Internet and Political Mobilization in Egypt and Tunisia

One of the difficulties with efforts to understand the role of social media in the successful North Africa uprisings (Tunisia and Egypt) is a paucity of theory.

The most common account is that the Internet offers alternative sources of information and alternative narratives for understanding events than the media controlled by the state.

There are several problems with this.

• It theorizes new media using theories that have been shown to be unsophisticated even when applied to old media, that is, seeing media primarily as a vehicle for the more or less passive receipt of information. It fails to theorize the specific elements that make new media “new.”
• In doing (1) it ignores the active ingenuity, creativity and agency of users, who not only receive but write new narratives, and generate such things as the Bassem Youssef  Show and Pigipedia.
• Only about 20 percent of people in Egypt are on-line, and they fall into pretty distinct age, income, and education demographics–yet the resistance movement itself clearly extends into many other walks of society.

Johanne Kubler addresses some of these issues in a recent article entitled (somewhat misleadingly) “Overcoming the Digital Divide” in a recent issue of CyberOrient.

She argues that while it is true that “the Internet as a relatively free space can be a vital factor in opening windows and expanding the realm of what can be said in public” (thuse resonating with the recent articles on the role of civility in Middle Eastern power structures), “rates of Internet penetration show that this is insufficient to radically transform the public as seen during the 18 days in Tahrir beginning Jan 25th.”

She takes a comparative approach, pointing out how the ability of Facebook to gather tens of thousands of members to Tunisian protest sites such as “Seyyeb Saleh“ (traditional curse in Tunisian dialect, meaning “leave me alone”), “Le “404 Not Found” nuit gravement à l’image de Mon Pays” (The “404 Not Found” seriously damages the image of My Country) [a reference to the error message frequently found because of the Tunisian government’s censorship], and “‘Aridha li ‘ashar alaaf tonisi dhid al- riqaba al- Eliktroniyya wa al-hajb” (Petition of ten thousand Tunisians against electronic control and filtering) failed to produce any actual protesters.

“This episode indicates the main challenge of Facebook activism, namely rather low commitment of participants,” she writes.

In Egypt, by contrast, blogging was directly linked to the Kifaya movement, many of whose activists and leaders were veterans of five years of protests. For these activists, the Internet was one of many tools they made use of as best they could, alongside word-of-mouth, printed pamphlets, interviews with independent and foreign news media, and others.

“Instead,” she argues, “the case of Egypt shows how traditional media such as the press can serve as a bridge to the general public sphere, helping to operate results of discussions online and to transform the newly acquired space of discussion into actual power on the street.”

She concludes:

As there is no direct correlation between increased Internet use and political action organised through this medium, we have to assume a more complex relationship. A successful social movement seems to need more than a virtual space of debate to be successful, although such a space can be an important complementary factor in opening windows and expanding the realm of what can be said in public.

This is an argument that fits well with my “media ecology” approach and also resonates with (but expands on) pre-revolutionary examinations of ways that new media were allowing non-traditional actors alternative venues to speak (especially about Islam) (Eickelman 1992, Anderson 2003).

Kuebler’s entire article in on-line and you can read it here at CyberOrient.

References:

Anderson, Jon 2003. The Internet and Islam’s New Interpreters. In New media in the Muslim world : the emerging public sphere. D. Eickelman and J. Anderson, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.