GONZALO

Figure 12 The Headquarters of the National Democratic Party (NDP) on the afternoon of January 28, 2011, after protestors burned it down. Picture taken by Hossam El-Hamalawy and used here with his permission.

IV. The Virtual Making of Tahrir

Many analysts have emphasized the significance of social media in the Egyptian

revolution. And to be sure, the impact of social media warrants attention as both a relatively new and a potentially powerful social phenomenon. Yet, too often, analysts have exaggerated the role of social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter, at the risk of reducing the complex dynamics of the revolution to a form of technological determinism. These analyses have oversimplified the complicated role of social media and failed to explore their connection to various forms of off-line activism, and to broader and historically longer political dynamics.

Even within the eighteen days of the revolution itself, the role of social media shifted over time, becoming minimal at some moments and generating paradoxical effects at others. The more accurate and productive question, therefore, is not whether the Egyptian revolution was a “social media revolution,” but in what ways social media facilitated, impeded, and/or influenced the revolution.

In this section, I distinguish between the online and offline dimensions of the revolution, and chart how the connections between the two shifted over time with various effects.

Specifically, I examine how online-offline interaction drew attention to the Tahrir Square sit-in, practically assisted those who were gathered there, and eventually constructed Tahrir as an icon of the revolution. I call this the virtual making of Tahrir. This was a unique process whereby the sit-in was connected both to the larger Egyptian population and to an international audience, making Tahrir the sit-in of and for Egypt’s revolution. I argue, however, that the relationship between the space of Tahrir and the forms of cyber-activism before and during the revolution was more multi-layered and dynamic than has been previously acknowledged. First, while cyber-activism was significant in both the initial mobilization that lead to the occupation of Tahrir Square and the subsequent iconization of the sit-in there, the physical square itself must also be remembered as a major site of bloggers’ and activists’ organizing efforts and campaigns during the revolution. It is this reciprocal dynamic between online and offline dimensions of activism that I seek to emphasize here. In doing so, I argue against technological determinism and affirm the insistence of many of my informants that, for all their virtual dimensions, revolutions are, ultimately, fought out on the ground.

Second, the role of social media in the revolution was not static over time; rather, it took different forms and shifted through various phases. I divide my analysis of the interaction

between online and offline activism into four phases: 1) From June 2010 to January 27 2011; 2) January 28 to February 1, 2011; and 3) February 2 to February 11, 2011. As discussed in Chapter 2, social media contributed in various ways to expand and transform political public space in Egypt in the years leading up to 2011. Here, I focus more specifically on the revolution itself, noting how social media facilitated mobilization at key moments, provoked various government responses, and sometimes produced paradoxical effects.

Social Media and Initial Mobilization for the Revolution

The period during which social media arguably played the most decisive role in the Egyptian revolution was in the few months leading up to the revolution. The most important and obvious example is the role played by the We Are All Khaled Said Facebook page, introduced in the previous chapter. The page was central in what I describe as the initial mobilization for the revolution. Between June 2010 and January 2011, the page brought widespread attention to the issue of police brutality, in general, and the case of Khaled Said, specifically. Activists used the page to organize various demonstrations related to the case. Over this seven-month period, the page attracted more and more visitors and built up credibility—in large part by avoiding

association with any one political party. By the time of the revolution, the page had almost half a million members. ⁹³ And in the weeks immediately preceding the revolution, the page became the primary virtual meeting place for discussions and publicizing events—including, most crucially, the protests in Tahrir Square on January 25, 2011.

As activists discussed various details regarding where, when, and how to stage protests, the We are All Khaled Said page provided an important site through which participants

93 At the time of this writing, the page has 3.5 million members (or “likes” for the page). The page also released statistics showing the number of visitors since its formation: one billion and 300 thousand by the end of March 2011.

themselves developed patterns of online-offline communication and instituted collective forms of discussion and decision making. Members of the page proposed ideas about places and slogans and shared practical strategies. The administrators simply facilitated the discussion and

highlighted conclusions reached through some form of consensus. Some of my informants, especially the founders of what later became the Youth Coalition for the Revolution described to me how, in the weeks leading up to the revolution, they regularly interacted with the

administrators of the page, even though the identities of the latter were still unknown at the time.

