Egypt: Facebook, Twitter, and Old-fashioned Organizing

Suzi McClear serves as the IREX Chief of Party for the Egypt Media Development Program. Below she offers her thoughts on the early days of the protests in Egypt, written prior to Mubarak’s resignation.

At church on the morning of January 28, 2011 the pastor joked that “Thanks to the Egyptian government we will not be interrupted by cell phones.” But on that Friday despite the cutoff of Internet, cell phones and SMS messages feeding into Twitter, the largest demonstrations blocked downtown Cairo causing the police to close the square. While phones came back on Saturday (after the demonstrations) Internet and SMS were down for a week. Still, the demonstrations continued to grow daily. Social media may have been the trigger that initially got things going, but the gun was already loaded with social and economic discontent, and once the initial shot was fired, the demonstrations took a life of their own.

A group of demonstrators marched by my flat that Friday and, seeing me on the balcony, invited me down to join them. Word spread in the traditional way -- friends calling on friends, neighbor to neighbor. The faces of the demonstrators in the square also changed since the first days, with a broader spectrum of people, well beyond the Facebook generation. What brought them out?

Social Media – blogs, Facebook and Twitter, initially made the call, but could they have worked without the underlying discontent, and would they have been able to sustain the pressure without more traditional means of, person to person communications? Facebook is credited with igniting the demonstrations, but once started, its presence or absence seemed almost immaterial. The fact that communications could be cut off, adding as much fuel to the fire as their absence, might have impacted things by limiting organization. Whatever their role is, they have been critical in understanding what has been happening since then as they are the principle manner of disseminating information in view of a highly biased, very political “traditional” press.

I went through the demonstrations in Serbia that helped bring down Milosevic ten years ago. There, some independent media were able to get the word out, but an early new media technique called “swarming” worked well, where one person sent an SMS message to five others and asked them to send that message on to five more; the traditional chain letter, before twitter, but aided by mobile phones. Clearly social media had an impact on setting the ball in motion, but so did satellite TV coverage of Tunisia, as well as the traditional social networks that long predate new media.

New media had an impact, but is that impact overstated? Since the demonstrations in Tahrir Square, that is a question being asked by traditional media professionals, sociologists, and politicians.

The Media Development Program is implemented by MSI, Inc. under a contract with the US Agency for International Development. IREX as a subcontractor provides management and media training expertise in new media, journalism skills, and media management.

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