Arab Media & Society

“Still, it cannot be denied, based on the observation of recent processes of sociopolitical change, that access to and use of wireless communication technology adds a fundamental tool to the arsenal of those who seek to influence politics and the political process without being constrained by the powers that be.”

-Castells et. al.

Introduction

There are, generally, five kinds of newspapers in Egypt: the government-owned dailies, the opposition dailies, the party newspapers, the regional papers, and newspapers published from abroad.¹ Public discourse is still dominated by government-owned or controlled media, such as the newspaper giant Al-Ahram and the state television. Independent newspapers such as Al-Masry Al-Youm and Al-Dustur have changed this equation, but the circulation figures still favor the government-owned and aligned media outlets. Egypt’s press environment can best be described as somewhat free. Rugh recently classified Egypt’s press environment as “transitional,” by which he means “these systems were quite complex, containing strong elements of government control and influence, alongside elements of freedom and diversity.”² Rugh argues that while journalists have much more freedom than in the past in such countries (he includes Tunisia, Jordan and Algeria in the category) the government still retains certain privileges, and that there are “red lines” that journalists dare not cross. In a practical sense, this means there appears to be a lively press environment, with copious criticisms of regime practices and policies – even in the government-owned papers – but with a great deal of self-censorship occurring still. In Egypt, the process of obtaining a license to publish a newspaper is a daunting obstacle to any entity or individual who wishes to pursue one. Black³ details the ordeal that awaited the would-be publishers of El-Badeel in 2007, who had to wait months upon months for their license.

As one might expect in such an authoritarian regime, many groups and individuals have difficulty accessing the public sphere. This exclusion might be due to social factors, as in the case of religious minorities such as Coptic Christians and Baha’is, or it might be due to political exclusion, as in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood. Whatever the source of exclusion, such groups have had great difficulty having their voices heard as part of a robust public sphere. Since the growth of the Internet in the mid-90s, scholars have looked for signs that the digital world might provide a haven for the growth of alternative public spheres for such groups, sometimes conceptualized as “electronic public spheres”, explicitly borrowing the concept of the public sphere from Habermas and applying it to the Internet. They do so in recognition that, as Palczewski argues, “Social movement and counterpublic sphere theories have recognized the importance of identity creation and self-expression to the disempowered.”⁴ Blogs themselves have long been posited as “the voice of the voiceless”, a way to democratize public life and add the voices of ordinary people to those of the elites.

In addition to blogging, the rise of Web 2.0 has given rise to the creation of what some scholars have called “social media”, what Shirky refers to as “social tools” and what I refer to as Social Media Networks (SMNs). Social Media Networks encompass Weblogs (i.e. blogs), social networking sites such as Facebook, niche-networking sites such as LinkedIn (for professional networking), crowdsourcing content such as Digg⁵ (a site that allows users to rank and control media content), text-messaging services (by which mobile phone users can send written messages to one another), micromedia services such as Twitter (a many-to-many communications service that allows users to send messages to each other or post them to blogs), picture-sharing services such as Flickr (which allows users to mark or “tag” their photos and self-organize the content), and event-planning sites like Meet-Up. Much of what these services do is allow people to share information and to form groups, at a very low cost, with a very large number of people, and to do so interactively.

Online social networks are of critical importance when seeking to understand the impact of blogs. A single blog is simple a node in the vast network of the Internet. But not all nodes are created equal. In fact, the readership of blogs is governed by power laws, the idea that certain nodes in these networks have virtually no limit on their potential size or scale.⁶ The nodes of ordinary networks – a street grid, for example – have a more even distribution of connections, but networks governed by power laws can have wildly uneven distributions. Gladwell and Barabasi, among others, have noted that while most people tend to have roughly the same number of acquaintances, a small number of people (those Gladwell termed “connectors”) have an extraordinary number of social connections.⁷ In network terminology those connectors are hubs, and according to the law of preferential attachment, hubs are much more likely to attract new connections than other nodes in the network. The application of power laws to cyberspace was made when scholars tried to “map” the Internet and found that while there are millions of Web pages, only a few have more than a handful of links to other pages, while a select few (the hubs) have thousands and thousands. Again, as Watts argues, what distinguishes such a network from most of these ordinary networks is that a tiny minority of “nodes” will have an extraordinary numbers of connections, while the vast majority have few or none.⁸ This finding has proven to be quite robust.⁹ Understanding that readership is governed by power laws in the world of Social Media Networks will help us determine exactly how digital activists may and may not have an impact in authoritarian countries.

The Open Net Initiative, which monitors the extent of government filtering of the Internet globally, argues that there are still no formal attempts to filter or block Web sites in Egypt (2009)¹⁰. Boas and Kalathil note that Egypt, in contrast to Saudi Arabia, has no formal mechanism to control or filter Internet content.¹¹ What the Egyptian government does do quite effectively is harass and repress bloggers and other practitioners of online media. In fact all three of the journalists in prison at the time of writing are bloggers, and the regime arrested more than 100 bloggers in 2008 alone. Still, the lack of architectural control mechanisms means that individuals have still been willing to engage in activism online¹², and in many cases seem willing to suffer prison time. If Social Media Networks can help minorities challenge authoritarian states, we should be able to see this effect in Egypt, with its relatively liberal policies on online dissent.

