Egypt’s Unfinished Revolution: The Role of the Media Revisited

Contemporary Review of the Middle East, 2022

This article offers a new perspective on the extensive discussion of the role of new media in facilitating the 2011 Egyptian uprising by placing it within the historical context of how the state responded to new media in the previous decades. This article uses an archaeological analysis of state media to reveal how the state coped with the news media (newspapers, radio, television, satellite television) in the past to infer the present relationship between the state and the new media (the internet and social media). We discerned a recurring cyclical pattern characterized by a dynamic of openness-adaptation-narrowing, which sheds light on the media's ability to challenge state authority and on the state's ability to contain and limit new media. We suggest that the role of the internet and social media in the Egyptian "Arab Spring" should be viewed as being on this continuum, as an extension of processes of state-media relations that had developed in the preceding decades.

This dissertation is about information activists and journalists in revolutionary Egypt and their effort to make and spread dissenting stories and create revolutionary places, risking their life, freedom and wellbeing to do so. I approach media as place-making. I focus on media as part of the phenomenological world and I am interested in how media influence and are influenced by the places they move through. Thus, I pay attention to how media occur out in the world among people and I place media in relation to the movement of people and other things. This approach to media entails a focus on how information activists, journalists and others in revolutionary Egypt engage with media with their bodies. And it allows a focus on small places, which I find more revealing than the grand narratives of Tahrir Square. Thus, in this dissertation, I investigate the emplacement of information activists, journalists, and their media. Doing so, I seek to show how information activists and journalists move with and are moved by media in tents, streets, offices, apartments, and more. Further, I seek to show how media in revolutionary Egypt create opportunities for action and knowing, when information activists and journalists engage with media in different places. The dissertation consists of four articles, which are brought together by an extended introduction. The extended introduction situates the efforts of information activists and journalists in revolutionary Egypt by tracing the developments of military dictatorship back to the first military coup in 1952. Further, the introduction presents an analytical framework by developing the notion of media as place-making. Lastly, the introduction establishes a methodological framework, which draws on the notion of media as place-making. The methodological framework is grounded in phenomenological anthropology and establishes knowing in places while paying particular attention to how media influence place. Article 1, Blurred boundaries or conflicting epistemologies: Information activism and journalism in Egypt argues that information activists and journalists often have similar practices and goals. Yet, the article traces a significant distinction in their epistemologies. I describe these different epistemologies with Tim Ingold’s (2000a) notions of a global and spherical perception of the environment, which place the perceiver respectively outside and inside the world, which is perceived. Article 2, ‘Being there’, phone in hand: Thick presence and anthropological fieldwork with media investigates my own emplacement as an anthropologist and argues that studying with media influences our presence in the field. This argument also has implications for the activists and journalists of my study and their presence in different places. Article 3, Tents, tweets and television: Breaking taboos about military trials for civilians in revolutionary Egypt uses the concept of communicative ecologies to describe how infrastructure developed through different places in relation to the No to Military Trials for Civilians campaign. Lastly, article 4, Making media public: On revolutionary street screenings in Egypt, which I have co-written with Mosireen activist, Sherief Gaber, exemplifies the importance of looking at media as place-making by describing how videos shown at revolutionary street screenings influenced and were influenced by the places they moved through. The dissertation is based on seven months of anthropological fieldwork with information activists and journalists in Egypt, extensive previous and subsequent stays in Egypt and an extended period of fieldwork outside of Egypt. The fieldworks in Egypt were carried out in two rounds, first in the beginning of 2012, when The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) was leading the country, and again in the beginning of 2013, when Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood was president. This dissertation contributes to the emerging body of empirically-based scholarship on media and the Egyptian revolution, particularly by investigating connections between activists and journalists, by following significant stages in the revolution, and by engaging with small places. The main methodological contribution of this dissertation revolves around studying with media. I develop the notion of thick presence, breaking presence into co-location, ‘the presence of there here’, and ‘our presence there’. This provides a way of conceptualising that presence with media is not always reciprocal. The main theoretical contribution of this dissertation revolves around media as place-making. Violence has highlighted important things about how I could understand media and place in revolutionary Egypt. I argue that media make places by bringing a presence of other places into a place. With this, I contribute to how we can understand increasingly moveable media as part of and as made by the places they move through. Lastly, this dissertation has grown of out an industrial PhD carried out in collaboration with NGO, International Media Support (IMS). It is therefore relevant to point to its applied contribution. My research contributes to the work of IMS and similar institutions mainly by showing the relations between media and place. By doing so, it highlights the importance of supporting the creation of places with media. That is, this dissertation points to the importance of looking beyond products and audiences and engage with the places in which media occur. Thus, supporting the creation of a documentary film would be well accompanied by an attention to how this film can be shown.

2012

The popular revolution in Egypt has proven that the state-owned media was far from being the public opinion's shaper. Yet, it was the sole arena where intellectuals-or rather 'confirmed' intellectuals-could exchange views, shape the hegemonic discourse and dictate the consensus, according to the regime's parameters. That media, and especially the printed press, had crystallized the Egyptian intellectual elite, which by its mere association with the regime has alienated itself from any counter-elite or counter public. Its legitimacy and status stemmed mostly from its political affiliation. My argument is that the survival of the state-owned media after the revolution is not just about functionality, but rather about the survivability of an elite that cannot be replaced. This elite has certainly 'to pay a price' for its betrayal, blindness, lack of courage and neglect. It has to be born again in the same arena where it had committed its 'intellectual crimes' and to create a new hegemonic discourse in the same sphere were the previous regime had corrupted the discourse. However, it is not just about punishing and redeeming the old elites. It is about legitimizing the new discourse that is being created by the revolutionary public. As if the adoption of the new discourse by the state's media will be the ultimate symbol of its acceptance. In my paper, I intend to show the extent of adoption of the new discourse, and the changes in roles of the state's media in legitimizing the new discourse.

