In Egypt, is the keyboard mightier than the sword?

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In Egypt, is the keyboard mightier than the sword?
Sat, Jan 29, 2011 ... 08:01am

The old saying goes that the pen is mightier than the sword. The new saying might be that the keyboard is mightier than the bullet.

That's one of the lessons of the extraordinary events currently unfolding on the streets of Egypt, and before that earlier this month in Tunisia, where the role of social-networking websites like Facebook and Twitter appears to have been central in fomenting the mass protests challenging long-standing regimes.

Anger at the Cairo regime had been building up for years, but according to most accounts, it was the viral spread of protest plans on a Facebook page amassing 90,000 followers that sparked the biggest challenge to the regime of President Hosny Mubarak since he came to power 30 years ago. Protestors then used the Twitter tag of #Jan25 to organize the protests.

Egyptian authorities certainly view the use of social media as a serious threat to their ability to quell the unrest.

At first they tried to selectively block sites such as Facebook, Twitter and the Swedish web-streaming service Bambuser. But they soon realized that users would quickly find ways to work around such blockages, using proxy servers to reach the sites, or by figuring out alternative websites. So authorities on Friday took the almost unprecedented step of completely blocking the country's internet links.

That the protests just continued to escalate following that action indicated that though Facebook, Twitter and others may have been shaping events on the streets of Egypt, it's still an anomaly to identify these social media sites as prime catalysts in the historic uprising.

That point was reinforced by Parvez Sharma, a Middle East expert writing in New American Media, who quoted an Egyptian friend, Negma, as she spoke to by phone Friday as she was about to take to the streets of Cairo.

"Don't assume that this is a Twitter and Facebook revolution," she said.

"They have been useful, yes, but the majority of Egyptians do not have the Internet or smart phones. However the 'leaders' of the movement have used Twitter to communicate details to each other about which streets are blocked, where there is tear gas, their own coordinates. But, now, please know that no one is tweeting anymore."

Nevertheless, Jillian York, a researcher at Harvard University's Berkman Centre for Internet and Society, says the role of social media has been greater than ever in Egypt, and certainly eclipsed its use in 2009 in Iran and earlier this month in Tunisia.

"For the past few days, I have been watching people on Twitter plan to use the hashtag #Jan25 for January 25. And I have also seen things such as Google Docs literally laying out plans for protests. And so in this case, I have seen a lot more public organization on the Internet," said York.

"In Tunisia it was a bit less clear as to whether or not social media was being used to physically organize protests. As far as my Tunisian contacts told me, the majority of organizing happened on the ground, offline, and that social media was more of a tool to get information out of the country."

Iranian blogger Omid Memarian noted that though the internet has taken away the ability of governments to control the narratives, it's a conceit of Western journalists and twitterati to call it a Facebook revolution, because the key driver of the protests has not been access to social media but long-term inequality, poverty and political desperation.

"There are many dynamics in place in these countries that contribute to the current turmoils and unrest," he said. "And mainly we have decades of repression in these countries."

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In Egypt, is the keyboard mightier than the sword?

 

[H2O3C4Nitrogen]

The world has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half. Nothing that has happened during that time compares in its impact to the first exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858. That was so impressive that a mob of celebrants poured into the streets of New York and set fire to City Hall.

Appeared in the essay Mother Earth Mother Board by Neal Stephenson published in Wired 1996

On August 16, 1858, the first message sent across the cable was, "Glory to God in the highest; on earth, peace and good will toward men." Then Queen Victoria sent a telegram of congratulation to President James Buchanan through the line, and expressed a hope that it would prove "an additional link between the nations whose friendship is founded on their common interest and reciprocal esteem." The President responded that, "it is a triumph more glorious, because far more useful to mankind, than was ever won by conqueror on the field of battle. May the Atlantic telegraph, under the blessing of heaven, prove to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations, and an instrument destined by Divine Providence to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty, and law throughout the world."

These messages were the signal for an outburst of enthusiasm. Next morning a grand salute of 100 guns resounded in New York City, the streets were decorated with flags, the bells of the churches rung, and at night the city was illuminated.[6] The Atlantic cable was a theme for innumerable sermons and a prodigious quantity of doggerel.

