Arab Media & Society

A focus on Facebook also appears to have missed the apparent shift of online dissent from blogs to Twitter. As Hossam El-Hamalawy puts it, “the migration is not happening to Facebook, it’s happening to the microblogs.”[25] He adds, “Facebook is one of the outlets I have, but the heavyweights are not using Facebook.” The heavyweight bloggers El-Hamalawy refers to were skeptical of the April 6^th movement and its potential, even before the first strike. As blogger Demagh MAK puts it, “The thing is that it’s just easier to use Twitter than a blog. You are in the middle of a demonstration and someone is killed or arrested -- you can’t leave the demonstration and write a blog. One is killed two arrested; you can just send it by Twitter and everybody now knows.”[26] And in fact, it was Twitter that served as the most important clearinghouse for information regarding the events of April 6, 2009.

The decline of the April 6^th movement has been caused by more than poorly framed messages, recourse to ration, and the inherent weaknesses of its main technological tool, however. The Mubarak regime has grown much savvier over the past year with respect to interfering with the communications efforts of activists, making it significantly more difficult for individuals to conduct activism via the tools of the internet and mobile phones. For starters, a sophisticated registration-and-tracing system is now  in place for mobile phones, allowing the government to track users, interfere with their signals, and shut down large-scale attempts to text message. The Egyptian government successfully blocked the routes of activists’ text messages during the 2009 strike. As one of the primary organizers and leaders of the April 6th movement, says of the 2008 strike,

In 2008, we used SMS, we used mobile technology to contact all the people. We sent SMS asking people to call everyone and tell them there is a strike, and for people to use SMS to send us information. All of my friends, members of Kefaya, the parties, we sent SMS to numbers we didn’t know, we sent 2 million bulk mails, and about 50,000 SMS messages.[27]

The blocking of the text-messaging service vastly complicated the efforts of the organizers, who were already cash-strapped. For another part of the problem is simple financial logistics – Egyptian telecommunication companies don’t offer unlimited texting services like those available in other countries. In the United States, for instance, for only a few dollars a month one can purchase a plan that allows one to send unlimited text messages, thus facilitating mass messaging, the coordination of far flung and wide ranging action, and the ability to adjust plans on the go. According to one April 6^th leader, the movement tried to get around this obstacle by purchasing text-messages in bulk from India at a rate of $.01 per message, but the regime successfully blocked these messages as well. This meant that the only coordinating mechanism on the ground the day of the 2009 strike was the micro-blogging service Twitter, although this too had shut down its component that allows users to send text messages, meaning Twitter messages had to be sent via the Mobile Web rather than SMS. That change significantly raised the costs of using Twitter on the go. Those activists who can afford the pricy costs of the mobile web, either through USB internet connections or their cell phones, were still able to communicate and send many-to-many communications through Twitter, but they were limited to the wealthy few. And stripping the April 6^th activists of their messaging capabilities left them with essentially no means of executing or altering their plans after it became clear that the state was ready for them.

The regime has also instituted changes in the structure of internet cafes, vital sites of access to the internet for the average citizen that had been critical to the building of online public spheres in Egypt and in particular the creation and initial success of the April 6^th movement. For years individuals had been able to enter cafés and get online with minimal interference from either café owners or the state. However, as of August 2008, café owners were required to collect vital information about the individuals using their computers.[28] There can be little doubt about the intent of these regulations, and while their effect might be limited in practice, on a symbolic level the attempt to regulate access so closely could only have a chilling effect on the kind of writing, dissent, and activism individuals are willing to engage in. While sympathetic café owners still provide access to activists without collecting this information, it nevertheless forms an additional hurdle to spreading information by creating a general environment characterized by the threat of surveillance, coercion, and arrest. The reduction in the number of locations where unfettered internet access is available for a low cost can only reduce the network transmission capabilities of the technology and interfere with the ability of organizers to communicate and implement their plans.

Potentially a workaround to the clampdown on internet cafés, Egyptian telecommunication companies now offer mobile internet access via USB modems that are convenient for use on personal laptop computers.[29] This is in many ways a unique and useful service, enabling individuals to bypass the unwieldy process of having an internet connection set up in their homes, which for fast and reliable connections can be an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. Activists tell me that this USB connection is quite good, works most anywhere, and is very fast. However, the process of obtaining these devices also falls under state surveillance, as applicants are required to submit identity papers, addresses, and phone numbers, making it possible for users to be tracked by the service providers and hence the state authorities. Like all attempts at interfering with internet access, on-the-ground realities offer any number of workarounds, as sympathetic merchants are sometimes willing to sell USB modems to individuals submitting fake or falsified information. However, as with many attempts to step between the web and potential users, this measure is not necessarily about perfecting enforcement or stopping the truly dedicated and savvy user from accessing the internet. Rather, it’s about placing roadblocks between the internet and users in the same way that slowing down the load time of a web page will deter many individuals from bothering with that page at all.

Finally, activists also have to contend with the reality of de facto non-generative technologies. Zittrain defines generativity as  “a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.”[30] In other words, while many internet technologies were designed to be “open boxes” amenable to alteration by their owners, non-generative technologies are more like closed boxes, tied to their manufacturers and vulnerable to remote alteration, tracking, and destruction. Examples of non-generative devices include the ipod and TiVo; an examples of a generative devices would be the eminently adaptable and reprogrammable PC. Zittrain argues that you can think of this as the difference between “contributors or participants rather than mere consumers.” In the US, non-generativity is related to issues of profits and corporate interest, but in Egypt it is more closely related to surveillance and control, and is the model instituted by the regime and Egyptian telecommunication companies for accessing the Internet and using mobile devices.

Organizers from the April 6^th movement have described what such non-generativity means for them in practice – while it’s easy to change your mobile phone’s “simcard” and hence your number, the phones themselves contain a chip that can’t be removed or altered, making it possible for your initial service provider to track that phone indefinitely. The capabilities of the mobile phone can thus go in two directions, both enabling users to communicate with them and regimes to silence them – as illustrated by the events of June 2009 in Iran. When the Green Revolution took shape, the government shut down the text-messaging network[31]; Iranians were still able to access the Internet, either directly or through proxy servers, and therefore update various forms of social media communication. Yet the shutdown occurred at a critical moment during the Iranian events, preventing individuals and organizers from using their mobile phones as coordinating and frame-building devices and thus essentially crippling the capacity of mobile phones to serve as an accelerant when most needed .