Arab Media & Society

The cumulative effect of such deterrents can frustrate technology users to the point of simply accepting that there are things they can’t or shouldn’t be doing. Removing these individual nodes from a large network can slow down the information transmission capacity of social media and compromise their utility, in keeping with Metcalfe’s law about the value of communications networks growing as the number of their users rises.[32] It doesn’t seem that the Egyptian regime intends to shut down networks altogether (though that of course remains an ever present possibility, particularly during short-term crises). Rather, its aim seems to be creating uncertainty and hardship for activists engaging with technological tools at the same time that are persecuted in much more straightforward and old-fashioned ways.[33] The number of activists willing to put up both with state harassment and technical interference is surely not as high as the number of activists willing to engage in this activity absent such efforts.

Conclusion

It would be unfortunate if the failure of the April 6^th Youth Movement in this one particular instance led to the end of youth activism in Egypt generally, or even the departure of the newly-mobilized urban youth elite from the field of activism. Egyptian youth constitute a substantial majority of the population (58 percent of Egyptians are under 25) and will have to play a critical role in any serious process of political change that may take place in the coming years.[34] Yet the state these activists are tangling with is a battle-tested authoritarian regime with decades of experience dividing and conquering its opposition. It will take a much savvier opposition, with much clearer goals and a much stronger presence on the ground, to seriously threaten the state. And even with the global financial downturn, there are still enough Egyptians profiting from the economic order that the “end” of the Mubarak regime – if it comes – is likely to be quite unexpected and unplanned, as in the popular response to the Iranian presidential election earlier this year.

As El-Ghobashy argues, there has in fact been a certain democratization of Egyptian public life over the past 25 years – she cites the growth of human rights organizations, the increasing strength of the judiciary, and the revival of professional associations[35]. El-Ghobashy contends that this process has been enabled and accelerated by what she calls the “internationalization” of Egyptian politics. I would add the development of independent media outlets like Al-Masry Al-Youm and Al-Sharouk and the recent struggles of the labor movement to the list of democratic victories that are painstakingly being carved out in Egypt today. Despite the setbacks faced by the various opposition forces, a trend toward democratization has been clear, even as the government has walked back freedoms in other, more high-profile areas.

Yet if a viable opposition is to take shape with the assistance of electronic media like Twitter and Facebook, that opposition will have to pay much more careful attention to the kinds of small-scale struggles over freedom taking place every day in the courts, the press, the labor sector, and the professional associations. Where was the April 6^th movement, for instance, on the long-running strike in the Tanta Flax and Oils Company?[36] Electronic activists will have to pick up the banner of the struggle for an independent labor federation and to pay closer attention to the kinds of battles that can and cannot be won in the courts. It will also have to draw the right conclusions from what worked on April 6, 2008 and what didn’t on April 6, 2009. The 2008 strike probably wasn’t so much a large-scale mobilization as a test run for the kind of information dissemination that the international media has written so extensively about in Iran this year. As El-Hamalawy notes, “It was a day where information technology played a crucial role, the updates coming out of Mahalla, people were exchanging info on Facebook about the strike, they were mobilizing, how can we help, this and that.”[37]

And future actions should probably be tied either to on-the-ground labor activism or to those areas in which activists and professionals have had the most success contesting the regime’s hegemony: human rights and issues of constitutional and economic justice. These issues are the subject of widespread political agreement among Egypt’s divergent opposition forces,[38] and if they can successfully pool their resources, social media are likely to play a critical role in building political consensus, coordinating and executing concrete actions, and in putting together international human rights coalitions that can put pressure on the regime.   The most promising route might be for the April 6^th movement, with its ties to international media organizations and NGOs, to somehow link up with the labor movement in advance of the 2011 presidential elections – even if not all sectors of the opposition agree with the labor movement’s economic principles. As other revolutions have demonstrated, unity around issues of democracy must precede struggles over the post-revolutionary landscape. However, it is up to individual activists to turn the possibilities of social media into reality, and even the most tech-and-politically savvy individuals will continue to face determined resistance from a regime that has so far confounded any and all attempts to challenge its hegemony.

David M. Faris  is finishing  a PhD in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He conducted extensive fieldwork in Egypt between 2007 and 2009 on the relationship between new media technologies and politics.