A Revolution in Egypt through social media People call today the information age. The reason for this is the internet. With the internet, people can go online and have what seems like limitless information available to them at their fingertips. Recently, Egyptian activists have incorporated the internet to serve their revolutionary needs. They have come up with intelligent ways of knowing when online protest will lead to offline protest. Activists look at who is starting a protest and if it is someone they deem credible they are much more likely to join.
Without the internet and social media, the Egyptian revolutionaries would not have found their start, their leader, and their means of exposing the injustice taking place in their country. In this fast-paced time it is appropriate to point out the Internet’s role in the Egyptian revolution. In doing this, we must consider the leading role of a 30 year old executive from Google. “The peaceful Egyptian revolution had a distinct goal, but no clear leader”, reported CBS News correspondent Seth Doane. “Yet, from the masses, a handful emerged, including Wael Ghonim.
His “tweets” offered both a narrative and a nudge to protesters. ” “He has sort of been tweeting every day, almost every hour,” said CNET. com’s Declan McCullagh. “He has been saying this is what I’m doing this is how we are going to bring democracy and freedom to Egypt. He has developed quite a massive following; he has become a figure head of this revolt. I guess we can now call it a revolution,” (Pelly, 2011).
The Essay on Industrial Revolution 29
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Wael Ghonim does not seem like someone who would lead a revolution. At Cairo University he studied computer engineering and he earned an M. B. A. n marketing and finance at the American University in Cairo (Crovitz, 2011).
Ghonim is currently the product and marketing manager for the Middle East and North Africa sector of Google. He was a typical web marketer who was quoted in corporate press releases promoting the ArabNet conference, creating Google AdWords vouchers for small businesses and launching an Arabic website to teach people how to run searches, send emails and chat online (Crovitz, 2011).
These were hardly the activities of a revolutionary, but from his place in Dubai, Ghonim was waiting for an opportunity to become olitically active in his home country from behind the scenes. In June of 2010, he found his opportunity when a horrible murder of a young Egyptian businessman took place. Khaled Said, died after being beaten by the police (Prettyman, 2011).
Witnesses described how Said was taken from an Internet cafe by a small group of policemen, his head smashed into a set of marble stairs and left for dead on an Alexandria street. Police officers took Said as a threat when he was caught copying a video they had made of themselves splitting up confiscated marijuana, which later appeared on YouTube (Crovitz, 2011).
Ghonim responded by creating a Facebook page called “We Are All Khaled Said. ” It showed brutal cell phone photos shot in the morgue of Said’s face after the beating (Alexander, 2011).
This visual evidence proved the official explanations for his death to be false. The Facebook page attracted, almost immediately, around 500,000 members (Alexander, 2011).
After 30 years of martial law, abuse of power by police and state security officials were so common that the case was a perfect starting point for a network of many upset Egyptians.
With this large following, Ghonim and others used the Facebook page to track more accounts of police abuse of power which included wrongful arrests, torture and corrupt government (Alexander, 2011).
The Term Paper on Impact Of Facebook On The Egyptian Revolution
Many people around the world remember that day when hundreds of Egyptians were gathered on the Tahrir square in Cairo, trying to improve the future of Egypt. This scenario was not only noticeable in Egypt, but citizens from many Arab countries came together and demonstrated in order to improve the policy in their countries. It is argued that in for mation and communication technologies, such as ...
Social media also became a substitute for traditional media because most, if not all, of traditional media in Egypt is controlled by the governemnt. Even though Ghonim ran the Facebook page anonymously, Egyptian authorities traced it back to him (Crovitz, 2011).
A few days after the protests began; Ghonim was arrested and blindfolded for 10 days.
Authorities questioned him about how the protests had been organized, thinking he had knowledge of foreign involvement. When he had no information to give them the authorities learned there was no foreign involvement, which turned out to be worse. Angered, but inspired as well, by decades of authoritarian rule, Egyptian citizens had organized themselves into an internal problem for the government (Crovitz, 2011).
When Ghonim was released, he posted on Twitter, “Freedom is a blessing that deserves fighting for it. Soon, another Facebook page was created, with hundreds of thousands of people supporting him and claiming him to be the spokesman for the revolution (Alexander, 2011).
“This is an Internet revolution,” he said. “I’ll call it Revolution 2. 0. ” Google also played a role. After the Egyptian government cut off the Internet, Google created Speak2Tweet, which allowed Egyptians to leave voice messages that could be posted to Twitter (Crovitz, 2011).
The events in Egypt also show the different roles for different types of social media. Rafat Ali, founder of paidcontent. rg said, “Facebook helps organize people, such as detailing how and where to gather physically, while Twitter is for ‘amplification,’ enabling people in real time to share news and comment. ” Shortly after the fall of Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, a Jordanian newspaper printed a joke pointed at Egypt; “Why do the Tunisian youth ‘demonstrate’ in the streets, don’t they have Facebook? ” Less than a week later, protests across Egypt organized by a coalition of opposition groups, many of which are organized through Facebook, seemed to prove this punch line wrong (Prettyman, 2011).
Social media was used by activists to pass on information and over the month of January 2011 there were an estimated five million new Facebook members in Egypt. Around 90,000 group pages were created that attracted hundreds of thousands of members and promoted the early protests in Cairo. During an interview on CNN, Nicholas Thompson said, “Posters on Facebook and Twitter are saying things like, ‘Get together in twenty minutes’ or ‘the revolution is coming,’” (Prettyman, 2011).
The Review on Theories of Mass Media and Its Social Impacts
Since the invention of technologies such as the telegraph, radio and eventually television, which enabled communications “produced at a single source [to be] transmitted to an infinitely large audience” (Fearing, F. 1954), the social impacts of communications via mass media have been a subject of intense research by political and social scientists. This literature review intends to examine the ...
The BBC stated that this is the start of a new generation with a “vast number of the population being under the age of 30 who are technologically savvy and able to coordinate their protests,” (Alexander, 2011).
Leaders in Egypt must have felt the threat of these social media outlets as they cut off the Internet and soon after cell phone lines in an attempt disrupt the protests. It had become clear that the protesters were using a variety of different media types to communicate with each other and to get their message across (Alexander, 2011).
In Tahrir Square everywhere you looked there were, and there still are, cell phones, placards, protest message on cups, graffiti, newspapers and flyers, and al-Jazeera’s TV cameras which broadcast hours of live footage from the square daily. When one channel of communication was cut off, people moved on to the next (Alexander, 2011).
Even the U. N recognizes the effect that social media had on Egypt’s revolution, according to MSNBC, American U. N. Ambassador Susan Rice recognized the “enormous impact” of Twitter and Facebook on the world’s stage. “Governments are increasingly cognizant of their power” (Prettyman, 2011).
