Social Media Still Not “Free” in Egypt

Blogger Maikel Nabil Sanad was sentenced April 11 to three years in Tora Prison by a military court.

One of the key questions raised by the sentencing April 11 of blogger Maikel Nabil Sanad is why the mainstream media seems to be becoming ever more free of government restrictions while social media remains an area that must be restricted by the Egyptian state.

Egypt’s Military Court handed Nabil a three year sentence for his blog post entitled “The army and the people were never one hand.”  The blog entry described in detail the negative roles the army has so far played throughout the January 25 uprisings, for which Nabil was accused of “insulting the military” and “disturbing public security.”

I have blogged about the dramatic changes in Egypt’s mainstream media–it’s press and television news–here and here and here and … well, click on the tags. And I’m not alone in tracking these amazing changes. A recent  article in Foreign Policy celebrates the new license journalists have to investigate and criticize.

But I’m an anthropologist. When I speak of the “evolution” of the media I mean it in the technical sense of an institution adapting in patterned ways to changing environmental circumstances. I do not intend it in a teleological sense, as if all news media somehow strives for freedom if it can just overcome the obstacles imposed by government.

Egypt’s media has responded dramatically to revolutionary shifts in the social and political context. The state media’s slavish interpretation of serving as the governments voice by airing patent falsehoods no longer serves any adaptive function–it brings rewards from neither the market economy nor the new regime.

The state has replaced editors appointed by the old regime, refrained from employing the considerable censorship powers at its command, and even suggested allowing news institutions to recommend their own nominees for editorial and board positions. The old Minister of Information was sacked and no new one has yet been appointed to replace him. State TV showed Fridays protests in Tahrir, even though the military was clearly unhappy about them.

In making these changes, the Supreme Council serves several purposes: they get themselves out of the media business, they please a public seeking reassurance that the military is a good guy in this revolution, and they build goodwill within the media institutions that represent them to that public.

What they have not done–nor would I expect to see this–is dismantle any of the considerable apparatus that allows the state to punish media if it goes “too far”. Indeed, with the constitution suspended, military courts like those that sentenced Nabil can be used to suppress errant media far more efficiently and effectively than the old state and civil courts, which were used to suppress Ibrahim Eissa several years ago.

It is important not to romanticize notions of press freedom, a common failing in political analysis. “Freedom” is a complicated concept, and mainstream media always exist in the center of a web of tensions between market forces, state forces, the personalities of owners, and the subcultures of the educated elites (“intelligentsia”) from which journalists are drawn.

When Thomas Jefferson famously said that if it were left to him to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, he should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter, he was not speaking of modern, bureaucratic media, whether run by corporations or the state. In Jefferson’s day, most newspapers were printed by a small factory involving a professional printer and his apprentices, and perhaps a dozen or so people he could count on to write articles regularly, often for no pay.

From a production standpoint, it resembled contemporary social media more than it resembles the contemporary press.

But social media is different. In my book Anthropology and Mass Communication I followed Enzenberger (1970) and Manuel (1993) in distinguishing between “old media” in which some person or corporation or state controls the means of media production which is then distributed to a large (“mass”) audience, and “new media” in which to own the means of consumption is to own the means of production (cassettes, for example, or fax machines). At the time, I thought the Internet and Web represented simply the latest in new media. But I failed to take into account the extent to which texts are not circulated, as in new media, but actively remade as they circulate. Social media, especially Web 2.0, is not “new media” but “third wave media”.

And Third Wave media is terrifying because it is so ambiguous. It allows dispersed individuals to come together into shared spheres of association, and to plan and organize activities, and to simultaneously reach out to global sympathizers. From the viewpoint of the military leaders, it is new, its capacities are not well understood, but it clearly does not operate the way broadcast does–it operates through networks of interconnections and viral distributions. It leaves authorities without a sense of control (I discuss this same suspicion of viral distribution and transformation with regard to Pokemon in Chapter Three of Connected In Cairo).

The authorities believe they know how to control old media fairly well. They learned a lot about dealing with new media after the Iranian revolution, but most new media has been absorbed into digital media anyway. And digital media is,at least for now, a very uncertain mode of representation.

As for Nabil’s sentencing, by detaining him in his home, and preventing his further blogging, the military has sentenced the man while more or less confirming his points. And while this action has probably had some chilling effect on some blogs, as it was no doubt intended to do, many others have used it as the basis for blogs of their own.