YCR members sent the WAAKS page administrators numerous e-mails and Facebook messages, discussing various ideas for the prospective protest. This mediated relationship between

participants who eventually gathered in mass numbers at the same place at the same time make it very difficult to assert a rigid dichotomy between the virtual and the real. They also indicate that social media was providing participants with an opportunity to practice and produce new forms of dialogue and interaction. And for all that my informants insisted that the revolution absolutely could not be contained or enacted online, neither would it have been possible without the forms of planning and mobilization made possible there.

The Social Media Blackout: January 28 – February 1, 2011

Egyptian authorities shut down the Internet and all cell phone communication in Egypt at midnight, January 28, 2011. For almost one week, Egypt was returned to a pre-digital age. The measure was described by the US-based Internet-analysis firm Renesys as “an action

unprecedented in Internet history” that rendered “every Egyptian site inaccessible, from any part of the world” (Toor 2011). And yet, despite this drastic action, the revolution continued. The significance of this pairing cannot be overemphasized, particularly in light of the analyses mentioned at the beginning of this paper that would attempt to reduce the revolution to a form of

technological determinism. Too often, enthusiastic, yet overly simplistic claims about the role of social media in the Egyptian revolution ignore the question of how the protests continued and even intensified after the Internet shutdown. The answer to this is three-fold. First, protestors returned to using pre-digital methods of communication, from landlines to satellite phones and, perhaps most importantly, word of mouth. Second, they developed “backdoor” social media strategies whereby they would speak to friends and family outside of Egypt who would post to social media on their behalf. Thirdly and most importantly for the purposes of this chapter, there was a paradoxical effect of the social media and communications ban—namely, the blackout served to anger and mobilize a greater number of people, but at the same time, it spatially compressed their energies, by necessity, on a smaller space, specifically, Tahrir.

January 28, 2011, also described as the “Friday of Rage,” was a decisive day in the events of the revolution: Mubarak’s brutal Central Security Forces police suffered a major defeat in their street battles with protesters in many neighborhoods in urban centers—the most famous of which were in downtown Cairo near Tahrir, and relatively more restrained army troops were deployed in the streets (Cole 2011a). These two things: the defeat of the police and the

deployment of the army signaled an important victory for the revolution—a victory that

depended, in large part, upon the large turnout of protestors on the streets that day. The irony, of course, is that this was right in the middle of the Internet and communications blackout in Egypt.

But even more ironic is the following possibility: that the absence of social media actually helped to increase the numbers of protesters who participated that day. I interviewed many activists about their participation in the revolution, particularly focusing on specific days such as January 25 and January 28. Even more interesting, however, were my interviews with everyday citizens who didn’t identify as activists prior to the revolution, but who ended up in the streets

participating in it nonetheless. These informants told me: we and many of the other people we know just went to the streets to check things out; we wanted to see with our own eyes what was going on, given the lack of news and communications.

Some background context is helpful here: according to a 2011 United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) report, the number per 100 people in the Egyptian population who had cell phones was 101, and number per 100 who were Internet users was 36 (UNICEF 2013). If we exclude elders and children, every Egyptian has more than one cell phone. Many households have more cell phone lines than family members. People do this for a variety of reasons, from marking class status, to securing privacy between family and work and in society in general, to maneuvering between all these spheres. But as a result, many Egyptians were even more angry about the shutting down of all cell phone communications than they were about the Internet blackout. Eliminating cell phone conversations—both voice and text—meant, for many, essentially stopping life for millions of people in Egypt—many of whom might not otherwise have been mobilized to participate in the revolution. As one informant told me: “This was the decision that made critical mass participate in the revolution.”

