Ajakubiak's List: DGL- Digital Citizenship

• Feb. 10, 2008
• Egypt’s national soccer team reaches the finals of the Africa Cup, and a Facebook group started by fans grows to 45,000 members. “This was really the big bang” moment, says Wael Nawara, co-founder of the El Ghad party, as far as recognizing the potential power of social media tools for bringing people together to organize. At this point, Facebook is the third-most-visited Web site in Egypt, after Google and Yahoo.

• Khaled Said Is Killed

  Khaled Mohamed Said, 28, is sitting in an Internet cafe in Alexandria when two local detectives enter and begin beating him, according to witnesses. After the owner tells them to take it outside, they kick Mr. Said and smash his head against an iron gate, witnesses report. He dies soon after. The police posthumously accuse him of dealing drugs. In Alexandria, most people believe that Mr. Said had been deliberately singled out after he posted an online video documenting police corruption
• June 6, 2010
• In the days after Mr. Said’s death, Wael Ghonim starts a Facebook page called “We Are All Khaled Said” and inaugurates it with the following post:

• Within two minutes the page had 300 members. Mr. Ghonim, writing under an alias, then posted this call to action:

    
• “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook Page »
• July 8

• First Contact

  Writing under the alias of Khaled Said, Mr. Ghonim, who is living in Dubai, reaches out to the April 6 Youth Movement co-founder Ahmed Maher. (Mr. Maher often uses the online handle “Ghosty.”) After an introduction, he explains that he is using the Facebook page to “attract many non-political people” and carefully cultivate the aura of a “community.” The majority of content on the page, he says, is about police brutality, human dignity, freedom — universal issues, not political issues. Then he offers Mr. Maher the hint of a pledge. An excerpt of the e-mail exchange is below. It has been translated from Arabic.
• Mr. Maher responds immediately, praising the pseudonymous organizer behind the “We Are All Khaled Said” page for his ingenious method of motivating — some might call it recruiting — young people to get involved with social action. Mr. Maher suggests they join forces. An excerpt of the e-mail exchange is below. It has been translated from Arabic.
• In a matter of hours, the two activists — unknown to each other in the real world — establish a strong tie, agreeing, at least in principle, to work together. They exchange a few more messages that morning before making a plan to connect via Gchat the following night.
• Dec. 30
• “We Are All Khaled Said” has almost 500,000 supporters. Under the government of President Hosni Mubarak, Jan. 25 is a holiday known as Police Day, but to Egyptian activists, it is seen as a cruel joke; a day to honor the corrupt officers who beat and abuse people on a whim.
• The April 6 Youth Movement had tried to hold demonstrations on Jan. 25 the previous two years, but they fizzled. The idea is revisited within the movement, while Mr. Ghonim also brings it to the “We Are All Khaled Said” community.
• Reaching out to Mr. Maher in a chat session, Mr. Ghonim says he can “energize people to participate” in a demonstration, but he needs Mr. Maher’s expertise with information dissemination, publicity and strategies for evading state security agents. It is soon settled: “We Are All Khaled Said” will endorse and advertise a Jan. 25 event, while April 6 Youth Movement and other opposition groups will coordinate the logistics. An excerpt of the chat exchange is below. It has been translated from Arabic.
• Jan. 14

• As news of Tunisia’s revolution spreads across the Arab world, Twitter erupts with discussions about following Tunisia’s lead and ousting President Mubarak. Mr. Ghonim posts his first overt public statements about a possible overthrow of the government on the “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page.

    

  January 25 is Police Day and it’s a national holiday… If 100,000 take to the streets, no one can stop us… I wonder if we can??

• A Rush of Tweets

  Tweets from both activists and Egyptians who think of themselves as nonpolitical start to flood the Twittersphere. The posts are at turns a call to arms, a plea and a dare, all focusing on the idea that the time for revolution is at hand.
• Jan. 16

• Asmaa Mahfouz's Challenge

  Asmaa Mahfouz, a 26-year-old member of the April 6 Youth Movement, posts an online video. Staring into a Web camera with a piercing expression, she challenges her fellow countrymen — emphasis on men — to join the demonstrations on Jan. 25. The video goes viral.
• Jan. 18
• Jan. 19
• “I looked around and couldn’t find an existing hashtag,” she later recalled. “So I just made up something short and sweet. I thought it was temporary, until I found out everyone was using it.” #Jan25 becomes the eighth most popular hashtag of 2011.
• Jan. 26
• They launch an event page on Facebook, and Mr. Ghonim, with some input from Mr. Maher about locations, puts together a document titled “Everything You Need to Know About the Day of Rage.” He writes it in Google Docs so that once it is up it can be edited by the masses, much like a Wikipedia entry. “Who We Are,” the document begins. “We are Egypt’s young people on the Internet.” It then runs through the basics: why they are protesting, their demands, demonstration places and times, and, perhaps most critical, demonstration instructions emphasizing calm, unity and level-headedness. The guide is appended to the Facebook event page for Jan. 28, which, of course, is administered by “We Are All Khaled Said.”
• Feb. 11
• In his new memoir, "Revolution 2.0," Mr. Ghonim writes that “revolutions are processes, not events.”

