Egypt a young people's revolution

Kate Hudson
Production Manager
As youth-organized uprisings gain momentum in Yemen, Bahrain and Iran, Egyptians are looking forward to democracy with both celebration and caution. Feb. 11 marked the final day of President Mubarak’s oppressive 30-year regime over the Egyptian people, and ended the 18-day protests that brought about change.

The anger that motivated Egyptian youth to take to the streets has been building for decades, but it was only in the past few weeks that they realized their demands.
Will E., a former university student from Cairo, is one of those youth.
“I learned what it was for the dead to rise; for Egypt to live after years of being buried underneath a rubble of hatred, extremism and poverty,” he wrote in his blog Notes from the Underground, which offers an intensely personal perspective on the Egyptian protests.
“Tears fill my heart as I think about everyone leaving and going back to their daily business. Will they remember the strangers who became their brothers? Will they remember what it feels like to serve one another with joy?”
His story, reflective of the unified cries against an oppressive and corrupt regime, is one shared by much of the Arab world.
It was the medium; a series of events organized and promoted through Facebook, YouTube and the blogging community captivated and forced the international community to rethink the power of social media in implementing revolutionary change.
A moderate revolution
Will told Excalibur in a Skype interview about his experiences protesting alongside Egyptian youth. Unlike the 1979 revolution in Iran, he saw little evidence of extremism. The revolutionaries were regular, middle-class citizens with moderate demands.
“A lot of those young people were not politically active until now. What I wanted to show [through my writing] was the people’s experience,” he said. “A lot of things that happened were based on their emotional reactions [rather] than political ideologies. The protests were not about media games and conspiracy theories.”
York professor Thabit Abdullah, who taught at the American University in Cairo for four years, has been in contact with Egyptian protests since the beginning and noted that when speaking to the revolutionaries, they consistently had the Iranian revolution in mind.
“It played a big role as a negative role model,” he said. “People are mindful of trying to avoid it all together.”
Online activists and bloggers like Will have been essential to concentrating the collective anger that ultimately brought conversations from the world wide web to the streets and to the world.
Some of the catalysts for the establishment of this national support system included the burning of an Alexandrian church – an act attributed to government cronies – the Tunisian protests and the case of Khaled Said, a 27-year-old Alexandrian man who was beaten to death by police on June 7, 2010.
News of Said’s tragic death was spread via a Facebook page titled “We are all Khaled Said,” and ultimately helped play a major role in mobilizing support leading up to the Jan. 24 protests. The Facebook page, which was created and promoted by Google marketing executive Wael Ghonim, had about 130,000 members by mid-June 2010.
Will insisted there was a pre-existing energy that went beyond the computer screen.
“It’s not that we talked about Khaled Said,” he said. “The energy was already there waiting to explode. It wasn’t about the Facebook group; it was about Khaled Said himself. We felt so much injustice about a young man being beaten to death.”
Social media
In 2010, Malcolm Gladwell wrote in The New Yorker that online activism will never be able to sustain the “strong ties” necessary to instigate revolution. Weak ties created by social media, he argued, are not an effective way to push people into action.
The Egyptian protests may have proven him wrong.
“I completely disagree,” said Ramy Attalla, one of the key organizers of the Egyptian solidarity rallies in Toronto. “Egyptians are very unified in Egypt, and ideas spread extremely quickly among Egyptians.”
“It was the educated, the young people that use Facebook that were the first 20,000 marching through the streets. Soon, hundreds of thousands more started showing up.”
Attalla agreed the conditions for a revolution must already be in place, but emphasized the need to align generalized anger into a collective goal.
In the past, Attalla had used Facebook for marketing projects for school, but he found the same basic principles could be used to mobilize activists.
“To further a cause you must build a brand,” he said, referring to his own experience organizing protests in Toronto. “Facebook is a great way to gauge the mentality of the crowd and be up-to-date about what’s going on. People need a program to follow at a protest. It helps to unify them.”
