WHAT WENT DOWN IN CAIRO?
# In my research on the events in Cairo this year, what I kept running into was one word: Revolution. Interestingly, it was often accompanied by mentions of social media’s huge role in this revolution’s facilitation- (see Crovitz’s article in the Wall Street Journal, and J. Preston’s piece in the New York Times:
# But what was the deal with this revolution anyway? Why weren’t the events in Cairo simply a bunch of riots co-ordinated by facebook? It’s a pretty big call to label something revolutionary. I needed to find out what the seed of this revolution actually was. As it turned out, the story itself is quite incredible.
# To put things as simply as I can for simple people like myself, here’s the 411. 82 year old Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak had this year been in power for almost 30 years (I shudder to imagine one of our prime ministers being around for that long!). Many of the people of Egypt were becoming tired and frustrated with his leadership, which continued to see food prices rising, unemployment rates increasing and rife corruption in what was an authoritarian government (one protestor called it a dictatorship- see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12289124 ).
# These tensions had been brewing for some time, but it was one instance of the corruption that led to the murder of an innocent man, that set these epic protests in motion. Why this one case? I’ll tell you why.
Because it was happened upon by a rather clever Google executive for the Middle East, Wael Ghonim, who was looking for ways to use his skills to get politically active. Ghonim heard the story of Khaled Said, a young man who was brutally bashed to death by police because he had acquired footage of them with weed (very, very illegal in Egypt mind you). Said was rumoured to be putting it up on YouTube, as a way of revealing the rife police corruption in his country. His actions of course, had irrevocable consequences.
#Ghonim saw in this event a chance to take a political stand, and a chance for Said’s innocent death not to be in vain, and he created a facebook page called ‘We are all Khaled Said’. The page juxtaposed images of Said alive and smiling with pictures of his bloodied body in the morgue.
#The page resonated so much with Egyptians that it got 500,000 followers, and soon enough the it was being used to organise mass protests that resulted in the thousands who walked for 5 days including what is now called the ‘Day of Anger’ on Tuesday, January 25th 2011.
Check out this article and vid of the man himself:
#The protestors had been united and given a voice that otherwise would have remained silenced. During the height of the protests, the Egyptian government cut off internet and mobile services in attempt to curb the mayhem. But it was too late. The death of one man (who represented the ill-treatment of many by a corrupt government,) and the actions of Wael Ghonim who had merely created a facebook page (which we do every day for kicks and are happy if we get ten ‘likes’)- had indeed triggered a Revolution.
#A FEW STATS ABOUT SOCIAL NETWORKING USE IN EGYPT (according to Preston, New York Times,2011).
-In April 2008 an Egyptian Youth movement group got 70,000 facebook followers in aim at promoting awareness about unfair working conditions in Mahalla Al-Kobra.
- Google and facebook are the most common sites visited by Egyptians, closely followed by youtube. In case you were wondering, the vid of the police doing their deal that got Khaled killed did end up surfacing on YouTube.
- Preston has labelled facebook as the modern “tool of choice for human rights activists in Egypt”.
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