Jami Shetler's List: 3.6 Digital Citizenship

• CAIRO - It was sparked on social-networking sites, and inspired by a revolution in Tunisia. In 18 days, it grew into something astounding - a leaderless people's movement that at every turn outsmarted a government with an almost unblemished 30-year record of suppressing dissent.

• Each element of the digital technology used in communication has a particular function. The internet is useful for information dissemination and news gathering, social media for connecting and co-ordinating groups and individuals, mobile phones for taking photographs of what is happening and making it available to a wide global audience and satellite television for instant global reporting of events.
• Rapid internet interaction through Twitter and Facebook gave information to the protesters about how to counteract the security forces as they tried to disperse the protesters, maps showing locations for protest meetings and practical advice about such things as what to do when teargas is used against groups of protesters. All of these things increased the pressure that the protest movements were able to exert on their governments.

• Links to the audio messages are being tweeted out via the @speak2tweet Twitter account. As of Tuesday afternoon, over 800 voice messages had been posted to the constantly growing feed. Some of the messages come from citizens around the world, offering words of support to protesters, though it appears the majority of the voice message tweets were recorded by people in Egypt.
  
  The messages are filled with passionate, desperate, and defiant voices of Egyptians reporting on the circumstances at the scene. Some of the callers were out protesting in the streets, where shouting could be heard in the background of their voice messages.

• The recent overthrow of Egypt's elected government is in many ways a revolt by Egyptians against themselves. That should give even Morsi's most passionate opponents cause for alarm.

• "The movement [in Egypt] was very dependent on Facebook," said Alaa Abd El Fattah, an Egyptian blogger and activist in South Africa who has a strong following in Egypt. "It started with anger then turned into a legitimate uprising."
• The recent unrest in Egypt and Tunisia is forcing Facebook officials to grapple with the prospect that other governments will grow more cautious of permitting the company to operate in their countries without restrictions or close monitoring, according to David Kirkpatrick, author of "The Facebook Effect," an authorized biography of the company's history. Facebook is also looking at whether it should allow activists to have a measure of anonymity on the site, he said.
• Facebook in the last week, and they are debating this internally," Kirkpatrick said. "Many countries where Facebook is popular have autocracies or dictatorships, and most of the countries have passively tolerated their popularity. But what's happened in Egypt or Tunisia is likely to change other countries' attitudes, and they'll be more wary of Facebook operating there."

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• • null"I, a girl, am going down to Tahrir Square and I will stand alone." With these words, Asmaa Mahfouz put out a call on YouTube that went viral, helping to ignite Egypt's revolution. A 26-year-old business management graduate, Mahfouz helped rally Egyptians for the initial Jan. 25 protest, to "say no to corruption, no to this regime." -- 2013-07-26
    (YouTube's Role in bringing down Mubarak) -- 2013-07-26
    

• Google-owned YouTube also highlighted videos from Egypt on its news and politics channel, CitizenTube, invited users to submit their own and began streaming live coverage of broadcasts by the Al Jazeera television network.

• The internet has made a big difference in Egypt. For years, the country's secret police and state-controlled media have very effectively suppressed most dissident activities. Without the relatively free arena of online social networking sites and tools like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, young Egyptians like Ghonim could not have built the resilient and creative force that finally toppled Hosni Mubarak.
• As he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Friday, "We would post a video on Facebook and it would be shared by 50,000 people on their walls in hours." Alternative media channels are absolutely vital for freedom movements.

• As many commentators have noted, one of the early catalysts for the January 25th revolution in Egypt was a Facebook page created in honor of Khaled Said, a young man who had been brutally beaten and killed by the police. This page became a focal point around which 470,000 “fans” organized their dissidence while a YouTube video about his murder was viewed by more than 500,000 people fueling further public outrage.

   

  Inspired by the protests against and the eventual overthrow of Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on 14 January 2011, the Khaled Said Facebook page then became a focal point for the dissemination of popular protest throughout Egypt. As such, the limited penetration of social media within the country was overcome by the fact that it first scaled vertically through key Facebook sites such as those of Khaled Said, 15-year old Asmaa Mahfouz and later, Google executive Wael Ghonim.

• Social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter played a vital role in the Egyptian revolution, helping to get word out to the rest of the world about what was happening on the ground. This, in spite of the government’s near-complete five-day shutdown of Internet, Blackberry and mobile phone access in Egypt.
• Google also helped, having created a Speak2Tweet application, with the help of Twitter, that enabled protesters to phone-in their tweets.
• Needless to say, the role of social media has become far more vital to the world than many of us anticipated when we first started tweeting. As the protesters on the ground are reportedly now shouting, because of services like Twitter and Facebook, “Egypt is free.”

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• A really good example of this kind of technological innovation was provided last week by Google engineers, who in a few days built a system that enabled protesters in Egypt to send tweets even though the internet in their country had been shut down. "Like many people", they blogged, "we've been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we can do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service – the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection."

  They worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter and SayNow (a company Google recently acquired) to build the system. It provides three international phone numbers and anyone can tweet by leaving a voicemail. The tweets appear on twitter.com/speak2tweet.

• 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.
• The 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.
• 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

• 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.

  The system was heralded as a wondrous workaround, and a symbol of Internet ingenuity triumphing over real world adversity. But it had problems. If you didn't speak Arabic, you probably couldn't understand a word of the messages, which came through to Twitter anonymous and almost completely unmarked. But thanks to another dose of Internet ingenuity, another group, Small World News, created a site called Alive In Egypt that posted the translations of the tweets, along with the original audio.

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• In the attempt to control the growing unrest, the Egyptian government played catch-up on the Internet front. Protestors demanding the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak relied heavily on Facebook and Twitter. Social media had become the primary way for protests to be organized. On January 25, Twitter was shut down; the following day Facebook, Gmail and YouTube were pulled. Yet these measures were far from complete.

   

  On January 27, a day after the Egyptian government tried to shut down the Internet, one Facebook page devoted to a protest had 80,000 followers. In the absence of a central point of control of the Internet, the Egyptian government had to rely on Internet service providers to comply with their demands.

   

  And though the Mubarak regime cut off the Internet, information flows found ways around it. Google, for instance, created a voice-to-tweet service that allowed Egyptians to leave voicemail messages that were turned into tweets. Other Internet services allowed streaming audio clips from young Egyptians to be heard from anywhere on the world.

• • nullAs the leading Egyptian
    cyber activist, Gigi Ibrahim, has aptly remarked, ‘Twitter’ and ‘Facebook’ are
    useful tools, ‘but at the end of the day, if people don’t decide to go to the streets... nothing will happen’. The cases of Egypt and Libya show that Ibrahim’s
    point is valid both ways. ‘Twitter’ and ‘Facebook’ are useful tools, but if the
    state disrupts access to them, people will still go to the streets if they decide
    to do so. -- 2013-07-26
    (Negative Aspect of Twitter's use in the bringing down of Mubarak) -- 2013-07-26