This article will explain the impact of social media on subordinated minorities in Egypt through the exploration of the case of ID cards for Baha’is.The case study will seek to answer two questions: 1) Are Social Media Networks creating electronic public spheres or counterpublics for these groups? and 2) What is the actual political or social impact of these efforts? In other words, while existing studies have usually merely documented the electronic activity of subordinated groups, this study treats such activity as sui generis and seeks to build theories about the conditions under which social media might alter the material political conditions for subordinated minorities. Such a recognition does not preclude an appropriate recognition of the importance of self-expression and identity for subordinated minorities, but argues that in addition to these important functions, Social Media Networks are the critical missing variable in explaining the impact of the Internet on minorities. The null hypothesis is that whatever their contributions to deliberation and building democratic values (and even these hypotheses are suspect given recent research by Sunstein¹³ and Hindman¹⁴, Egyptian social media practitioners are doing little to nothing to change the political environment for subordinated minorities like women, Baha’is and Muslim Brothers. The alternative hypothesis advanced here is that SMNs transmit information from electronic public spheres into larger spheres, either national or global, and thereby impact perceptions of subordinated minorities and, under certain circumstances, lead to mobilizations. They do so through critical “nodes” of elite blogger-activists and their connections to the mainstream Egyptian media. The competing hypotheses will be evaluated against the evidence presented below in the hopes of arriving at an explanation and further building theory.

Politics in the online public sphere

Since the rise of Internet advocacy in the 1990s, scholars have sought to categorize and explain the impact of electronic communities on politics and society, in the United States. and abroad. One of the most popular subjects of scholarly inquiry has been the use of the Internet by marginalized groups – diasporas, ethnic, religious and political minorities, and revolutionary groups. These inquiries are usually couched in language borrowed from Jurgen Habermas, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Habermas defined the public sphere as “a domain of our social life in which such a thing as public opinion can be formed.”¹⁵ The public sphere as it developed in Europe in the 18^th and 19^th centuries was imagined as a place where previously excluded groups and individuals could have their voices heard, through conversations in cafés, salons, and newspapers .¹⁶ Habermas called the people’s “public use of their reason” “peculiar and without historical precedent”¹⁷. It is the aspect of unfettered access that makes it so difficult to theorize online public spheres as Habermasian public spheres, especially in authoritarian or impoverished contexts. However, Habermas’s third element, that “ideas presented in the public sphere were considered on the basis of their merits, and not on the social standing of the speaker”¹⁸ does appear to apply to the Internet. Theorists of online public spheres are particularly apt to seize on this last point, since in theory blogs, chat rooms, and community Web sites are open to anyone – both for formation and participation.

Dahlberg, however, offers a full set of reasons why online public spheres fail to meet the standards delineated by Habermas.¹⁹ Such reasons include the increasing commercialization of the digital world, the lack of civility and deliberation online, the difficulty of ascertaining the veracity of information, and the exclusion of certain groups and individuals because of unequal access to digital communications. One might add Hindman’s finding that the American blogosphere has merely crowned a new elite, since many prominent bloggers and activists are the graduates of Ivy League universities, are well-known journalists, or can be thought of in other ways as elites. Many such inquiries have involved delineating the terms and conditions of what might constitute such an online public sphere, and whether certain sites, communities, or groups meet those standards.

Other scholars have characterized the use of the Internet by subordinated groups as “virtual counterpublics” or “cyber-movements”²⁰. Counterpublic theory may be a particularly appropriate way to analyze the use of Social Media Networks in Egypt. Fraser (1992) defines counterpublics as “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs”²¹. Counterpublics are theorized as operating in distinction from, and opposition to, the bourgeois public sphere of Habermasian theory, inasmuch as the public sphere itself can be exclusionary. Asen and Brouwer note that counterpublics have a dual nature – on the one hand they operate as sites of debate, identity-formation, and refuge from the public sphere, while on the other, they serve as sites of training and resistance for activism in the broader public sphere²². Ideas of exclusion, oppression, and resistance are key for counterpublic theory. In Egypt, Baha’is are struggling to constitute identities in the face of powerful state and corporate interests that seek to impose conceptions of identity and action upon them. And for all, the digital world of Social Media Networks offers the possibility of, at minimum, a discursive arena largely, though not entirely, free of state interference, where ideas and practices of resistance can be developed and senses of community fostered.

Blogs also might offer a kind of updated literary public sphere. Habermas outlined two kinds of public spheres – the literary and the political. The former emerged through the development of novels out of letter-writing, and led to the development of interiority. Habermas argued that the development of novels in 18^th-century Europe restructured “the intimacy of the private realm”, which came to be seen as “the authentic space of human existence”²³. The public nature of the novel meant that no one with the means to purchase them could be excluded from reading them. Similarly, one of the animating goals of bloggers from subordinated minorities is precisely to humanize the Other, to allow access to the interiority of demonized groups, and to give them an “authentic space of human existence”. At the same time, those blogs offer not only a glimpse into the inner lives of the Other, but they also provide their authors with the ability to critically comment on the affairs of the state. Social Media Networks increase the "carrying capacity" for public debate. Maratea argues that "the emergence of social problems results from a competitive process in which claims-makers vie for public attention by promoting problem claims in public arenas"²⁴. However, the public has limited attention, and traditional avenues of leveling claims in society have traditionally been limited - newspaper op-ed pages, demonstrations, and the mainstream media. The blogosphere, however, has been able to introduce new claims-makers into the public arena (what others might call the public sphere), by offering citizens publishing tools at very low cost²⁵ . The introduction of new claims-makers often takes the form of blogs providing journalists with "a trove of available claims"²⁶. While Maratea was writing strictly about the blogosphere, the rise in importance of other Social Media Networks since 2008 only serves to provide elite journalists with more potential "troves" of claims and claims-makers. And in authoritarian contexts such as Egypt, the carrying capacity of traditional public arenas is even lower, due to repression, censorship, and self-censorship. So SMNs might play a particularly important role in such societies, transmitting claims from groups such as Baha'is to elite journalists, where they reach the public sphere. This study argues, again, that it is the links between elite journalists and SMN activists in Egypt that explains a great deal of the impact of these technologies on Egyptian public life.

Bahai’s and virtual identity-formation