Tarjeta de control de potencia de alto flujo de corriente electrónico

Where a divide was most palpable, however, was not among social media users but between users and non-users. Throughout the data, most participants contrasted themselves against the majority of Egyptians who received information from outside social media. Participants saw themselves as demographically and socio-economically privileged, allowing them to negotiate convergent media in a fashion not possible (or agreeable) to the general public. The public was often seen as left to follow their political biases when consuming information from mass media. This was the concern raised by Kassem, a professor and active user, who saw the privileged and adept social media users representing an elite-flight from direct mass media consumption. This exodus of

privileged citizens, Kassem argued, removed pressure for a more moderate, professional, and neutral media to develop in Egypt. Though social media may demonstrate a

compensatory mechanism to mass media, according to Kassem it also risked exacerbating the partisanship and sensationalism in mass media.

Numerous domestic channels had started broadcasting short segments on trending content on YouTube or Twitter, as Sherine noted at the start of the chapter. Essentially, being on social media could make something inherently newsworthy. The short-lived youth-run satellite station, 25TV, developed a programme called Hashtag which presented topics and material trending on social media. Yusef, who was familiar with the show, described it as presenting “whatever was trending on the internet to the TV for people who don’t access the internet like the most popular YouTube videos, the newest websites, the newest Facebook pages, Tweets from all the activists and other people, or blogs.” Given social media’s relatively small and fractured user-base, Hashtag and other traditional media served to make the online content more widely available to the Egyptian public, potentially resolving what Thoraya described as the massive socio-economic

segmentation between mass media and social media audiences, and by extension the ever growing social polarization this segmentation exacerbated.

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7.6 Discussion

After the Uprising, both mass media and social media experienced new levels of growth. In mass media, new satellite channels were appearing, and even the profession of

journalism was undergoing transformation. In social media, the revolution raised the prominence and boosted the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, supposedly competing with traditional media as sources of information. Yet both platforms were connected to one another, functionally and structurally, exhibiting

convergence of media. But the convergence exhibited is not a seamless integration of old and new media, nor even a coherent one. Rather, the convergence demonstrated an interpenetration of social media and mass media within Egypt’s contentious politics. As with broadcast media, social media was interwoven with the local conditions in Egypt, and this chapter explored its ambivalent yet essential role in contemporary social conflict, polarization, and mistrust. In the previous chapter, 6.Broadcast Media, we found that the Egyptian broadcast media was often perceived to be a problematic source of information, lacking expertise, impartiality, or professionalism. This chapter sought to complement that work by extending the scope to include social media. In so doing, social media was found to functionally complement features of the rest of the information milieu, on the one hand allowing consumers to redress the milieu’s problematic features (mediating and supplementing mass media content or allowing for news to be vetted and personally trusted sources to be followed) and on the other hand reproducing them (polarizing social and political segments of the population or spreading misinformation). Whether through the circulation of content, the assertion of credibility, or the representation of users, the significance of social media was intertwined with the media industry, whether by supplementing, mediating, or compensating for it.

People accessed information that was personally meaningful after it was filtered through an online community, irrespective of its original outlet (ONTV or Al-Masry Al-Youm) or medium (newspapers or television) or original prominence (front-page headline, a

passing reference in a column). The fact that social media relied heavily on broadcast media for its content was previously established through the comprehensive study of on the Arab blogosphere (Etling et al., 2009) which found a high proportion of links from

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social media posts were directed to international and domestic broadcast media. But what participants drew attention to was the autonomous sharing practices that evaluated news according to collective interests rather than editorial priorities. This networked structure, besides personalizing one’s stream of mainstream news, also did away with traditional media’s gate-keeping mechanism, opening the range of news stories available to online audiences, as Fahmy (2010) observed in her study of news stories published on Egyptian blogs. Hamdy and Gomaa’s (2012) comparison of how the Uprising was framed in broadcast media and social media demonstrates a contrast in mainstream and non- mainstream coverage of controversies, but also demonstrates the polarization that this dichotomy manifests (see 3.Literature Review). Yet by filtering and rearranging broadcast content in this manner, as well as complementing it with alternative content, these intermediating processes served to counter-act—to some degree—the editorial biases of broadcast media (see 6.Broadcast Media), even they were reshaped or replaced with online biases.

This is a central aspect of the participatory culture that diffuses convergent media with professional and amateur contributors, as noted by Jenkins (2006). Social media was commonly portrayed by participants as what Hafez called an “independent-alternative” platform for genuinely alternative news, disseminating the information mainstream media—state-owned or privately-owned—shied away from (Fahmy, 2010; Hafez, 2001). Social media could also disseminate information native to social media that redressed the absences of opinion polls, balanced perspectives, or more risqué content. While in the context of information and news gathering such subjective contributions may be seen as problematic, scholars such as Kraidy (2008, 2010) and Lynch (2003, 2005) have

remarked that in the shortage of outlets for public opinions to be openly collected and communicated (e.g., on-air call-ins, letters to the editor, or public polls), there is a value to new media platforms in allowing for private sentiments to be openly expressed, exposing citizens to different viewpoints.

Around every controversy, the Egyptians I spoke with expressed frustration at the

uncertainty and the lack of transparency surrounding the cases, as well as suspicion of the actors associated (see 8.Characteristics). The content and capacities of social media, as

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exemplified here, appended to those of mass media, suggested there was always something taking place behind the scenes; the positive interpretation of this was that social media offered more transparency and accountability than a pliant broadcast media alone could provide. It was in this vein that attorney and legal reform activist Sawsan characterized social media as an antidote to the propaganda that had long permeated Egypt’s media. But in the unstable and reactionary political climate following the Uprising, this media convergence simultaneously perpetuated a culture of distrust, ambiguity, and factionalism, thereby intensifying the public contention permeating the transitional process (see 2.Background). Social media provided a layer of content valorization to the news, circulating it according to collective tastes. Of course, there is also the finer grain fragmentation taking place through social media’s personalized information environment. While the filtering and personalization of information

described in this paper were crucial for orientating politically engaged citizens in a period of intense uncertainty and misinformation, it also served to potentially fragment the knowledge cultures in a time when consensus was desperately needed. These networks operated as filter bubbles (Pariser, 2011), limiting and personalizing the information available to users according to group-specific interests and biases, insulating users from alternative perspectives and opinions of outsiders, and perhaps radicalizing online communities against them. Yet many found social media as a means to access various viewpoints, even from partisan sources they vehemently opposed. Several participants stated that the expression of public opinions was the facet of social media content that most differentiated it from mass media.

The earlier chapters called into question the objectivity, expertise, professionalism, and trustworthiness of media practitioners in Egypt (6.Broadcast Media; see also

2.Background and 3.Literature Review). This mistrust is evident in the common expression “newspaper-speak” (kalam garayed) to refer to falsehoods, as pointed out by one participant. Alterman (1998) anticipated that the wealth of information available through new outlets would lead citizens to become increasingly critical of the credibility of sources across sources. Social media seemed to contribute to this more critical

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by participants not as necessarily providing more credible information than mass media—in fact, misinformation seems the norm rather than the exception.

But as anticipated by Alterman (1998), there was indeed a pressure to discriminate information’s trustworthiness on social media, but it was clear that participants did not think all users had developed the skill to “sift through it”. This skepticism was hard-won, emerging from familiarity with the quality of content circulating online, which genuinely paralleled the sensationalism published in mass media (see 6.Broadcast Media). What was found was that social media, as with mass media, was rife with misinformation or misleading information. There is no sense that social media enjoyed higher medium credibility than newspapers or television, which is in keeping with other research (Hamdy, 2013a, 2013b). Furthermore, the supposition put forward by Wanta and Hu (1994) correlating an audience’s reliance on a source with the source’s perceived credibility was undercut by the responses from participants, as they revealed more complex selection processes. The fact that a source’s lack of credibility did not lead consumers to avoid it demonstrates that the significance of information credibility is moderated by other drives and goals in information consumption, as observed by Tsfati and Cappella (2005). Even non-credible sources can offer important insights, according to participants, whether to acquaint someone with opposing viewpoints, to indicate the gravity of an issue, or derive some gratification in frivolous gossip.

Instead of offering better information, users leveraged the structural and genre elements of Twitter and Facebook (histories, links, profiles, timelines, commentary, and

correspondences) to evaluate the credibility of an online source. This corroborated findings of Etling et al. (2009) of a show me culture native to social media, where the claims of contributors were highly substantiated through interactive online features. It also allowed users to connect with people who may offer first-hand accounts of events being reported, or trace news back to its native source (e.g., a newspaper article, a television interview, a YouTube video) to be seen in full context and assessed according to its original documentation. In sum, social media offered a range of practices for those adept and interested to establish the truth behind stories they came across through online and offline channels. It also fostered a more intimate, personalized trust with sources,

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who may be journalists, activists, or other citizens, whom people could turn to for reliable information.

It must be recognized that many journalists themselves were a large and important demographic of social media users, especially on Twitter, ready to both share and consume content in an effort to keep themselves and their institutions relevant, efficient, and current information sources. This fusion of social media and broadcast media in the Egyptian context was noted by Sakr (2012) and Aouragh and Alexander (2011), who discussed the movement of professionals and amateurs back-and-forth between the two media platforms, relying on both realms according to their respective strengths in order to perform successfully in the other. The heavy presence and reliance of media practitioners on social media not only blurs its material distinction from mass media, but it also

cautions us against overstating it as the realm of “amateurs” (pace Jenkins, 2006). Yusef, however, considered it “sad” that social media remained the go-to source for proper information and verification, without an equally credible and reliable equivalent available through mass media. The alternative interpretation presented here is that social media in Egypt function as an intermediating layer—available to those with the ability and access—modifying and supplementing broadcast media’s deficiencies in content and credibility.

The ongoing debate over the political significance of social media, whether to challenge or entrench dominant interest groups, is hardly resolved by the equivocal testimonies participants offered. Their reports oscillated between the views professed by social media “optimists” (e.g., Feenberg, 2006; 2013; Shirky, 2011) and “skeptics” (e.g., Dean 2005; 2010; Gladwell, 2011; Morozov, 2011). In this popular debate about social media, the former group claims online technologies emancipate citizens by undermining the narratives imposed by top-down structures (e.g., capitalist, technocratic, etc.), while the latter group sees the same technologies only increasing people’s vulnerability to

manipulation and demobilization. My participants variously portrayed social media as exerting a positive, neutral, or negative influence over the domestic circulation of

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judgement of social media within this context impossible, particularly in relation to the aforementioned debates framing social media as either potentially liberatory or inherently undermined by capitalist forms of domination. Yet such contradictions and ambiguities ought to be embraced; they reveal the platforms’ ambivalent effects within the larger circuits of information that participants negotiated. Documenting this complexity, as articulated by the citizens who experienced it, must take priority over any reductive and ideological evaluation of an artificially isolated platform or medium. Furthermore, it is apparent throughout the accounts of participants that social media, good or bad, must be understood for its convergence within a larger information ecosystem, wherein its perceived utility and value take shape; on this point, at least, there seemed to be genuine consensus.

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Chapter 8 - Characteristics of Information Consumers