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• On Monday, Awad Suleiman and Mahmoud Salah were each sentenced to 10 years in jail for the death of the 28-year-old blogger. The two men were originally sentenced to seven years on charges of excessive brutality, but a retrial was ordered by the court after Suleiman and Salah appealed the decision. The second time around, the men were found guilty of manslaughter and torture.
• The gruesome image showed clear signs of beating and torture and went viral after it was released by Said’s family online. It was reproduced as a rallying-cry and sparked a solidarity campaign called “We Are All Khaled Said.” It would become one of the country’s largest political opposition forums.

• One of those bystanders, Amal Kamel, stood at the top of a short flight of marble stairs in the lobby, watching the officers punch and kick the man, Khaled Said, smashing his head against the bottom step until his body was still and he stopped begging for his life. The officers dragged Mr. Said to a car, Ms. Kamel said, and returned 10 minutes later to leave his body at the bottom of the stairs.
• A police officer told Mr. Said’s relatives that he choked on a clump of marijuana.
• A cellphone picture of Mr. Said’s bloodied, battered face challenged the government’s assertions
• The furor has not died down. New disclosures about the case surface regularly in independent newspapers, and a Facebook page dedicated to Mr. Said, with more than 190,000 fans, keeps growing. A band released a rap video about the beating, calling Mr. Said “a witness and a martyr.” Young men and women dressed in black have held numerous protests in towns around the country.

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• That was the day Wael Ghonim, a 29-year-old Google marketing executive, was browsing Facebook in his home in Dubai and found a startling image: a photo­graph of a bloodied and disfigured face, its jaw broken, a young life taken away. That life, he soon learned, had belonged to Khaled Mohamed Said, a 28-year-old from Alexandria who had been beaten to death by the Egyptian police.
• hough only a fraction of Egyptians have Internet access, Ghonim writes, the number of Web users in the country increased to 13.6 million in 2008 from 1.5 million in 2004. Through blogs, Twitter and Facebook, the Web has become a haven for a young, educated class yearning to express its worries and anxieties.

• This article focuses on how these new types of media acted as effective tools for promoting civic engagement, through supporting the capabilities of the democratic activists by allowing forums for free speech and political networking opportunities; providing a virtual space for assembly; and supporting the capability of the protestors to plan, organize, and execute peaceful protests.
• The role of new media before, during, and after the Egyptian revolution was especially important in three intertwined ways, namely: enabling cyberactivism, which was a major trigger for street activism; encouraging civic engagement, through aiding the mobilization and organization of protests and other forms of political expression; and promoting a new form of citizen journalism, which provides a platform for ordinary citizens to express themselves and document their own versions of reality. Therefore, it is crucial to provide definitions for these terms, in order to better understand their relevance and applicability in the context of the Egyptian revolution.
• Howard (2011, p.145) defines cyberactivism as “the act of using the internet to advance a political cause that is difficult to advance offline,” adding that “the goal of such activism is often to create intellectually and emotionally compelling digital artifacts that tell stories of injustice, interpret history, and advocate for particular political outcomes.” Cyberactivism differs from mobilization because of the latter’s focus on planning, execution, and facilitation of actions. However, they are both closely interrelated, since cyberactivism can help to foster and promote civic engagement, which, in turn, gives birth to various forms of mobilization.

• The term civic engagement refers to the process through which civil society is invited to participate in ongoing political, economic and social efforts that are meant to bring about change. According to the Coalition for Civic Engagement and Leadership at the University of Maryland:

   

   

   

  Civic engagement is acting upon a heightened sense of responsibility to one’s communities. This includes a wide range of activities, including developing civic sensitivity, participation in building civil society, and benefiting the common good. Civic engagement encompasses the notions of global citizenship and interdependence. Through civic engagement, individuals - as citizens of their communities, their nations, and the world - are empowered as agents of positive social change for a more democratic world.

• civil society is the realm of organized social life that is open, voluntary, self-generating, at least partially self-supporting, autonomous from the state, and bound by a legal order or set of shared rules. It is distinct from ‘society’ in general in that it involves citizens acting collectively in a public sphere to express their interests, passions, preferences, and ideas…to hold state officials accountable (p. 221).