In 1984 William Beeman published a brief but useful essay on the media ecology of Iran before, during and after the revolution. After briefly discussing the relationship between interpersonal gossip ("the grapevine"), and state television and radio, he discusses the dramatic changes in the news media as the revolution progressed, only to settle back into its original role as a voice for the regime—albeit a new regime. The Egyptian uprising had new elements absent in the Iranian revolution, most notably social media and satellite television. Social media does not replace either "the grapevine" of networks of face-to-face interaction nor the monodirectional power of television (which was, in fact, somewhat less unitary than 1970s Iran because of satellite programming). Rather, it offers a way to extend the "grapevine" networks to link otherwise geographically separated individuals into an entirely new public sphere, on the one hand, and to appropriate, supplement, comment on and reframe other media on the other. The revolutionary media ecology of Egypt—in particular the ways various media index, image and influence one another—suggests that (unlike Iran) whatever the ultimate political outcome of the uprisings, the mediascape of Egypt after the revolution will be significantly different than it was before January 25.

This article is a contribution to the debate about the role of the Internet in mobilizations for political and social change, drawing on interviews and observations during the Egyptian revolution. We propose distinguishing between the use of the Internet as a tool by those seeking to bring about change from below, and the Internet's role as a space where collective dissent can be articulated. We argue that it is important to go beyond three sets of polemics. First, we argue for transcending the debate between utopian and dystopian perspectives on the role of the Internet in political change. Second, we propose a shift away from perspectives that isolate the Internet from other media by examining the powerful synergy between social media and satellite broadcasters during the January 25 uprising. And finally, we call for an understanding of the dialectical relationship between online and offline political action.

2011

Amal Dib and AbdelGhany Sayed give an overview of the highly politicized Egyptian media scene between 2012 and 2013 and, especially, its power to shape domestic perception of ongoing political struggles. Before, during, and after the so-called Arab Spring, those in power have suppressed the media outlets of their rivals: the forces of political Islam on the one hand and that of Egypt’s old and deep (military) state on the other. Media contributes to the process of writing history. It provides the public with constant updates, building up their view of what is happening. This is often regarded as the objective “truth.” But “truth,” as Michel Foucault noted, does not exist independent of power. Truth is a social product and therefore relative. Much like knowledge, it is bound to power and operates among the individuals and institutions that generate and sustain it. In countries undergoing political transformation, like Egypt, the media take up the role not only of informing the public on those changes but also of shaping public opinion, the narrative(s) around the present, and the very course of history. This paper examines the media’s integral role in Egypt’s ongoing conflict. It offers an analysis of how the media have become a battleground for political conflicts, how the authorities have suppressed the media outlets of their rivals, and how this, as well as the aggravation of the political conflict, affects the way individuals see the conflict and overall developments in the country.

International Journal of Communication, 2011

The Tahrir Data Project gathers empirical data on media use during the Egyptian revolution of January and February 2011. The Project consists of three data sets documenting media use by protesters, by coordinators, and by transnational audiences. Preliminary descriptive analysis of the data suggests that social media use was not dominant in demonstrations, but may have played an important role in connecting and motivating protesters. Metrics for media use by protesters indicate a strong presence of activities and characteristics commonly associated with communication in protests to social media and social media users. These metrics, along with preliminary data on coordinator strategies and preliminary analysis of the #jan25 tweet set, suggest an important but complex role played by social media in the Egyptian revolution of 2011. The data and preliminary analysis are presented here, together with a number of research questions for further study.

Research on new media has always highlighted the assumption that in authoritarian contexts, communication technologies provide political activists with ampler space than available in the heavily policed physical world. However, social and political changes taking place throughout Egypt and the Arab region reflect a shift. In a country like Egypt, where only around 30 % of the population have internet access, the vibrant digital media scene is relocating itself once more in public spaces. Digital initiatives, such as Askar Kadhibun (Lying generals) and Musirrin (Steadfast), are transforming online media material into older (pre-modern) modes of traditional media, such as graffiti and traveling street performances. This constitutes a shift towards the ascendancy of popular cultural production, and a challenge to the reification and sacrilization of digital media in a context where poverty and illiteracy play a major role in both the dissemination of information and in political mobilization.

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2011

This article examines the use of digital media in the 2011 Egyptian revolution (25 January–11 February), termed by many analysts and commentators a “Facebook revolution”, “Twitter revolution”, “digital revolution” or “electronic revolution”. Such appellations highlight the role of the youth who organized and mobilized for the revolution and the essential role played by digital media. Disengaging from the controversial debate over whether Egypt’s revolution was instigated by social media or simply used them for its purposes, the article demonstrates the uncontestable role that social networks, text messages, and satellite news channels played as a tool of control and manipulation, on the one hand, and a mode of resistance, on the other. Delineating some key reasons why the Egyptian revolution came to be associated with digital media, the article shows the government’s reaction to the threat posed by such media through analysis of a key moment on the night of 27 and 28 January 2011, when the Egyptian government decided to cut off all Internet and smart phone connections. Through a detailed chronology of the development of events during that period of blockage, the article analyzes the government’s decision along two axes: manipulation through blockage and manipulation through propaganda and brainwashing. It concludes by showing how the government’s attempts to sabotage the revolution came in the end to be used subversively by the protestors as means of resistance. It injected the revolution with more momentum, and in fact inadvertently led to its success. Keywords: Egyptian revolution, digital media, despotism, propaganda, Tunisian revolution, resistance