Thomas Boldon's List: DigitalCitizenship

• How the Internet brought down a dictator
• On Jan. 27, just before the Egyptian government turned off the Internet for all Egyptians, Facebook saw six times more traffic than Google inside the country. Then came the outage. Then came the protests. Two weeks later, and with relatively little bloodshed, the 30-year government of Hosni Mubarak ended. It's indisputable that the Internet and social media played a pivotal role. In fact, the revolution may not have happened without them.
• Time for change
  A recent WikiLeak suggests that the seeds of the February 2011 revolution were already sown by late 2008, by activists called the April 6 Youth Movement who wanted to unseat Mubarak prior to the scheduled September 2011 elections. Yet few doubt that much of the momentum built in June 2010, when a Google employee named Wael Ghonim anonymously started a Facebook page to commemorate the death of Khaled Said, beaten to death by police for flaunting drug possession online.
• he wildfire flame of social networking burned quickly. In just a few weeks, Ghonim's page — We are all Khaled Said — had accumulated 130,000 fans, according to the New York Times. Ghonim this week said that the page has 375,000 followers. (The English-language site visible to U.S. Facebookers has just over 71,000 followers.) In a country with around 5 million Facebook users, that is a large percentile, and doesn't count Facebook users who may visit the page without "liking" it.

• Where there had been scattered planning, mostly in secret — the WikiLeaks document was not even clear whether or not the "sensitive" revolutionary plan was on the Internet — there was now public online gathering. The page served as an independent monitor of the November and December 2010 parliamentary elections, considered by many to be fraudulent. Anger built, as did the popularity of Facebook and Twitter as a means to vent that anger.

  At the same time, turmoil in Tunisia boiled over, thanks largely to social media. An exiled video blogger was thanked for his role in sending a repressive dictator packing, while another blogger was named junior minister for communications in the interim government. The relatively poor country of 10 million had 4 million Internet users; restrictions were not enough to stop the social-media-fueled upheaval.

  Egyptian activists, perhaps prodded by the success of the Tunisian revolt, used Facebook to organize a demonstration that started on Jan. 25. The Khaled Said page and the page run by the April 6 Youth Movement, itself with tens of thousands of followers, both advertised the protests, news of which also blew through Twitter and over mobile phones via SMS.

  According to Philip N. Howard, director of the Project on Information Technology and Political Islam at the University of Washington, the turn-off-the-Internet strategy was not employed to block opposing factions from organizing. The government did it specifically because it feared the amplification of true grass roots outrage.

  "The real threat to the regime is people will take pictures of the police beating their brothers and sisters, and the regime can't respond well to Facebook images of the police shooting rubber bullets into a crowd," Howard told msnbc.com on Jan. 28. "There is no regime response for those images that go out over trusted networks."
• Shut down
  "It's like the entire Internet forgot where Egypt was," explained Jim Cowie, CTO of Renesys, an Internet monitoring firm. "The packets we were sending asking for Egyptian Web pages just didn't have a destination." Egypt holds the dubious honor of being the first country to shut off its Internet, cutting off about 20 million people, a quarter of the nation's population.
• You can't stop the Internet
  On Monday, Feb. 1, a service called SpeakToTweet, launched by Google and Twitter, brought voices of Net-deprived Egyptians to the global forum of Twitter by way of a phone number. Just like regular voicemail, people could call and leave a message
• Small World News' founder, Brian Conley, had experimented with this voicemail style of free press before, in Gaza and in Iraq. As someone who has dedicated his adulthood to helping "those living in under-represented communities" get the tools they need to "produce media and tell stories," he had been watching the Egypt protests with interest. As the outage hit, and Google and Twitter made their move, he decided to jump in after them. All he needed were translators who would devote time, for free, to translating upwards of 1,000 garbled voice messages.
• "Crowdsourcing  was a big buzzword a few years back, but it only works when you have an interested and willing population looking to take action," Conley told me. "That's what we did with Alive In Egypt, we said 'Here's something you can do.'"

