Hosni Mubarak is gone, but can Egypt’s digital revolution unite the country?

Twitter and Facebook played an integral role in helping to topple Hosni Mubarak, but if Egypt is to be reformed, the online momentum of recent events must go beyond mere protest There was a chant I heard in the midst of one the most dangerous moments of Egypt’s popular revolution against President Hosni Mubarak. As supporters of the regime and its opponents faced off with bricks and petrol bombs across a barricade on the edge of Tahrir Square, those wanting Mubarak to go shouted: “We are Egyptians! You are Egyptians!” It was part taunt, part invitation to join them. And a statement of fact. It underlined a new reality that was being forged, the dangerous dissonance between two Egypts that remain – despite Mubarak’s resignation – in conflict. For while Mubarak, the polarising figure of hatred, may have gone, his nasty state remains. Those who doubt that need only consider just how easily the tap of chaos was turned on and off in service of Mubarak’s survival: the harassment of human rights activists and journalists; the mobilisation of the violent gangs in his support. And their sudden disappearance. Behind those actions are a set of entrenched interests, including the senior military hierarchy, which have invested for decades in Mubarak’s rule of Egypt’s grubbily intertwined realms of political and economic influence. For what has been left behind – after Mubarak – are two radically contradictory notions of organisation and power: two Egypts in competition whose ability to communicate will define how events unfold in the coming months. The reality is that Egypt’s revolution, like Tunisia’s, has been a broad and shallow one, with most in Tahrir Square rejecting the leaders the west’s media wanted to impose: whether Mohammed ElBaradei or the Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed some, like arrested Google executive Wael Ghonim, in a tweet on Friday night, have rejected any notion that they might be a “figurehead”, insisting on the people’s ownership of events. Which leaves an unanswered question. If, as the evidence strongly suggests, social networks like Facebook and Twitter were crucial in organising the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, what does that mean about the nature of these revolutions and their ability to negotiate with the still strong remnants of the autocratic states left behind? For what we have witnessed in both countries are uprisings that have mirrored the nature of the online networks used to organise them. They have been viral events, at least at first, which have quickly forged links between disparate interest groups – non-hierarchical in the way they have come

Posted by on February 13, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry