Arab Media & Society

In terms of ideas, most observers agree that the action was poorly conceptualized. Anniversary actions would probably only be a success if they commemorated an occasion of much larger significance – which is not to underestimate what took place in 2008, but rather to emphasize the fact that the greatest resistance had taken place in Mahalla and that it ultimately all ended with the regime more or less victorious. In other words, it wasn’t exactly clear what was being commemorated on April 6, 2009. So with the Mubarak regime having proven that the potential costs of repression remain very high in Egypt, most young people in the country took the rational approach and decided that they would let other people make a political statement for them. And in classic prisoner’s dilemma form, that statement was never made because the vast majority of people made precisely the same calculation. This outcome is also in keeping with the findings of collective action literature that suggests it is the presence of cogent demands that drives protest movements, rather than new technologies themselves. The youthful, elite organizers of the April 6^th movement, social media technology in hand, are simply not capable of singlehandedly manufacturing the conditions that might lead to widespread protest in Egypt.

Another conceptual obstacle to the success of the 2009 follow-up strike was related to a factional split that can partly be traced to rumors about funding the movement - Ahmed Maher himself is alleged to have sought cash from Freedom House, an organization believed to have ties to the US foreign security apparatus. Rumors of CIA involvement in the April 6^th movement crippled the activists’ credibility at a critical juncture and turned the group’s Facebook page into a battleground. Group leaders denied they had worked with Freedom House and reaffirmed their commitment to barring foreign involvement in the movement, but the damage appeared to have already been done.[18] One activist told me that while opposition forces are happy to accept technical assistance from foreign promoters of democracy, the acceptance of cash from organizations with known agendas can be deadly for the public credibility of organizers.[19]

To truly understand the failure of the April 6, 2009 message, however, we must first understand what it was about the message of the previous year that had resonated with so many people. At the time, Egypt was undergoing price increases for basic staples just as the global economy was beginning to take a turn for the worse. Even those individuals who didn’t know anyone in Mahalla or particularly care about the fate of striking textile workers had an access point to the movement’s message about economic justice. The increase in the price of bread, in particular, called to mind the reason for Egypt’s last large-scale street action in 1977. And most importantly, the general strike call was yoked to a concrete, on-the-ground action – the strike of Mahalla textile workers and their demands for better wages and working conditions. Without the very real foment in the streets of that city and its emotive effect on Egyptian observers, it is unlikely that anyone in Cairo or Alexandria would have cared enough to join this kind of a Facebook group to begin with.

It was the absence of such a clear message that led to confusion about the purpose of the follow-up strike in 2009. Individuals were asked to stay home and not buy anything – but if they had to leave the house, to wear black. All of this was allegedly to protest the injustices perpetrated during and after the April 6, 2008 strike, making the whole movement somewhat self-referential. Given that the message of the April 6^th movement had not reached important sections of the Egyptian population to begin with, basing the follow-up strike on the repression following the 2008 strike was probably not a wise tactic. Still, there were concrete demands. According to the movement, the April 6, 2009 strike had four: the institution of a national minimum wage, the indexing of prices to inflation, the election of a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution, and the suspension of gas exports to Israel.[20] The third demand in particular was unrealistic at best, and probably only served to underline the regime's fears about the movement's true goals. The demand for a national minimum wage was almost certainly undermined by the regime's success in buying off sectors of the labor movement with wage increases. While this was less the fault of the movement than a success for the regime, it still points to the movement’s failure to craft an effective message. Finally, the demand regarding Egypt’s relations with Israel probably only served to muddy the waters.

Yet in addition to the fact that the organizers failed to develop a credible and mobilizing message to feed into their social networking tools, certain limitations to the potential of Facebook organizing itself presented challenges to the planned 2009 strike.

To begin with, Facebook groups seem to engender extraordinarily low levels of commitment on the part of their members. While the technical capabilities of Facebook – such as the public nature of “status updates” and the ability of users to change their profile picture to adopt a popular symbol– lend themselves to the production and dissemination of ideas, they do not necessarily facilitate the active and sustained mobilization of individuals. Ethan Zuckerman points to the problem of “serial activists”, who jump from cause to cause and join group after group – Gaza, April 6^th, freeing Ayman Nour – without ever making a real investment of time or energy in any of them.[21] This potential for lack of commitment should have been understood when the movement’s initial follow-up action, the May 4^th strike, turned out to be such a resounding failure.

So while the April 6^th Facebook page still has 70,000 members, very few of them remain actively involved, whether on the group’s message board or in real life. According to one of April 6^th’s senior members, the movement maintains only about 2,000 full-time members on the ground.[22] The April 6^th movement eventually grasped this commitment problem and created a web presence [23] to complement its Facebook profile, but even these technologies in tandem can't mobilize people without concomitant movement on the ground.

And in addition to engendering low levels of commitment, features of Facebook’s interface can actually undermine its utility under certain circumstances and be counterproductive to effective online organizing. Particularly at the height of a crisis, for example, the “wall” of a group and the main Facebook status update page of an individual can be inundated with messages. “In that flood of data, it’s possible to lose key messages,” contends Zuckerman.[24]