How the Street and Digital World Speak To One Another: From Egypt
I’ve just returned from several fascinating weeks of fieldwork in Egypt where I spoke to an inspiring range of citizens about the political, technological, and media climate. We discussed Egypt pre-January 2011, during the 18 days after the initial Jan25 protests, and the current environment. I’m now working on an article length piece for the popular press that reminds us to remember that this movement was powered by masses of laborers and working class families, and not just technologically-savvy educated and wealthy youth. Yet technologies do play a key role, one which catalayzes another set of networks that impact journalism, high-end organizing, and upper middle class mobilization. But how do we think about the ways in which the mass, street power speaks with the digital world without telling a story that forgets one in light of the other? And how does learning about the ways in which the Street and Digital World speak to one another better allow us to analyze other political movements that involve technology and a variety of classes worldwide? The article I’ll be writing will hopefully appear in a widely available media outlet and ask our public to think about the intelligent ways in which different groups come together to mobilize.
You can look up Tweets I was writing while I was in Egypt seeing the actions and intentions of people first hand by following me on Twitter @rameshmedia.
I’ll be posting earlier versions of this article here on my blog, but here is the argument in a nutshell.
Running across freeways with labor organizers, speaking with taxi drivers and laborers, and visiting rural areas of Egypt convinces me that neither social media technologies nor the youth that use them caused or directly led a revolution where people from every walk of life took to the street. Indeed, only 15% of Egyptians have Internet access and a small percent of them are active on social media. Indeed, while re-telling a story that places heroic youth from educated, wealthy families at the center ignores the masses, dismissing social media’s dramatic impact on journalism and high-end organizing in turn is equally shortsighted. This article spells out how networks of the street and networks of the Internet work with one another, placing working classes and community organizers side-by-side with social media users. This story, of the balance between the physical and digital world, brings light to the factors beneath the Arab Spring that are capturing the global eye.
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Hi Ramesh, I’m waiting for your article!
You develop a very interesting topic and I want to know more about your research.
I haven’t done any ethnographic fieldwork on this, but some talks with Egyptian friends hint at a long and bitter political maturity process, through which the Egyptian people has used all the means at its disposal to oppose the Mubarak’s regime. This includes YouTube, Twitter and Facebook; but also (and mostly) the Friday sermons, the pamphlets, the furtive conversations, and a great collective effort to rise awareness about the fact that better country is possible.
Best regards,