"Just back from celeberations in the street. My voice is completely gone from shouting & chanting. It's an incredible day in Egyptians life. Incredible day in Egypt's history. We will build a new Egypt. A new fair, free just Egypt for all. I can feel bit change in how Egyptians are dealing with each other with care love." - Wael Ghonim, "We are all Khaled Said", Facebook, February 12, 2011
Having been riveted to the events that unfolded in Egypt and the world, the Canucks sell hangs rather dross and limp in the fire and sweat of the people who overthrew a dictator; and the torture murder of a young man that gave rise to it. For 24 hours last week, we were all Egyptians. And the network made it so.
Mathew Ingram, in a blog on gigaom.com, made the argument at the beginning of, what was then, a pro-democracy movement in Egypt:
"The argument I have tried to make is simply that... social media tools can be incredibly powerful, both for spreading the word — which can give moral or emotional support to others in a country, as well as generating external support — as well as for organizational purposes, thanks to the power of the network. As Jared Cohen of Google Ideas put it, social media may not be a cause, but it can be a powerful “accelerant.”"What transpired in Egypt over 18 shorts days proved otherwise. The network was more than fuel, it was the cause and effect of revolution.
When the internet began to make us collectively conscious of the pro-democracy protests in Egypt, Tim Wood, a friend from university, and I had this brief exchange:
Tim Wood
Exhilirating live footage from Cairo. For those of us who regret not having been news-conscious in 1989, current events in the Maghreb almost make up for it: http://english.aljazeera.net/w
Tim is a young, intelligent attorney in New York, who had interned for the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and served as a Legislative Assistant for the Parliament of Canada. He had smartly summarized the history we would be witness to in Egypt. He's young, healthy, strong and on the net; like the self-sacrificing youth that took over Cairo's Tahrir Square, inspiring thousands of Algerians and Yemenis to take to the streets of their capital cities, and put the wheels in motion for a resurgence of the "green movement" in Iran.
A few days after that exchange with Tim, and after I'd begun to post on the events in Egypt, I got this message on Facebook:
- Hala Romana Thanks Dave for covering the events going on in Egypt. I'm Egyptian and have family in Egypt and it is so amazing to see all the care and support coming from Canada. This is another reason why l'm proud to be Canadian!!
30 January at 11:37 · 
Dave Brindle You're welcome, Hala. Are you able to reach your family and are they safe?
30 January at 11:49 ·
Hala Romana Thanks Dave. I was able to make connect with my family today. Thankfully they are are safe. My cousin and his neighbors stayed up last night protecting their apartment complex from thieves. Today, there is a army tanker down the road from them so they feel abit safer.
Tim and Hala taught me an important lesson that would serve me well over the following days. My laptop was where the story would come together. The world was streaming, scanning, reading, and posting. It was the crucible for the critical mass that brought down two regimes - Mubarak's and geezer media.
The In 1989, networking was exchanging as many business cards as you could. In 1969, networking took weeks and months to bring together a social force that could cause unpredictable, unprecedented and profound change such as what shook the world in just three weeks. That's light-speed in geopolitics. For anyone to think that the network, not the brands - Facebook and Twitter being to the network what Kleenex is to tissue paper; but that the network wasn't responsible for initiating and sustaining Egypt's revolution is living in the time of the pharaohs and holds to the belief that a bad winter unequivocally refutes climate change.
For the final two days of Hosni Mubarak's solipsistic stubbornness before acceding to the people's - and Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces - will, the network hummed. It grew to critical mass and tipped the balance in favour of the people. Bits and pieces came together, like a big picture puzzle, from everywhere on the table. The force of the democracy Egypt grew into a young, healthy, strong, always in motion yet ultimately immovable force of will because of communication made possible through the network.
The network is global democracy that is creating a domino effect. So important is content from the web that the venerable Guardian has now created an interactive page on it's web site: "Twitter network of Arab protests - interactive map" where users can follow the latest tweets on protests around the Arab world.
