Andrew Heinz's List: Digital Citizenship

The Egyptian Revolution 2011 has shaken the Arab world and stirred up Middle-East politics. Moreover, it caused a rush in political science and the neighboring disciplines, which had not predicted an event like this and now have troubles explaining it. While many things can be learned from the popular uprising, and from the limitations of previous scholarship, our focus will be on a moral resource, which has occasionally been noticed, but not sufficiently explored: the role of humor in keeping up the spirit of the Revolution. For 18 days, protestors persevered at Liberation Square in Central Cairo, the epicenter of resistance; at times a few dozens, at times hundreds of thousands. What they did was to fight the terror of the regime, which reached absurd peaks during those days, with humor-successfully. We offer a social-functionalist account of the uprising, which includes behavioral as well as cultural levels of analysis, and illuminates how humorous means helped to achieve deadly serious goals. By reconstructing how Egyptians laughed themselves into democracy, we outline a social psychology of resistance, which uses humor both as a sword and a shield.

This article examines the structural causes behind the revolution and the role of influential actors, opposition forces, and organizations, including the pro-change movements, the April 6 movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Popular Campaign for the Support of ElBaradei, and labor unions. It also assesses the crucial mistakes that the Mubarak regime made that contributed to its demise and discusses the successful use of traditional and modern mobilization strategies and the tactical use of nonviolent strategies. Finally, this article discusses the ambiguous role of the military in the revolution and raises questions about its role in the transition.

The article focuses on the discussion and debate of the Egyptian revolution in late January to early February 2011 on the microblog site Twitter. It states a number of activists in Egypt credit social media for its role in helping the Arab Spring movement gain critical mass and mentions that protesters, journalists, and the media made extensive use of online social networking, text messages, and microblogs (Tweet) on the protests. It comments on trending topics and influential individuals and organizations who were Tweeting on the revolution. It mentions that a significant portion of discussion on the revolution reflected broadcast news of events with Tweets used to repost news for others.

Based on a survey of participants in Egypt's Tahrir Square protests, we demonstrate that social media in general, and Facebook in particular, provided new sources of information the regime could not easily control and were crucial in shaping how citizens made individual decisions about participating in protests, the logistics of protest, and the likelihood of success. We demonstrate that people learned about the protests primarily through interpersonal communication using Facebook, phone contact, or face-to-face conversation. Controlling for other factors, social media use greatly increased the odds that a respondent attended protests on the first day. Half of those surveyed produced and disseminated visuals from the demonstrations, mainly through Facebook

The article explores the role of women in Egyptian revolution of 2011 and states that despite of their extensive efforts and critical role in the revolution, their rights issues were ignored and voice of activist women were suppressed. It also states that their political involvement was also not promoted after the revolution that formed the cycle of post-revolution marginalization, driving women to join revolutionary causes for their rights and political participation.

This essay attempts to deconstruct myths about the Egyptian revolution. It reveals that it is far from being a peaceful and Cairo-centered revolt made by globalized, middle-class youth. It argues that the US "empire" and its media apparatus have created such myths about Egypt's uprising in order to direct it to become another failed color revolution like its Eastern European counterparts that delivered neoliberal, United States—friendly regimes.

The article focuses on the limits of legal redress for female journalists that were sexually assaulted during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. Topics include the prevalence of violence against women in Egypt, the Egyptian government's failure to respond to sexual violence in the country, and the domestic actions women may take after foreign sexual assaults.