J. D. Fielder

From AYM: Timeline of the Egyptian Revolution

Great post on AYM Movements for those who want to keep track what happened and when:

April 6, 2008

- The April 6 Youth Movement Facebook page is created to support the workers in Mahalla al-Kobra, an industrial town, who were planning to strike on April 6. Police and military were ready to arrest anyone demonstrating. Subsequent protests were largely considered flops and multiple activists were arrested between April and July.   

Spring 2010

- A group of activists, including Google executive Wael Ghonim and April 6 leader Ahmed Maher, begin meeting once a week to discuss plans for a protest against the government.

Continued at AYM Movements.org

-

A Short Ode to Egypt

" Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." - Robert F. Kennedy

 

-

Egyptian Sovereignty versus the Networked Public Sphere

The title is a bit of a misnomer, given that the focus of my argument rests on Jillian C. York's position that protests in neighboring Tunisia are not a "Twitter" Revolution, but rather a "Human" revolution.  Social media is simply a tool, which happened to prove useful for Egypt's historically vibrant local civic culture (Long, Reich, and Gasiorowski 2010).  Gigaom's Matthew Ingram adds:

Foreign Policy magazine columnist Evgeny Morozov has argued that Twitter and Facebook should not be credited with playing any kind of critical role in Tunisia,  and suggested that doing so is a sign of the “cyber-utopianism” that many social-media advocates suffer from: that is, the belief that the Internet is  unambiguously good, or that the use of Twitter or Facebook can somehow magically free a repressed society from its shackles. Morozov, who has written an entire  book about this idea called Net Delusion, made the point in his blog post after the Tunisian uprising that while social media might have been used in some way during the events, tools like Twitter and Facebook did not play a crucial role--that is, the revolution would have happened with or without them. CONTINUED

I also contend that social media is merely a tool for challenging state sovereignty, as was the printed pamphlet during the U.S. Revolutionary war, Radio propaganda during World War II, and Ayatollah Khomeini's use of smuggled cassette tapes leading up to the 1979 revolution.

Privately, I hope the protests in Egypt succeed.  According to Dahl (1989), democracy (or polyarchy, as he calls it) can only thrive if the following conditions are met.  In particular, the regime's decision to pull the communication kill switch severely undermined the latter three conditions:

  - Officials are elected
  - Elections are free and fair
  - Suffrage is inclusive
  - All citizens have the right to run for office
  - Freedom of expression is guaranteed
  - Voters have unfettered access to alternative information
  - Citizens have the right of associational autonomy (i.e. can form parties, civic organizations...)

But academically, I remain objective on understanding how communication and associational processes affect state sovereignty.  Do I want Egypt to succeed? Yes.  Do I like the Iranian theocracy? Not at all, albeit the Shah was a kleptocrat.  Still, the cassette tape helped undermine the Shah's regime, and I treat the event as a case study. Unlike other cultures of the Middle East, Iranians for the most part see themselves as Iranians (or Persians) first and then by tribe/group/family second.  Iranians unite around common symbols and identity, which was ripe for tapping first in 1979 and again during the 2009 Iranian presidential election (alas, the tape put Iran in shackles: not exactly the utopian vision).  Contrast that with a country such as Kuwait, where it is considered taboo to discuss political affairs with people you do not know in person, let alone online with a bunch of virtual strangers (Wheeler 2006).  This not to say that social media would not be used in a great Kuwaiti uprising, but I assess certain civic conditions must exist (such as Egypt's local association structure) for social media to be effective. 

Returning to Egypt as the primary case study, an article by E.B. Boyd at Fast Company captures my assessment:

In situations of chaos, the upper hand goes to the group that can shape a narrative and get it to stick. History is written by the victors, after all--now, even in real time. When looting began over the weekend, the narrative could easily have shifted in favor of the government: Hooligans were turning the city upside down. Order needed to be restored. Clamp down.

But word started getting out via Twitter that hastily arranged neighborhood watch groups were apprehending looters who, it turned out, had police IDs on them. This might or might not have been true--it wasn’t possible to confirm the statements--but it certainly shed a different light on the looting. Certainly, other regimes have been known to hire young men to go out and toss a city, to make it look like protesters have turned ugly, giving them an excuse to clamp down.

