, at the right times, and in the right sequences, can generate powerful outcomes that upend established institutions and fundamentally reconfigure the status quo.
Rather than concentrating on the outcome of social mobilization, this book explores the individual and collectives processes of contention and participation and the specific role new media technologies played in these. Drawing on the concept of mechanisms and contentious repertoires from social movement theory and Bourdieuâs field theory, the analytical framework proposed in this study explains why and how cyberactivism can have political impact in authoritarian regimes. It specifies how youth were able to take advantage of momentous technological changes in ICT in seemingly small ways that nonetheless had serious consequences for an authoritarian regime accustomed to controlling information flows and dominating the public sphere. These consequences included:Therefore, I focus specifically on analyzing the impact of this new contentious politics on the journalistic field, in which the MSM are situated, and on the political field, in which political movements like Kefaya and the oppositional Muslim Brotherhood were situated. Negotiations between such dichotomies run throughout the entire story. The tension between privacy versus publicity, activism versus journalism, professional versus amateur, young versus old, physical versus virtual, and conformity versus itjihad (independent reasoning) is found in each contentious episode.
- reconfiguring the journalistic field and challenging the hegemony of the state over the media ecosystem;
- reconfiguring the boundaries of the public sphere and who gets to participate;
- forcing authoritarian regimes to make trade-offs between control and openness in their policy choices;
- and upending traditional generational and authority hierarchies, from the privileged role of the mainstream media (MSM) to the hegemony of the political elite.
The Research Question
How do social media enable contentious politics? How are ICTs implicated in processes of political change? What is the political impact of blogs and social media in authoritarian contexts? Does citizen journalism alter the dynamics of state-dominated media systems and, if so, why? The term âpoliticsâ in this sense means the exercise of power and decision-making that establishes a particular order, or reality, that becomes taken as granted. Politics in the Middle East, and for the matter, globally, are often studied as if they only comprise formal political processes like elections or legislating, but to understand political change, we need to get beyond the traditional locus of politics and prevailing definitions of participation as attempting to influence the government or formal institutions (Singerman 1995, 4). Politics pervades the daily lives of individuals, particularly in authoritarian, paternalistic countries like Egypt, calling for an approach that focuses on politics from the ground up or micropolitics. Goldfarb argues that micropolitics, or what he calls the politics of small things, can be politically consequential and lead to political change through the creation of a new social reality and virtual polis via expressive interactions and dialogue about alternative ideologies. His observation that âconsequential political life develops in small spaces where dialogue generates political powerâ may have emerged from studying the social movements that helped topple the Soviet Union and gave rise to the Christian Right in America, but applies to the case of millennial Egypt as well (Goldfarb 2006). Blogs and social media, I argue, were the small spaces where young people generated dialogue and imagined a different future that undermined the hegemony of the political status quo. These communicative spaces were places in which identities were socially negotiated, collectives created and articulated, free speech practiced, and symbolic power generated, forming an alternative public sphere and new fields of power. This approach follows Bimberâs calls to do away with the unhelpfully ambiguous catchall term âtechnological determinismâ by focusing on the human actions and cultural practices that produce effects as well as the unintended consequences of technological development, in which the âtechnology is at least partially autonomousâ and thus impacts are not solely within the purview of intentional human action (1994, 85, 98). Indeed many of the debates over whether new ICTs are inherently liberating or whether their use caused the 2011 uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the Middle East are too often mired in a superficial debate over technological determinism, which I address in greater detail throughout this chapter.
Focusing on the micropolitics of power, the day-to-day interactions, conversations, and lived practices of individuals make it possible to see how pockets of resistance emerge, subversively re-codifying power relations even if the politicalâeconomic structure and functioning of the state remains intact (Foucault 1980, 123; Goldfarb 2006). Thus investigating how Egyptian youth fashioned a new public sphere in the blogosphere, or forced the issues of sexual harassment and torture from the private sphere into the public sphere, or pushed the Muslim Brotherhoodâs leadership to revise its political platform to be more egalitarian, can reveal how resistance took place and how incremental shifts in power relations occurred. In the following chapters, I analyze how the youth who were at the forefront of adopting these new technologies used them to create new possibilities and challenge boundaries and tradition, whether in the political field, the journalistic field, or the Muslim Brotherhood.
