IV. Blogs
The final tool of social media this research will address is blogs. It is the first social networking website, it was created on 1999 yet it started to be influential when it was bought by Google on 2003. Blogs are “an easy-to-use content management tool. When you ‘blog’ you are instantly adding new content to your site via a web interface, without any technical or programming skills required” but a mere internet access and typing skills, these low-cost barriers have led to personal blogs proliferating worldwide. There were 35,000 active blogs in the Arab region in 2009, growing to 40,000 by 2010. This number has increased dramatically since the 2011 uprisings, speculated at 600,000 blogs today, according to the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information. In Egypt, Blogs were the first tool used to express government opposition, blogs started in Egypt since 2004 both in Arabic and English languages, there are 9,597 blogs published between Sep 2004 and Aug 2011. It is noticeable that as the blogs increased in numbers they grew to be more politically oriented.
With the political surge in 2005 blogging grew tremendously, by then, it was the most used social network to express political activism. Blogs created a public sphere allowed its users to participate anonymously in the political life. Keeping in consideration that political activism was relatively new and violated by the regime this led to the frequent use of blogs by those who are still afraid of joining the opposition in real life. At that time the main content of the blogs was distributing the information hidden by the mainstream media.
The blogs started documenting the stories of the police brutality including pictures of the violence in the prisons and against the political activists. Then it developed to include different topics such as; the religious conflicts that was hidden on purpose by the regime and even when some cases occur in the real world they used to deny it and prevent from streaming it in the official media. Others included some of the – said to be – leaked governmental information. With the development of the blogs and its frequent use bloggers started using slang language in documenting their views so as to spread to the widest sector, the ease to comprehend and less formality made the readers feel this is closer to their own experiences. Although it circulated among a relatively small number of users, blogs enhanced the idea of public debate and discussing the sensitive issues.
Blogs set the ground for an active and valiant public sphere which gave the users more freedom of expression and in turn increased the opposition later on. This new public sphere created by youth bridged the gap among the different ideological categories; it encompassed seculars and Muslim brotherhood together in the same debate and created common points of interest between them which is regime opposition. In a way this trained them to cooperate and work together which was noticed later during the revolution.
The years 2006 and 2008 witnessed most of the blogging activity; 2006 as a result to the rise of Kefaya and 2008 due to the creation of April 6 movement. In 2006, shortly before Kefaya, Wael Abbas one of Egypt’s most influential bloggers, created a website Egyptian Awareness, which later became the main channel to broadcast "Kefaya" activities. Abbas and a few other early adopters of blog technology worked simultaneously as political advocates and crusading journalists. Bloggers started to be very politicized, the content always included governmental criticism and referring to the incidents hidden by the regime, for instance a female blogger Nora Younis was discussing how the regime sexually harass the females participating in the opposition marches and stands. The regime was monitoring their activity and every now and then they were harassed by the government, a female activist and blogger Asmaa Aly, had been arrested and spent a month in jail in 2006 for participating in a Kefaya-organized sit-in for judicial independence that was publicized for through blogs. Albeit this repression opposition parties and newspapers started paying attention to the role of blogs and created their own blogs, El Dustor created their blog in 2006 and they reprinted important posts for readers without Internet access.
As the bloggers started their activity relatively earlier than the others they have been subjected to the regime's violence more than the other users. With the rise of April 6 movement the government started to feel the threat of the social media, hence the year 2008 witnessed several cases arresting and torturing bloggers. In May 2008, Ahmed Maher, a member of kefaya, a famous blogger and founder of April 6 movement, stated that state-security officers picked him up and beat him intermittently for 12 hours to try to get him to give up the password for the Facebook group. Wael Abbas posted pictures of Maher’s bruised back on his blog, and an opposition newspaper printed Maher’s account of the incident. Another blogger is Kareem el Beheiri, a worker turned labor rights activist and blogger was tortured in custody and later released. His cyber-activism was part of a growing movement, albeit gradual, new media was used effectively to mobilize people against the regime.
Despite the fact that Blogs were not as influential as the other tools during the revolution as it required time to write and computers to access the blogs, this minimized their role as the fast pace of the events required a more handy and easier to access tool, however, blogs had the lead in creating Egypt's new public space and in motivating the masses to be politically active participants, it set the ground for activists to communicate and directed the people to the role of social media and the incredibility of the traditional ones. It motivated them to be opinionated and made them aware of their role and importance.
Few conclusions can be drawn from this brief analysis; The new media and more specifically social media cannot cause change, they should be viewed only as technological tools, and at the end of the day any technology is only a tool at the hands of the people, technology alone cannot cause change yet it can accelerate it.
Evaluating the role of social media should focus on how the people are utilizing these tools, an important point is to be mentioned here, there is a huge gap between the cyber activism that is usually accompanied by cyber utopianism and the real life practices. Ideas are easy to create and disseminate over the different networks, the difficult part is to implement it to practices and to take it to real life. This is always accompanied by the problems of mass mobilization and collective action that was discussed in the previous chapter. The case of the Iranian revolution 2009 provides a very good example to this argument, the revolution was dubbed "Twitter Revolution" due to the great role twitter played in organizing and mobilizing for the protests, yet it wasn't reinforced with real world practices. On the contrary, the Egyptian case provides a good example of utilizing the social media, the calls were packed with confrontational activists who were insisting on completing their movement, they provided a strong backup to these organizational networks.
Needless to mention the anonymity of the users is a double edged sword, on one hand it protect the activists from the regime's repression, makes the cause impersonalized which make it harder to attack and provide them with an open, free, unrestricted public sphere that is easier to communicate through. On the other it creates a less credible environment that is relatively dangerous in case it was used by the government to spy on, delude, or impeach activists.
The new media indicates three identifiable trends: it was used as an organizational tool to connect people, mobilize them and organize their act, as an alternative press and outlet for citizen journalism , and finally as a tool for disseminating information and generating awareness both internally and internationally. In the Egyptian case, the main contribution was to the people who actually participated in the protests, went to the streets, faced the police and insisted on toppling down the regime. Their efforts, time, risks and sacrifices cannot be compared to the cyber-activism. Furthermore, during the internet and phone networks blackout they had a minimal role inside Egypt, which drives the attention to the main contribution of these tools in raising the international awareness about the protests and international support even from the people who were trying to set up proxies, hacking into government sites, and spreading the word about the cause.
To recap, the role of the new media in the Egyptian revolution is very controversial, scholars varied between exaggerating the role and negating it. It played a complementary role in a leaderless revolution and accelerated it. However, such role couldn't be achieved without the preexistence of encouraging socio-political circumstances that could benefit from these tools, "Social media are often a useful compliment to the kinds of activism that take place in the offline world"