Revolutions Without Revolutionaries? Network Theory, Facebook, and the Egyptian Blogosphere

Abstract

On the morning of April 6th, 2008, a small group of Egyptian bloggers and activists made their way from one internet cafe to another, updating web sites and Twitter feeds dedicated to the day’s tumultuous events in Cairo and other cities. They generously allowed me to spend the day with them, to see what they were up to and how they were using the tools of Web 2.0 to facilitate political protest and social action in Egypt. [i] The afternoon took me from the overpriced coffee joints of Mohandiseen and Zamalek to the Judges’ Syndicate, where a protest was the focus of several blocks full of plainclothes police, riot police, participants, and gawkers both Egyptian and foreign. The young men and women spent their time in the cafes aggregating reports from other activists about arrests and protests, and while they of course were doing everything they could to avoid being arrested, the general attitude seemed to be one of acceptance of that risk. They were doing all of these things at the same time, often talking on the phone, updating a Web site, and speaking with one another, engaging in what has been dubbed “continuous partial attention.” As one of the organizers and writers told me, “With the Internet you can get online anytime, wherever, so now we are publishing all the same news the same minute. If someone got caught now, arrested now, we can write about it now, rather than the old style.”[ii] By the old style, of course, this young blogger meant the traditional media, which has a built-in time-lag between an event and the delivery of news about that event, a delay that has been obliterated by the tools of new media.

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