 

[H2O3C4Nitrogen]

Communication Prosthetics: Threat, or Menace?


By Neal Stephenson Whole Earth Summer 2001



I was talking recently to a novelist friend who doesn't get out much, and who (like most of our breed) likes it that way. But after a decade or more of working by himself, he had taken a temporary job that involved working with fellow human beings (FHBs).

I asked him how it was going. He seemed uncomfortable. No, no, the people were just fine, he insisted, and he loved the project. But something was bothering him.

"Neal," he finally said, "have you ever heard of this thing called...a Powerpoint Presentation?"

I confessed that I had. But this was no time to strike the pose of Mr. Cool, man of the world, been-there-done-that. I needed to let the poor guy ventilate. He was traumatized. Confronting the reality of Powerpoint was a moment of pure existential horror for him.

I was able to talk him out of his funk with the following rationale: outside of the tiny, cloistered world of novelists, most people have to work with fellow human beings. Which means communicating with them. But communicating with FHBs is hard. Some can do it by drawing pictures, others by interpretive dance, oratory, cinema, or sonnets. But some can't. Thus Powerpoint. To people who can't communicate, it is what the dialysis machine is to people who don't have kidneys.

In truth, I just made this up on the spur of the moment to talk my friend down off his existential ledge. But since then I have begun to notice other Communications Prosthetics (CPs). They show up most often in the business environment, so crowded with people who can't discharge their responsibilities without communicating with FHBs.

I suspect that the whiteboard is also a Communications Prosthetic. It does the same thing as a plain old-fashioned chalkboard. But its noisome pens spew xylene fumes into the air, bursting small blood vessels in the eye, dissolving mucous membranes, triggering migraine headaches, and making everyone giddy and out of focus. A used-up, dried-out pen cannot be distinguished from a fresh one until you pick it up and try to write with it, whereas from ten yards away you can tell how much chalk is left in a piece of chalk. The only thing that the whiteboard has going for it is spurious New Economy sleekness, and more vivid colors in which to scrawl inane bubble diagrams.

To paraphrase the old saw about pornography, I can't define what a CP is, but I know it when I see it. Every English teacher who has read a poorly structured student essay that employs twenty-five different typefaces in four different colors, every web surfer who has gotten lost in a flashy commercial website, every recipient of an Internet greeting card (or a paper one, for that matter, everyone who has tried to make sense of a brochure cluttered with clip art, or to get work done using a Kafkaesque graphical user interface, knows.

CPs are about abdication of judgment. If you are writing a document on a manual typewriter, you are forced to make choices. If you are penning a sonnet in Elizabethan London, you must think very hard before you touch your ink-laden bird feather to that sheet of expensive paper. If you are trying to get 100 musicians to play your symphony, you had better have your ducks in a row before you walk into the hall with an armload of scores. If you are turning a huge block of marble into a sculpture, you'd best know exactly what you are about before you let fly with that hammer. But in the world of CPs, paper is free, musicians are synthesized robots who never complain, and blocks of marble are endowed with unlimited Undo. It creates the illusion that the nasty, old-fashioned requirement to make all those damned choices has been done away with.

The only fly in the ointment is that we have not yet been able to create a digital audience. If you were talking to a digital audience, and noticed that they had, in the last few moments, become hopelessly confused, you could just hit Undo a few times and restore them to their previous state of mental clarity.

Terminally confused audiences could be dragged to the Trash and replaced with fresh ones.

But as matters stand, we must put up with the same analog audiences that Shakespeare wrote plays and Beethoven wrote symphonies for: audiences that can't be Trashed and that throw tomatoes at you when they are unhappy.

The trend is not all bad, however. A while ago I got a cellphone endowed with the ability to receive text messages. But there was a limit: each message could be no more than a couple of hundred characters. What good was such a thing? After some playing around, I found that most haikus were short enough to sneak in under that limit. Now I'm thinking about a perl script that would monitor all of my incoming email and reject all messages that were not correctly formatted haikus. It would get rid of long-winded messages, and filter out spam too. Most spam, anyway....

Internet Sherlock

Learn your enemies' secrets

Banned in fifty states.