   

   
• The term “public will” refers to “a social force that can mobilize organically, or with external support and influence, to become a political lever for social change…[it] has the potential, if adequately resourced, organized, and mobilized, to serve as the impetus for social change” (Salmon, Fernandez & Post, 2010, p.159).
• An equally significant concept worth defining is citizen journalism, which provides ordinary citizens the opportunity to document their own version of reality and tell their own side of the story. It is distinguished from professional journalism in that ordinary citizens use digital media tools to report on events on the ground, uploading text and videos directly to the Internet or feeding the information and videos to media outlets. Therefore we can contend that citizen journalism “is a promising new breed of news-making that has been championed by various scholars…[for] granting ordinary citizens a novel, hands-on role” (Reich, 2008, p. 739). Citizen journalism “gives people a voice and therefore power. The people’s participation itself and what they produce are regarded with the hope to contribute to an informed citizenry and democracy” (Nip, 2006, p. 212). Citizen journalism assumes that “average citizens are capable of intelligent judgment, mature understanding, and rational choice if offered the opportunity; in other words, that democracy as ‘self-government’ is not a dream but a practical premise” (Rosen, 1994, p. 18).
• Facebook’s largest impact was in the mobilization of protesters (Vila, 2011). In fact, it could be said that the Egyptian revolution witnessed the first incident of the “politicization of Facebook” on a grand scale to orchestrate major reform and drastic change.
• This highlights the value of social media in terms of creating networks that enable peer-to-peer communication between users.
• . Facebook, for example, is built on linkages between “friends”, whereas Google Moderator and Twitter allow anyone to comment on a subject. Google Moderator allows for commentary and voting on subjects by all users. Twitter allows users to create a subject for discussion and post a comment, or “tweet,” about that subject (which could include a link to other content ), which can then be picked up by other users and “retweeted” multiple times, until it becomes widespread. Thus, tools like Twitter lead to an environment where the best ideas and content, regardless of who posted it, can spread and gain great influence in a type of “meritocracy” of ideas and information (Maher, 2011). By combining these multiple functions of different types of online media together in one effective communication network during the January 2011 revolution, it is easy to understand how Egyptian political activists won their battle against the regime, both online and, most importantly, offline.
• And once people were in the streets, Facebook and similar platforms were “less immediately relevant,” although online tools were still important for coordination, such as maps made with Google tools and SMSs to alert protesters to sniper locations (Vila, 2011). Twitter was used simultaneously for citizen journalism and mobilization during the revolution. For example, Nadia Idle and Alex Nunns (2011, p. 31) report that “protesters marched through the back streets in districts like Shubra and Boulaq, gathering people as they went, all the while tweeting news of their location and progress.” On Twitter, images were posted showing satellite maps marked with arrows indicating where protesters could go to avoid pro-government thugs (Meier, 2011).
• Furthermore, protesters on the street used Twitter to “announce new initiatives, like marching to the parliament building, and to boost their collective morale with reports of other developments around the country” (Idle and Nunns, 2011, p. 20). “Planning discussions also took place on Twitter, using the hashtag #Jan25 to enable anyone to join the conversation, and activists talked to each other directly using the @ reply function” (Idle and Nunns, 2011, p. 20).
• During the Internet blackout, Google and Twitter scrambled to offer the “Speak-2-Tweet”, a service whereby users could call an international telephone number to post and hear Twitter messages without the Internet (BBC, 2011). The Small World Newsproject “Alive” partnered with Speak-2-Tweet to translate voice messages from protesters at Tahrir Square, and one of their reports was that of a 15-year-old boy telling his story about being “abducted from the street, beaten, and detained for 22 days” (Silver, 2011). Some recordings appeared on the Speak-2-Tweet Twitter account from Egyptians who learned about the service during the blackout, possibly via phone calls with friends and family outside of Egypt (York, 2011c). This last point highlights an interesting phenomenon, whereby Egyptian activists were supported by the flow of information coming to them from abroad, while simultaneously influencing international public opinion abroad, through their own coverage of the Egyptian uprising and the information they provided on it. This clearly signals the “indispensable role for the mobilization of communication networks across borders in an attempt to recruit political support and…resources required for public will to emerge and gain traction”

• Protesters uploaded raw videos of police brutality to YouTube and other video sharing sites (Abrougui, 2011). And, during the Internet blackout, while professional journalists struggled to get their stories out, “street protesters were using land lines to call supporters, who translated and published their accounts on Twitter for an international audience hungry for news of the unfolding events” (Ishani, 2011).

   

   

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• Wael Ghonim created a Google document, open to the public, that outlined the strategy for protesters in Egypt. It had more than 90,000 views before Jan. 25, 2011. To read the document in English, click on the text tab. This English translation reflects the document as of Feb. 2012.

