LaMar Marion's List: 3.5 Digital Citizenship Assignment

• By Dr Sahar Khamis and Katherine Vaughn

   

   

   

  

  An Egyptian protester acknowledges the role of social media, picture by Awais Chaudhry
• “If you want to free a society, just give them Internet access.” These were the words of 30-year-old Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim in a CNN interview on February 9, 2011, just two days before long-time dictator Hosni Mubarak was forced to step down under pressure from a popular, youthful, and peaceful revolution. This revolution was characterized by the instrumental use of social media, especially Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and text messaging by protesters, to bring about political change and democratic transformation. 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.
• Prior to 1990, most media ownership in the Arab world lay with governments, and most media functioned under strict governmental supervision and control. A number of authors (Abdel Rahman, 1985, 2002; Boyd, 1999; Mellor, 2007; Rugh, 2004) argued that in this era Arab media were mostly controlled by governments mainly to keep lay people uninformed, and thus incapable of effectively participating in political controversies and rational debates.
• A new media revolution erupted in the Arab world after 1990, inspired by the introduction of both satellite television channels and the Internet (Khamis & Sisler, 2010). In the 1990s Internet penetration started to spread throughout the Arab world. Although the region generally suffered from being on the low end of the digital divide (Abdulla, 2007, p. 35) and faced many challenges, including the lack of human and economic information technology (IT) resources, illiteracy and computer illiteracy, the lack of funds for IT research and development, and the lack of solid telecommunication infrastructures (Abdulla, 2007, p. 35), this situation is rapidly changing, since many Arab countries are currently striving to increase Internet penetration rates.

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• A Tunisian-Egyptian Link That Shook Arab History
• The exchange on Facebook was part of a remarkable two-year collaboration that has given birth to a new force in the Arab world — a pan-Arab youth movement dedicated to spreading democracy in a region without it. Young Egyptian and Tunisian activists brainstormed on the use of technology to evade surveillance, commiserated about torture and traded practical tips on how to stand up to rubber bullets and organize barricades.

• By 2008, many of the young organizers had retreated to their computer keyboards and turned into bloggers, attempting to raise support for a wave of isolated labor strikes set off by government privatizations and runaway inflation.

   After a strike that March in the city of Mahalla, Egypt, Mr. Maher and his friends called for a nationwide general strike for April 6. To promote it, they set up a Facebook group that became the nexus of their movement, which they were determined to keep independent from any of the established political groups. Bad weather turned the strike into a nonevent in most places, but in Mahalla a demonstration by the workers’ families led to a violent police crackdown — the first major labor confrontation in years.

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• But one of the most highly charged sessions (I was among the speakers) had little to do with journalism as we know it. The final panel, “Freedom: The New Battle Front for Arab Cyber Media,” opened with a video clip of Esra Abdel Fattah, otherwise known as Egypt’s “Facebook Girl.” The report described how the young Egyptian woman, who had no previous record of political activity, had been involved with a Facebook group in support of a national strike. The “6 April” strike was sparked by workers’ protests against skyrocketing food prices, which had only begun to climb in the West, but were already crippling working-class households in developing countries.

• The audience in Dubai considered the Facebook case to be a freedom of expression concern, but an Egyptian official would have presented the event in a very different light. Esra’s arrest took place amid an ongoing national crisis. According to Joel Beinin, director of Middle East Studies at the American University in Cairo, over the past two years, Egypt has been experiencing the “longest and strongest wave of worker protest since the end of World War II.”[1]  

   

• Hi, this is Mona from Cairo, I just wanted to let the world know that we have been disconnected from our last point of communication through the Internet and there’s a strong word going around that we will again be disconnected from mobile phone calls.  So, I wanted everyone to know in case you don’t get any feedback from what’s happening tomorrow, and I didn’t want anyone to worry about us.

   

  They did this before, the only difference is the last when time they did this I was completely freaked out; I was so scared that they were going to shoot us all and nobody would know about us.  This time, I’m not scared at all, I feel as if, like, I want to tell them ‘bring it on!’ We are excited, we are happy, we are going to be in Tahrir Square tomorrow, we are going to be huge, and we are going to do our march and do our protest and Mubarak is going out.

   

  [sigh] Be with us!  Bye bye.

• To say that social-media was a key part of the revolution does not necessarily mean that people used GPS-enabled phones to coordinate demonstrations; that is simplistic and misses the point in which social media shapes the environment in general. What it means is that the people acted in a world where they had more means of expressing themselves to each other and the world, being more assured that their plight would not be buried by the deep pit of censorship, and a little more confidence that their extended families, their neighbors, their fellow citizens were similarly fed up, as poignantly expressed by the slogan taken up by the protestors: “Yezzi Fock! Enough!”