Emilie Johnson's List: Digital Citizenship Assignment

• Shortly after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down from power on Friday, activist Wael Ghonim spoke with CNN's Wolf Blitzer and credited Facebook with the success of the Egyptian people's uprising.
• Ghonim, a marketing manager for Google, played a key role in organizing the January 25 protest by reaching out to Egyptian youths on Facebook. Shortly after that first protest, Ghonim was arrested in Cairo and imprisoned for 12 days.
• Since his release, Ghonim has become a symbol for the Egyptian movement, although he has rejected this notion. "I'm not a hero. I was writing on a keyboard on the Internet and I wasn't exposing my life to danger," he said in an interview immediately after his release. "The heroes are the one who are in the street."

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• 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.

• At once angered and animated, the Egyptian-­born Ghonim went online and created a Facebook page. “Today they killed Khaled,” he wrote. “If I don’t act for his sake, tomorrow they will kill me.” It took a few moments for Ghonim to settle on a name for the page, one that would fit the character of an increasingly personalized and politically galvanizing Internet. He finally decided on “Kullena Khaled Said” — “We Are All Khaled Said.”

   “Khaled Said was a young man just like me, and what happened to him could have happened to me,” Ghonim writes in “Revolution 2.0,” his fast-paced and engrossing new memoir of political awakening. “All young Egyptians had long been oppressed, enjoying no rights in our own homeland.”
• An accidental activist, Ghonim tapped into a shared frustration that became 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. What bubbled up online inevitably spilled onto the streets, starting with a series of “Silent Stands” that culminated in a massive and historic rally at Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo. “We Are All Khaled Said” helped ignite an uprising that led to the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak and the dissolution of the ruling National Democratic Party. In turn, Ghonim — who was arrested during the height of the protests — reluctantly became one of the leading voices of the Arab Spring.
• During the interview he gave on Egyptian television after his release from detention, when he broke down crying as a photo montage of young Egyptians killed in the protests played across the screen, he was quick to point out that “the real heroes” of the revolution were those who had been martyred. He resists being labeled an icon. He insists he represents just one story and says his online activism should be seen only in the context of “hundreds of other pages, Facebook accounts and Twitter profiles” dedicated to covering and organizing the Arab Spring.
• But his individual story resonates on two levels: it epitomizes the coming-of-age of a young Middle Eastern generation that has grown up in the digital era, as well as the transformation of an apolitical man from comfortable executive to prominent activist.
• The Middle East is home to roughly 100 million people ages 15 to 29. Many are educated but unemployed. Though 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.
• In Egypt’s case, it was simply a place for venting the outrage resulting from years of repression, economic instability and individual frustration. Ghonim writes that in 2011, out of Egypt’s more than 80 million people, some 48 million were poor and 2.5 million lived in extreme poverty. “More than three million young Egyptians are unemployed,” he says.
• Technology, of course, is not a panacea.
• he places himself in “a small, privileged slice” of Egypt’s population, he once shared his countrymen’s indifference to politics. “Most of us shied away,” he writes, “believing that we could not do anything to change the status quo.” Connecting online with other young, educated Egyptians changed his mind.
• Ghonim drew on his considerable skill and knowledge as an online marketer while running the “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page. Early on, he decided that creating the page, as opposed to a Facebook group, would be a better way to spread information. More important, he knew that maintaining an informal, authentic tone was crucial to amassing allies. People had to see themselves in the page. “Using the pronoun I was critical to establishing the fact that the page was not managed by an organization, political party or movement of any kind,” he writes. “On the contrary, the writer was an ordinary Egyptian devastated by the brutality inflicted on Khaled Said and motivated to seek justice.”
• As the youth-led Tunisian upheaval further inspired young activists in Egypt, Ghonim was arrested by the secret police. For nearly two weeks, he was held blindfolded and handcuffed, deprived of sleep and subjected to repeated interrogations, as his friends, family and colleagues at Google tried to discover his whereabouts. That he was released as quickly as he was demonstrated the power of Revolution 2.0.

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• DOROTHEA SCHOENE: Since when have you been actively involved in the revolution?

    

  LARA BALADI: The protests started on Tuesday, January 25, 2011. The following Friday, January 28 (a non-working day), most of the population went to the streets on what was called the "Day of Anger." "Day of Anger" refers to the anger against the brutality used by the police forces against the protestors on the three preceding days. I went down on that Friday. However, ever since I started working as an artist, and increasingly so in the last few years, my work has been reflecting my concerns with Egypt's extremely alarming sociopolitical context.

    

  DS: In what ways did you participate?

    

  LB: On January 28, I joined the people on Tahrir as a regular citizen. But soon I began to be involved proactively. During the eighteen days just before Mubarak stepped down, a few friends and I were looking into ways to import equipment to start a pirate radio station. Mubarak was toppled. At that point, there were many people who had similar ideas, so we joined forces and I took part in Radio Tahrir, an online radio. By then, the political landscape was evolving quickly, and so did the objectives/mission of the radio project. There was a euphoric atmosphere and a generally strong optimistic belief that radical political change could really take place.

• On July 8, 2011, I started Tahrir Cinema with the non-profit Egyptian media initiative Mosireen. It was during the second sit-in in Tahrir that the idea came about. People were screaming and shouting on stages into microphones; there was so much diffused information floating around but no focus. The sit-in was a great opportunity to do something constructive. I am a visual artist after all, and for me there was an urgent need for visuals in Tahrir, as well as an urgent need for raising collective consciousness on the reality of the political situation of the moment.

    

  On Twitter the next day, I found a message from an activist saying, "We need a projector to show films in the square." This confirmed my feeling, and I decided to organize projections and take on what was to become Tahrir Cinema. One thing led to another. Omar Robert Hamilton, a member of Mosireen, saw one of my tweets and asked to meet me. We talked about the project, and before I knew it we were a group putting together the equipment, the screenings, and the program, and we started.