"We are all Khaled Said"
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| Khaled Said poster |
"There is no one reason to explain why tens of thousands of Egyptians are taking part in the largest protests in a generation, calling for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. It is, rather, a combustible combination of factors ranging from the torture killing of a twenty-something businessman to the emerging political force of Facebook in the Arab world."
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| Said's unrecognizable face - beaten by police to a bloody pulp |
Is Wael Ghonim new face of revolution 2.0?
Khaled Said is the first young face of the Egyptian revolution that we became aware of - a face beaten and bashed beyond recognition. Then we began to see young Egyptian faces by the thousands converge because of the efforts of Wael Ghonim, arguably the second most important face of the revolution. In the parlance of journalism, Ghonim and his online friends took Khaled Said's tragic story and ran with it. Ran all the way to Tahrir Square, and stayed and communicated to the world. Connected. As the CBC reported,
Profile pic for Facebook page
"The 30-year-old Google manager created the Facebook page "We Are All Khaled Said." It became a rallying point for the anti-government protests that began on Jan. 25.
On Jan. 27, Ghonim went missing. It was discovered that he was being held by Egyptian authorities.
After 12 days in detention, Ghonim was released on Feb. 7, and said that he had not been tortured while in detention, but Egyptian officers did interrogate him relentlessly about how the anti-government protests were organized."
It was organized. It was planned. You say you want a revolution? Give people the internet. Egypt's revolution is the faces of youth, a new media literate generation that continues to evolve and expand on the net. With every shift in the geopolitical landscape - Iran, Egypt, Algeria, Yemen - it gets more savvy in its choice of reliable sources.
Anderson Cooper, meet Ayman Mohyeldin
The "green movement" in Iran had opened the portal to Al Jazeera English, an exemplary news organization that eschews the sensational hyperbole and jingoism of US media. (Let's not even deign to discuss how Fox News extrapolated their agenda out of Egypt, other than to say it was blatant fear-mongering, the like of which would make Dick Cheney proud.) Let's, instead, use the Milquetoast of US cable news, CNN.
CNN's Anderson Cooper got a punch in the head. Ayman Mohyeldin, the break-out star of Al Jazeera's coverage, was blind-folded and detained by Egyptian secret police. Mohyeldin KO'd Cooper in the first round.
In the New York Times TV Watch, Alessandra Stanley wrote,
It was Al Jazeera’s victory as well, of course, and that struggle was also fought live on television over the last 18 days, though more subliminally. The Mubarak government, which repeatedly tried to block the Arabic-language channel, treated Al Jazeera as an enemy that incited the protesters.
Al Jazeera English seemed intent on using the upheaval in Egypt to assume the kind of authoritative role that CNN had during the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The network fought back — with impassive resistance. Throughout the crisis, its correspondents covering the protests tried to hold themselves to a strict neutrality that even CNN reporters didn’t feign.
...
As they did at the height of the Iraq war, many Americans chose to watch foreign newscasts, in particular streams of BBC World News and Al Jazeera English.It's important to understand how much the network - particularly the brands Facebook and Twitter - is to the content of ink-on-dead trees newspapers and their online divisions, and traditional newscasts, be they CNN, Al Jazeera or even state-controlled Egyptian TV.
The day prior to Mubarak's fall, Al Jazeera noted that Egyptian TV had begun to take a much more aggressive approach and tone to its coverage of state corruption, injustice and social reform. Geezer media might bellyache about net content not being vetted and it replacing their role as content aggregator, but where would Wolf Blizter's Situation Room be without interface gadgets?
A different kind of guerrilla freedom fighter
The throngs that gathered at Tahrir Square were not freedom fighters carrying Kalashnikovs and streaming from the mountains or jungles to mount clandestine, violent attacks. The "Tienanmen Option", the infamous massacre that crushed the pro-democracy student uprising in China that Tim Wood alluded to in his reference to 1989, was never in play. This was an insurgency, in that it had cell-network interface, fostered a security of solidarity in the population, continually and instantly undermined the regime, and attacked Mubarak live on TV. Yet this was, with the exception of tragic and criminal loss of life when pro-Mubarak thugs clashed with pro-democracy protesters, a passive revolution. The activity was on the net.