• Although the moderator of that fateful Facebook page was anonymous at the time, the world soon learned that it was the work of Wael Ghonim, a 30-year-old Egyptian-born marketing executive for Google, who was based out of Dubai.
• Internationally he became the symbol of the "Facebook Revolution" and was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. A Mideast business magazine named him the second most powerful Arab in the world.
• In Wael Ghonim's new book, Revolution 2.0, he maintains that the January 25 movement in Egypt was a leaderless revolution.
• Without Facebook, people would have had to find another a way to broadcast the initiation call. That is basically what Facebook and social media did. People initiated the call and promoted it online before it went offline. It even went offline before the 25th of January. The snowball effect started online right after Tunisia happened, then it went offline before the 25th of January.
• I think that social networking definitely played an important role at the very beginning to create that snowball effect. Then social media as well as blogs played a major role in telling people the truth. The nature of the Internet makes it possible for media to be decentralized. People are empowered to post their version of the story and everyone can see. In the past, that was not possible. This was a big help to the revolution. Phones were definitely important as well. As I jokingly say, "Why is everyone asking me what the role of the Internet was in the revolution, and not asking me what the role of phones was in the revolution?" Any collaboration or communication tool does help because it connects people. On the other hand, we need to remember that at the end of the day, technology just provides the tools that people can use.
• I think one of the great things about social media is that you get instant feedback on whatever you say or post. People do respond quickly, and in a few minutes you can actually see the response to whatever you've said. People can agree and disagree with you quickly enough for you to realize you are doing the right thing or the wrong thing. Seeing the increased number of fans, likes, and comments, really gives you a sense that you have the majority on your side. Coming from a marketing background, it was very important to me that I write in a way that connected with mainstream Egyptians. I was not looking to communicate with those who were already convinced of the cause and actively working for it. My own mandate was to communicate with those who might not be interested, but who could eventually start getting interested in the cause.
• It continuously surveyed them every time there was an activity.
• t's important to collaborate, to use tools to collect feedback, survey the users, and to make sure they are with you. I've always created surveys asking people what they think of the page. Do they agree with most of what's being said on the page or not? I always want to know, to make sure we're not losing their confidence and to make sure that we're still mainstream. Because once you lose your mainstream edge and you are just communicating with the 10% of the page who will fully believe in what you say, the page's ability to contribute to change is going to be much weaker.
• There was no leader in this revolution. There was no one making decisions on behalf of the masses in the streets. Everyone who decided to negotiate on behalf of people got discredited and didn't manage to continue the negotiation process.
• When they shut down the phones in Egypt it was a big boost for the revolution.

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• It began when Walid Rachid, 27, an online activist, wrote to Mr Ghonim – who   was acting anonymously – asking for "marketing help" with   his group's plans for a protest on January 25. 

   

   The pair communicated via Google's Instant Messaging system, apparently the   only form of communication Mr Ghonim believed to be secure, and pulled   together an alliance of different youth groups via the web. 

   

   They threw off the scent of Egyptian authorities, according to Zyad el-Elaimy,   a 30-year-old Communist activist and lawyer, by advertising online that they   would be meeting at a mosque, then actually meeting in a poor area elsewhere.
• Twitter and Google teamed up to allow activists to continue Tweeting by making   phone calls, but considerable damage was done to the online side of the   protest movement.

• This year, tweets became one of the most important sources of news in Egypt, as well a tool for coordinating activism and protest.

• Twitter is a very important tool for protesters, as evidenced by the fact it and Facebook were repeatedly blocked in Egypt as the protests flared up. We use it to campaign and spread the word about protests/stands---hashtags are invaluable in that respect, and to share news quickly and efficiently, with our own 140-char commentary on them, and subsequently have conversations with random people/complete strangers. But most importantly, it allows us to share on the ground info like police brutality, things to watch out for, activists getting arrested, etc.
• Facebook, she went on to say, was a valuable organizational tool for Egyptian demonstrators. But Twitter gave the protesters a glimpse at how fast and far their message was spreading. For example, hashtags like #Jan25, #Egypt and #Tahrir became global trends on Twitter during the protests. "Twitter trends also help us gauge how visible we are to the international community (my trends feed is set to Worldwide, and I know a lot of people have it set to various places in the US)," @alya1989262 wrote. "Making our voices heard, making sure people outside Egypt are aware of what's going on is very important to us, especially with the recent cell lines and internet blackout [...]"
• Crediting Tunisia's uprising as an inspiration for Egypt's anti-government activists, she wrote: "[T]he Tunisian revolution was barely covered by traditional media until Ben Ali fled, but the #tunisia and #sidibouzid hashtags allowed us to follow the events for the whole month beforehand. I think that further convinced us of the power each of us has to effect change."

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