But the tweets belied that narrative. And indeed, on Saturday, a New York-based Egyptian blogger interviewed by CNN, suggested as much. She “appealed to the media to not fall for what she described as a Mubarak regime plot to make the protests in Egypt seem like dangerous anarchy,” according to the New York Times’ blog The Lede. “I urge you to use the words ‘revolt’ and ‘uprising’ and ‘revolution’ and not ‘chaos’ and not ‘unrest," she said. "We are talking about a historic moment.” The narrative was reset. Soon thereafter, CNN changed its on-screen headlines from “CHAOS IN EGYPT” to “UPRISING IN EGYPT.” CONTINUED

Further, Mobarak's attempts to stick his finger in the media dike are not proving successful, as discussed by Computerworld's Nancy Gohring and Robert McMillan:

Even with no Internet, people have found ways to get messages out on Twitter. On Friday someone had set up a Twitter account where they posted messages that they had received via telephone calls from Egypt. A typical message reads: "Live Phonecall: streets mostly quiet in Dokki, no police in sight. Lots of police trucks seen at Sheraton."

Others are using fax machines to get information into Egypt about possible ways to communicate. They are distributing fax machine numbers for universities and embassies and asking people to send faxes to those numbers with instructions about how to use a mobile phone as a dial-up modem.

Members of the hacker group Anonymous have also been getting in on the act. They are reportedly faxing some of the latest government cables from WikiLeaks which reveal human rights abuses under President Mubarak, to locations in the country, according to Forbes magazine. CONTINUED

To cite air power theory, while on one hand social media is just a tool, Egyptian protesters are effectively using it to fold the regime back in on itself (Fadok 1995).  That is, they are applying information faster than the regime can respond, giving them the initiative while dramatically undermining regime will.  I say this from the current observation the Mubarak does not know what to do or how to react, especially with the Egyptian army playing nice so far (what air power theory refers to as strategic paralysis).  At this rate, the regime's inability to control information will crack it's will to resist: a human revolution happening at the speed of light.

That said, the outcome remains to be seen. I thought the same thing would occur during the Iranian protests of 2009, yet the regime's will did not crack.  Still, I contend that Egypt is a premier case study on how quickly the modern networked public sphere can undercut state sovereignty.

Dahl, Robert A.  1989.  Democracy and Its Critics. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Fadok, David. 1995. John Boyd and John Warden: Air Power’s Quest for Strategic Paralysis. Maxwell AFB: School of Advanced Airpower Studies.

Long, David E., Bernard Reich, and Mark Gasiorowksi. 2010. The Government and Politics of the Middle East and North Africa. 6th ed. Westview Press.

Wheeler, Deborah L. 2006.  The Internet in the Middle East: Global Expectations and Local Imaginations in Kuwait. Albany: State University of New York Press.

-

YouTube Yanks Jihadi Videos

From wired.com:

The British government has bad news for extremists and the Qaeda-curious: It might get a tiny bit less convenient for you to access videos of your favorite jihadi media.

The Daily Telegraph is reporting that YouTube has begun removing videos featuring the extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, following complaints from the British government to the White House about the content. The complaints arose after British police discovered that Roshonara Choudhry, a British student who recently stabbed a Member of Parliament “to get revenge for the people of Iraq,” had viewed videos of Awlaki on the internet. CONTINUED

-

Internet Censorship in Algeria

A little something I found on OpenNet Initiative:

"Algeria joins an increasingly expanding list of government Internet censors in the Middle East and North Africa. ONI's in-country tests conducted January 1, 2010 verified that access to the the Web site of the Algerian political movement Rachad (www.rachad.org) has been banned in Algeria. Access to the movement's Internet TV channel (tv.rachad.org) and discussion forum (forum.rachad.org) were also found to be inaccessible." CONTINUED

-

The Economist Predicts: Iranian Regime Losing it's Grip?

Read in the Jan 2-8 Economist the Iranian theocracy may be on it's final legs following the regime's violent crackdown on late-December protests:

"Signs of the regime's fading legitimacy are numerous.  In December, for instance, the head of Iran's central bank issued a stern warning that from January 8th it would no longer accept bank notes defaced by extra words.  In practice, this would mean extra notes taken out of circulation, following a quiet campaign by oppositionists to mark them with anti-regime slogans (pg. 34)."

The summer protests encouraged me to write my most recent paper, which I'm hoping to present in April (needs work, but I'm overall happy with the results.  On one hand, I was happy to see the full employment of Web 2.0 during the protests, while on the other hand I was discouraged by the lack of effect on the regime, at least at the time. 

If the regime wants to stay in power, they must do two things:  let the moderates run things, and take the little clause about wiping Israel off the map out of their constitution.  The latter might be like playing Janga, but it's that or be swept aside.

ALSO, same edition has a great article on cultural cellphone usage, pages 56-58.

8XD9PR9JEAHN