• 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.
• 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.

• Unsurprisingly, social networking is a prominent force in certain layers of Egyptian society.
• Facebook is by far the most popular platform, outstripping Twitter which is confined to a relatively small collection of internationally-oriented users.
• Perhaps the most interesting application of new media we encountered was this use of Facebook as an advocacy and press management tool by certain opposition groups. One leading organizer with the Democratic Front Party described how they turned to Facebook as a spin machine whenever the government provided an opportunity: “When the security forces broke in our front door on January 26, we immediately put up a Facebook group to collect popular anger and let the media know.”
• Mobile phones may have played the role of the most tangible technology in the revolution. At a basic level, text messages and voice calls enabled the Egyptian people to coordinate, to stay informed, and to communicate amongst themselves and to the outside world.
• Ultimately, technology’s impact is only as strong as the weakest links in the human system that uses it. Indeed, digital tools are seldom trusted in Egypt, and for good reason. Long accustomed to state surveillance, most citizens — from youth activists to factory workers — expect the same to be true online and on their phones, and recognize that monitoring is especially likely on digital networks.

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• Jan 31, 2011 2:33PM ET /    Global   

   

  The 'Twitter Revolution' Debate: The Egyptian Test Case
• We can see that these  sites were used in order to get the word out about how to bypass  checkpoints, how to get across bridges, how to get to places where  people wanted to demonstrate. So it was a critical tool in getting  people out into the streets."

• Technology  has always been involved in modern revolutions... Text-messaging helped  spawn a revolution a decade ago in the Philippines. After television  broadcasts of President Estrada being acquitted of corruption, residents  took to their mobile phones texting their outrage. The streets of  Manila quickly filled, forcing the president to resign... The 1979  Iranian revolution was “closely linked” to the audiocassette...  Tiananmen was called the “Fax Revolution” because “the rest of the world  was better informed than the rest of the neighborhood, because of the  fax machine.” Now, there’s Twitter and Facebook. Clearly, those tools  have aided this year’s uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen — despite  access to them being limited or suppressed.
  
• Ultimately, Mubarak Shot Himself in the Foot By Shutting Down the Net, writes a reader  at Talking Points Memo: "Twitter and Facebook can bring people  together, but once they connect they have the opportunity to establish  other methods of contact. Mubarak was safe while people were sitting on  their butts twittering. He is much less safe now he has taken away  Twitter and forced them to come out into the streets."

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