Cairo's Facebook Flat. The Secret Rally That Sparked an Uprising. The Hopeful Network - By Maryam Ishani. CAIRO — Most of the world got a crash course in the Egyptian opposition movement this month, as mass protests broke out on the streets of Cairo. From all appearances, the movement emerged organically in the wake of the overthrow of the government in nearby Tunisia, as hundreds of thousands of angry citizens turned out to demand President Hosni Mubarak immediately step down. Several days after the marches began, former International Atomic Energy Agency chief and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohamed ElBaradei arrived on the scene to give the marchers in the streets a nominal leader and media-savvy public face. And shortly after that, Egypt's largest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, joined in, lending its political heft to the movement. But the groundwork for the Egyptian uprising was set well before these high-profile figures and organizations became involved.
His efforts proved wildly successful. In September 2010, a group of journalists organized by a U.S. What Happens when Eighty Million Egyptians Disappear? | NDItech | democracyworks. UPDATE: It's hard not to speculate on the political implications as events unfold. Protestors are defying curfew, police are using violent and aggressive tactics in the street, soldiers are being greeted with flowers. It's difficult to understate the significance of what is happening in Egypt right now. Likely no one - not the protestors, the government, nor the observers on the outside - knows where this is headed. Landlines, of course, are still up. People are using them to continue to access the outside world, through voice and dialup. Protesters are spreading the news through Twitter, phone calls, word of mouth. Al-Jazeera is broadcasting live - its earlier reticence long forgotten. POST: With so much at stake in Egypt, and so much happening so quickly, its difficult to know where to begin.
Again, as technology blog, I will leave the politics to the experts - but some quick context. These events in Egypt have unfolded further and faster than anyone would have predicted. Revolution = Messiness At Scale, Again. Ingram picks up on the flimsy reasoning in Gladwell’s recent redux of his ‘Twitter is no revolutionary tool’ argument: Mathew Ingram, Gladwell Still Missing the Point About Social Media and ActivismAfter weeks of discussion in the blogosphere over whether what happened in Tunisia was a “Twitter revolution,” and whether social media also helped trigger the current anti-government uprising in Egypt, author Malcolm Gladwell — who wrote a widely-read New Yorker article about how inconsequential social media is when it comes to “real” social activism — has finally weighed in with his thoughts.
But he continues to miss the real point about the use of Twitter and Facebook, which is somewhat surprising for the author of the best-seller The Tipping Point. Gladwell’s tone is bizarrely anti-modernist: Does Egypt Need Twitter? Right now there are protests in Egypt that look like they might bring down the government. Virtual revolutions always begin with the people. With terms such as "Twitter revolution" and "Facebook revolution" floating around the recent uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, it's easy to overlook one thing.
While social media can be an instigator of, catalyst for and witness to social change, it does not bring about social change - not singlehandedly anyway. People do. It's not surprising that social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have played such an important part in mobilising the masses in Tunisia and Egypt. According to the upcoming Arab Social Media Report, produced by the governance and innovation program at the Dubai School of Government, Egypt has over 5 million Facebook users and counting as of the end of January, the largest number of Facebook users in the Arab world. Half of the internet users in Tunisia meanwhile have Facebook accounts. It is also a testament to protestors' creativity that they have found ways to circumvent these social media lockdowns. One-page article.