Indeed, long before the 2011 uprising, Egyptian bloggers had succeeded in putting new issues on the public agenda and challenged the dominance of the MSM. They coordinated collective action and organized habitual and ongoing protests in the streets and in the blogosphere, and helped each other learn how to use online platforms to express their opinions and focus on their passions. I argue that Egyptâs young cyberactivists, and particularly citizen journalists, radically shifted the informational status quo by witnessing, putting on record, and imbuing political meaning to symbolic struggles to define quotidian struggles against social injustice, harassment, and censorship as part of a broader movement for political reform. Bourdieu observed that the âsimple report, the very fact of reporting, of putting on record as a reporter, always implies a social construction of reality that can mobilize (or demobilize) individuals or groupsâ (Bourdieu 1998, 21). And this is precisely what happened in Egypt during the first decade of the 2000s, or what I term the millennial period.
I therefore start from the idea that politics has always blended with the dominant media of the era, from the use of papyrus by the ancient Egyptians to extend their empire to the role of the printing press in the secularization of politics in Europe to the use of television commercials by political candidates in contemporary America (Deibert; Altheide and Snow 1979). The media, I believe, are therefore central to any analysis of political power or change, and thus invite a particular focus on representational power and the journalistic field. Communication technology impacts politics because it enables and constrains particular forms of communication and contestation. The way people use and integrate networked social media into micropolitical practices can lead to incremental changes that can have a cumulatively powerful impact on the status quo.
Young Egyptians used cyberactivism to create a youth-led, technologically inflected social movement that fought back against the barrier of fear created over the three decades of Mubarakâs rule. I trace how blogging and social media gave rise to the blogosphere as a public sphere in which this new social movement, comprised primarily of youth, was created, and how they paired this with embodied activism on the streets to create new repertoires of contention. I argue that the movement was thus intimately intertwined with the development of new technologies and forms of communication that changed the nature of political protest in an authoritarian context and challenged the hegemony of the state-dominated media.
The focus on the media is important because the media are a particularly powerful apparatus of control in authoritarian regimes (Gramsci 1992). As Arendt observed, âappearances are realities, and that which does not appear is politically insignificantâ (Goldfarb 2006, 14). Information and events do not inherently have political meaning or importance, rather they must be interpreted, framed, and contextualized before becoming imbued with significance and import, a process in which gatekeepers such as politicians, journalists, and media owners traditionally played a central role. Blogs and social media platforms enabled anyone with access to a computer or mobile phone and an Internet connection to become a journalist, editor, producer, and publisher and to participate in a new public sphere, in other words, the blogosphere. Nonetheless, as a real social space, there were real power relations and dynamics that mattered, and the link between cyberactivism and street activism was made early on.
One of my central contentions, therefore, is that blogging and social media reconfigure the potentiality for expression and participation, but that it is the particular concatenations of technologically inflected repertoires of contention that transform potentiality into actuality. I follow Tilly in conceiving of the concept of the repertoire as the set of means a group has for making various and different claims on different groups or individuals, referring to what they do as well as how they know how to do it (1986, 4). These repertoires exist in dynamic processes made up of recurrent causal mechanisms, which McAdam et al. define as âdelimited class of events that alter relations among specified sets of elements in identical or closely similar ways over a variety of situationsâ (2001, 24). By analyzing the configurations and sequencing of these mechanisms and the ensuing âalterations in relations among connected elements,â this framework provides an explanation for why certain outcomes resulted (McAdam et al. 2001, 85). This analysis reveals the mechanisms by which the potentiality of the Internet and social media is transformed into concrete instantiations of political struggle through activism, news-making practices, and new processes of interaction. The ensuing chapters explore the specific ways in which new ICTs and social media created configurations and sequencing of mechanisms that enabled a youth-led social movement to become politically consequential in an authoritarian context.
Refuting Technological Determinism and the Formality of Political Inquiry
I propose that focusing on the micropolitics of practices and discourse reveals how epistemological and ontological changes take place ...