Alexborder's List: Egyptian Revolution

• Wael Ghonim
• Ghonim went online and created a Facebook page.
• Revolution 2.0
• immediately evident online. Two minutes after he started his Facebook page, 300 people had joined it. Three months later, that number had grown to more than 250,000.
• hundreds of other pages, Facebook accounts and Twitter profiles” dedicated to covering and organizing the Arab Spring
• he number of Web users in the country increased to 13.6 million in 2008 from 1.5 million in 2004
• instrumental in shaping my experiences as well as my character.” Like many who grew up with instant messaging, online video games and the here-comes-everybody ethos of sites like Wikipedia, he refers to himself as a “real-life introvert yet an Internet extrovert.” He met his wife, Ilka, an American Muslim, online
• through printed fliers and mass text messaging, it turned out.
• We needed to have everyone join forces: workers, human rights activists, government employees and others who had grown tired of the regime’s policies
• with what one is willing to stand for online and offline, and what one citizen is willing to risk in the service of his country.

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• Much of the organization and mobilization occurred through the Internet, particularly on social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
• social media also played a vital role as a democratic model
• The main catalyst for the January 25 revolution was the Internet,
• Internet-based revolution
• the Internet was the tool that showed every dissident voice in Egypt that he or she is not alone, and is indeed joined by at least hundreds of thousands who seek change.
• one-third of Egypt’s population of eighty million remains illiterate, and just 25 percent of Egyptians use the Internet
• Facebook and Twitter were instrumental in organizing
• motivating, and directing these crowds as to where to go and what to do
• event on Facebook eleven days in advance.
• The Internet, by definition, is a democratic medium, at least in the sense that anyone with Internet access is a potential publisher of information
• Internet activism started in Egypt with the appearance of Web 2.0 technology in the country around 2003.
• Internet applications such as the video-sharing platform YouTube, which appeared in 2005, took blogging to a higher level

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• Having grown up on such empty descriptions, it's not surprising that we're hearing so much today about Egypt's "Facebook revolution" or its "Twitter revolution."
• the percentage of population under age 15 and the degree of urbanization, some intriguing facts jump out.
• nternet access in Egypt is barely 20%, much less than Tunisia or Iran, according to InternetWorldStats.com. Mobile phone usage is much higher, at about 40%. And that number has skyrocketed in recent years, from barely 6% in 2003, according to http://www.mobileactive.org/, a nonprofit that tracks mobile usage worldwide.
• About a third of the population is under 15
• The internet has made a big difference in Egypt
• We would post a video on Facebook and it would be shared by 50,000 people on their walls in hours.
• A nucleus of human rights activists, lawyers, bloggers and labor organizers have been hard at work for several years in Egypt, risking prison,
• Along the way, they devised some ingenious hacks around the police state, like using mobile phones and Twitter to share information about imprisoned activists and using international phone lines for sending text messages.
• If you want to liberate a society, just give them the internet

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