In the 24 hours of the revolution that toppled Mubarak, I was working the Al Jazeera English and BBC live streams, toggling between theguardian.co.uk, The Globe and Mail, and Tweetdeck, posting, and retweeting. In all, I sent about 100 items to the net in 24 hours, most summarized here on my blog. Multiply that by the network, and nobody really can. The net has gone beyond rating.
I had raised the question of alarm to Tim because, as a journalist, I have witnessed revolutions in newsrooms where you wait for something to blow up. But Egypt is different. It was, as was repeated over and over on Friday, February 11th, exhilarating. The undercurrents of alarm, later expressed in the analysis of the revolutionary hangover, however, were ever present and more so now. Things will become less friendly. Facebook friends will become adversaries.
2011: Celebrating 100 years of McLuhan
Lost in all of the hum online - #Egypt,#CRTC - was 2011 is 100th anniversary of birth of Marshall McLuhan. He was right. http://marshallmcluhan.com/When I posted that, my friend, Rod Mickleburgh at The Globe and Mail, shot back;
@davebrindleshow mcluahan was certainly right when he gave my mother an A on her eng lit masters essay for him, on ulysses...
@davebrindleshow she also had northrop frye as a prof that year...my mom was amazing....she went back for her MA at 46....See that? Storytelling. That's what participatory journalism - or citizen or open journalism - works online. There's a great story in 6 lines and a click.
It's ironic that we're celebrating 100 years of McLuhan. Because he was Canadian and we are engaged in an electronic revolt. In this instance, a net revolution was actually taking place in Canada over two causes at the same time as Egypt. One stirred up the net - on Facebook and Twitter - so much that Prime Minister Stephen Harper, sensing the will of the young demographic might rally against him in an imminent election, stepped in and acquiesced to opposition over the CRTC's decision on user-based-billing. What's happening now in that debate has become too complicated and fractured for the interests of the network beyond special interest groups and telecorps.
The second cause relates directly to the reliability of news and information - manufactured news. Is there, as The Globe and Mail's TV critic John Doyle said,
an argument to be made that language of CRTC regulations on “news” and “truth” must conform to the law of the land, there is no authentic need to open up this can of worms.The worms are out of the can. If the government, through the CRTC can legislate truth and news on TV, the precedent exists to impose the same on the internet.
Ross Howard, faculty member for Langara College’s Department of Journalism said in an excellent, but flawed opinion piece by Walker Morrow in the brand, spanking-new thedependent.ca,
... online is just another form of presenting the same info quicker, more accessibly and with greater feedback and diversity of sources.” He continues, “Unfortunately, the Web by itself provides no answer or relief from this ignorance driven by corporate imperatives and near-drowning in the info-tsunami we’re facing, because blogs and Facebook and Twitter etc. provide extraordinary diversity and interactivity but absolutely no reliability.I would challenge Mr. Howard's assertion of the network's unreliability. My friend,Tim Wood, had made and educated and valid argument that would prove correct. Look at his C.V. He wasn't guessing. He didn't make it up. Look at the summary of my posts and point out one that was not reliable. Ask the people of Egypt which was more reliable, the regime or the network. The network is reliable in that it never loses its voice, fluidity, fairness, free expression of ideas and opinions, and sense of justice - the very essence of democracy. And if an open democracy isn't reliable, what on earth is?
Caution, the spin starts here. The same engine that can organize through disorganization can also be retooled and used to quickly reorganize into factions and agendas. The inherent strength of the internet's global democracy is also it's weakness. The network doesn't have leadership nor does it follow a plan, and it is wrong to assume an up and down choice anymore between geezer media and open media.
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