Thus, by the morning of February 2, 2011, when Internet and cell phone communications were restored in Egypt, the plan had already backfired. Far from ensuring the world would see images of only pro-Mubarak supporters, the return of the Internet at this time enabled protestors to show the world the exact opposite of what Mubarak’s regime wanted to portray: its brutality and authoritarianism. Images of protesters being beaten in Tahrir, and attacks with camels and live ammunition were circulated worldwide. While the shutdown had contributed to stir up international sympathy for the protestors in Tahrir, this ill-timed (from the regime’s perspective)

return of the Internet and its rapidly circulating images, Tweets, and videos contributed to make Tahrir the icon of the Egyptian revolution.

By “iconization,” I mean the process by which the circulated images of and messages regarding Tahrir Square transformed Tahrir into the most potent symbol and representative sign of the revolution. This happened through multiple channels. The first was the immediate

coverage of events through social media. Egyptian bloggers and activists, and also regular citizens who became politicized through the protests, used their cell phones and smart phones to take pictures and send/post messages about Tahrir. The second channel was the creation of the Twitter topic or “hashtag” #Tahrir (other famous hashtags of the revolution being Egypt, Jan25, revolution, and Mubarak). Using this hashtag, sympathetic activists from around the world started to share and spread words and images from Tahrir. The phrase “Tweets from Tahrir”

became widespread in the days immediately preceding the ousting of Mubarak on February 11.⁹⁴ In short, social media interacted with offline events and actions to constitute the sit-in in Tahrir as the central icon of the revolution. And to the extent that this “making” of Tahrir was effected in part through virtual channels, the process highlights the immediate modularity of the repertoires that converged at Tahrir. The sit-in itself may not have been replicated per se

elsewhere in Egypt, particularly not at the same scale or with the same level of success, yet through social media and iconization of Tahrir, I suggest that we might find in this example new ways of thinking about repertoires and their transferability/transposability, as highlighted so famously by Sidney Tarrow (1993).

94 Notably, it was only a few months after the revolution that books began to appear with the words

“Twitter” “Tahrir” in the title; the most important of which was Tweets from Tahrir, edited by Alex Nunns and Nadia Idle (Idle and Nunns 2011). The book also has a website that features important tweets from Tahrir during the revolution (“Tweets”). And also see some pieces written about this period (Nunns 2011).

Conclusion

This chapter was devoted to investigate how the sit-in in Tahrir became the central repertoire in the Egyptian revolution, and how all repertoires took place in Tahrir became the central mode of action in the revolution. Empirically, the discussion in this chapter shows that the discussion about spontaneity in the Egyptian revolution and Tahrir is exaggerated. As I show in the chapter, actions in Tahrir entailed a mix of organization and spontaneity. Theoretically, Tahrir sit-in represents a challenge to the scholarship in repertoires in three different ways. The first of these is the problem of scale. As I showed in this chapter, while Tahrir sit-in was bound by space of Tahrir, the sit-in was transformed into the center of all main protest actions in the revolutions. In other words, seemingly the sit-in repertoire was bound by space, but it was connected to different places, and also wider impact that goes beyond Tahrir. My study to the sit-in sit-in Tahrir expose the limitations of conventional theories of repertoire which do not deal with how repertoire may have scale up and down. The second way is the problem of repertoire’s connections to other repertories. Most of the literature in collective action repertoires does not deal with this issue. This literature tends to analyze repertoires as separate from one another. A close reading to some of the foundational literature about repertoires sheds light about how historical contexts mattered (such as the French revolution and barricades), but also that we need to study them in relations to one another. As shown in this chapter, Tahrir was not only a sit-in, but was in a sort of organized and messy connections with other repertoires such as rallies, building barricades and also attacking government buildings. Third, this chapter is also an

invitation to expand and problematize the question of modularity as developed by Sidney Tarrow.

Tarrow’s modularity simply means the transferability and or the transposability of modes of

collective action. Even though Tahrir sit-in was not transferred to other parts in Egypt (there is only one failed attempt only in Alexandria as I showed in the introduction), but the fact that Tahrir was iconized and virtually constructed, while it was happening in the same time, as a global phenomena (which latter inspired occupy movement) makes one wonder, can we speak of

“immediate modularity?” As the chapter shows, social media contributed to process of

iconization of Tahrir, and globalizing its image at the time of the protest during the revolution.

CHAPTER 4