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• The motivating factors of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 were to eliminate the corrupt authoritarian regime of Mubarak, and to demand fair elections and civil liberties
• Among the several inciting incidents were the strong and sudden reversal of the gradual trend towards democratization and liberalization taking place in the late 2000s, culminating in the November 2010 Parliamentary elections in which Mubarak's ruling party, the National Democratic Party (NDP) fraudulently won an overwhelming 81% super majority in parliament. According to some democracy advocates like Saad Eddin Ibrahim, there was no significant attempt to conceal the vote manipulation and election rigging which tookplace to insure such a result, a significant change from the relatively more fair democratic elections of 2005. This move by the ruling government was perceived as a slap in the face by most Egyptian citizens.

• In the embryonic, ever evolving era of social media — when milestones come by the day, if not by the second — June 8, 2010, has secured a rightful place in history. 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.

• CAIRO -- The revolution in Egypt is unfinished business. While new online tools are used to strengthen civil society, activists are still struggling with the digital divide when it comes to mobilizing masses against the army and the remains of the old administration.
• On a Saturday evening in Cairo, a digital campaign against military trials for civilians is on. Activists are posting comments on the Facebook site of the Egyptian Armed Forces, whose Supreme Council -- the SCAF -- holds power in Egypt. SCAF took over after President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in the revolution in February.

• From Tahrir Square to Twitter

    

  She, like the other Egyptian activists, is not happy with the proceedings after the spring uprising. The old regime is still in power, and the army has its foot on the neck of the country. Not so much has changed since Mubarak left, and many view the revolution as an unfinished chapter.

    

  "But we will make the change happen. It is only a matter of time," she said.

    

  As the military has closed Tahrir Square from demonstrations, smaller protests are happening elsewhere in Cairo. Facebook pages, such as We are all Khaleed Said, with more than 1.6 million followers, are used for spreading the message about protests and campaigns.

    

  "The Khaleed Said page is a machine now. Almost everything that is posted there goes viral instantly," said Adel Iskandar, a media scholar from Georgetown University who specializes in the Middle East.

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• nstructions for the protest were clearly disseminated on Facebook: Stand 5 feet apart, so as not to break Egyptian laws against public demonstration; be absolutely silent; no signs; wear black, as determined in an online vote; stand on the banks of the river or sea for one hour only, then walk away.

  No one yet knew who had organized this protest against police brutality. There were five Facebook page administrators, tech-savvy activists who didn't really know each other. They had communicated almost exclusively over Google's e-mail system, which doesn't allow outsiders to trace communications back to a specific computer's IP address.

• In doing so, they would update our image of what it means to be a revolutionary: Perhaps it's no longer enough to wield slogans, baseball bats and gas masks; modern revolutions must be fueled, in part, by a bit of tech geekery, too.

  Map: Tech and revolution in the region

  The regime-changing wave of protests started after Tunisians successfully ousted their president in a popular uprising.

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  "Who does a Facebook event for a revolution, you know?"
  --Mahmoud Salem, Egyptian blogger 

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  Egypt's then-nameless revolutionaries had created a Facebook "event" for January 25, like those for birthday parties or dinner gatherings.

  They gave it an ominous name:

  "The Day of the Revolution Against Torture, Poverty, Corruption and Unemployment."

  More than 80,000 people clicked "yes" on the invite, indicating they would attend, according to Ahmed Saleh, one of the five administrators of the Facebook page.

  Mahmoud Salem, 29, one of Egypt's most prominent bloggers, saw the Facebook event come across his Twitter feed. At first, he didn't believe it was real.

• Cairo, Egypt — I grew up in Egypt. I spent half my life here. But Saturday, when my plane from JFK airport touched down in Cairo, I arrived in a different country than the one I had known all my life. This is not Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt anymore and, regardless of what happens, it will never be again.

   

  In Tahrir Square, thousands of Egyptians–men and women, young and old, rich and poor–gathered today to celebrate their victory over the regime’s hated police and state security forces and to call on Mubarak to step down and leave once and for all. They talked about the massive protest on Friday, the culmination of three days of demonstrations that began on January 25th to mark National Police Day. It was an act of popular revolt the likes of which many Egyptians never thought they would see during Mubarak’s reign. "The regime has been convincing us very well that we cannot do it, but Tunisians gave us an idea and it took us only three days and we did it," said Ahmad El Esseily, a 35 year-old author and TV/radio talk show host who took part in the demonstrations. "We are a lot of people and we are strong."