A shift in power
Andrew Eckford – a York University computer science professor who’s advocated for the use of blogs, Facebook and Twitter in his own classrooms – said he thought social media could cause a shift in political power.
“Social media encourages the rapid formation of political groups based on common interest and around previously unknown leaders,” he said.
He cited a case close to home: the 2008 CUPE 3903 teaching assistants’ strike at York University.
“Undergraduates who were opposed to the [York University] TA strike had no traditional leaders to represent them, as the student union backed the TAs and the administration was keeping a relatively low profile,” said Eckford. “Using Facebook, thousands of these students rapidly coalesced around an anti-strike group, which ended up playing a significant role in shaping the debate. It’s a role that, I would argue, took the major players by surprise.”
“So it’s clearly important to democratic debate, in that points of view that are not represented by traditional leaders can suddenly – and unpredictably – foster large movements that are not tied to traditional power structures.”
Facebook in Egypt
Facebook plays an important role in the daily lives of young Canadians, but  Egyptian youth have taken it in a much different direction.
Facebook users in Egypt are considerably younger: 62 percent of users are under 25 years of age, while in Canada that number sits at 39 percent.
More exceptional, though, is the fact online discussions there are mostly political.
“Right now if you see something related to something ‘social’, at this point it would be really off topic,” said Will. “Facebook is a political tool here. It’s not just fun and games. It is really very highly politicized.”
Skeptics have doubted social media has the numbers to make a difference in Egypt. Only 21 percent of Egypt’s population uses the internet.
Abdullah suggested that 21 percent could be more than enough, though, noting the online demographic is increasing at a very rapid pace.
“Revolutions don’t require that every individual be organized directly. The important thing is that you have a leadership that is organized and in touch with one another,” he said. “If this leadership knows how to articulate these demands in such a way that it is appealing to the masses, that’s all that is needed, really.”
Technology at York
Besides mobilizing protesters in Egypt, social media has been an important tool for Egyptian students in the diaspora to stay connected.
Several members of the Coptic Christian Students Association (CCSA) at York explained that social media has been an essential tool in staying connected.
Daniel Rizkalla, who moved to Toronto from Cairo last October, says Facebook is the primary medium he uses to stay in contact with family and friends.
“Facebook is all I use. I see all of the talk is political, about what’s going on in Egypt.”
Rizkalla said that even though the internet was shut down across Egypt in early February – an action met with wild public disapproval – he was able to maintain online contact.
“Some of my friends posted their pictures – wow,” he exclaimed. “Literally, from their windows, you [can] see someone getting beaten. It was pretty intense.”
Bavly Kost, another member of CCSA, is convinced that social media was a major factor in the success of these particular protests.
“The amount of technology, the expansion of communication is incredible over the last few years. It’s really changed a lot,” he suggested. “This will probably go down as one of the greatest revolutions of our time because of how technology played a part.”
A new democracy
Abdullah said that change in the rest of the Middle East is likely to take place – gradually, but eventually.
“I think we can expect change over a long period. I don’t think it’s going to result in massive spectacular change like in Egypt or Tunisia over a couple of months [but] over the coming decade we’re going to see a real transformation, or at least an attempt to address the question of Crony Capitalism and growing class division through increasing democratization and some sort of social reform,” he predicted. “How effective they will be, I can’t say for sure.”
In Egypt, an election process will be implemented to determine a new leadership; however, Will suggested that it would likely be a massive open-ended debate where ideas will be shared, making Egypt’s democracy more than just a label. He predicts that social media will once again be an important facilitator.
“[The revolution] is the first step in catching up with civilization,” he said. “We have to be critical, we have to put pressure, we have to analyze; we have to raise awareness.”
“We don’t want to sleep like we were sleeping for the past 20 years,” he reflected. “This [debate] is keeping people awake and sustaining that sense of empowerment.”