Harlem Shake meets Arab Spring. “If I can’t dance to it, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.” -Emma Goldman

#Jan25 Egypt - Omar Offendum, The Narcicyst, Fr…
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One year ago today. As this unfolded, we watched unfolding events live streaming on Al Jazeera English in my Sociology of War and Peace class.

alapoet:

When he said “everywhere,” apparently he meant “everywhere else.”

I’m hard-pressed to see how this analysis applies to social movements in general, and Egypt in particular. On DemocracyNow! on Wednesday, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, who reported from Egypt during the uprising, indicates that people flooded Tahrir Square precisely because when the internet was shut off, they couldn’t simply stay at home and check the progress of the rally by Facebook or SMS. This does indicate a separation between digital and material realities.

Moreover, novelist Ahdaf Soueif indicates that the movement has been building for ten years. What we now think of as mediated or augmented reality, for example the locative features of social media, did not exist at the beginning of that time period. Much of the mobilization which appears so novel to the casual Western observer, had as its impetus the unrest of independent Egyptian trade unions dating back to at least 2003. At that time, according to Eric Boehlert, the US blogosphere was still nascent.

Finally, if our system of social stratification is imposed upon the digital, then there are haves and have nots. Are Egyptian street vendors cyborgs? Yet they have been a part of the uprising. I’m not convinced that cyberspace and meatspace are so easily elided, for I think such a view diminishes the latter.

icancstructures:

by Space Invaders

Last week, fellow editor Nathan Jurgenson made a post entitled “Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality” with a call for more concept work surrounding this topic. I…

Tomorrow in my Sociology of War and Peace class, we will be talking about mediation. One of the texts we use for the class discusses Carter’s mediation of the Camp David Accords. We’ll talk about Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated in 1981. It’s interesting to be reflecting on this from the vantage of rapid social change in Egypt.

This post is masterfully written, and extremely helpful. The visualization provides evidence for the argument that reality is beyond these binaries of “a Twitter revolution” and Gladwell’s reductionism. A healthy skepticism of opposing claims is in order; a synthesis that can be substantiated is better.

icancstructures:

Protesters charge their mobile phones in Tahrir Square in Cairo.

In my previous post on “Digital Dualism Versus Augmented Reality,” I lay out two competing views for conceptualizing…

So it’s a virus that only attacks al Qaeda? That’s pretty ingenious, and the only way to think of this as anything other than an ill-timed an opportunistic flip-flop. They think we’re not paying attention, that we’ll accept that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. (Next week, we’ll explore why he didn’t use the term “refudiation”.)

Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona and independent Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut were in Egypt this weekend as the first visiting congressional delegation since Mubarak’s ouster. McCain and Lieberman met with officials in Egypt’s transitional government and even took a walk through Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the focal point of the uprising. At a news conference, McCain had warm words for the Egyptian revolution.

Sen. John McCain: “This revolution is a repudiation of al-Qaeda. This revolution has shown the people of the world, not just in the Arab world, that peaceful change can come about and violence and extremism is not required in order to achieve democracy and freedom. That’s why we are especially proud to be here, where history is being made for the entire world, not just the Arab world.”

McCain’s comments appear to differ from his stance during the height of the Egyptian uprising. Speaking on Fox News just days before Mubarak was forced to resign, McCain described the popular movements in the Arab world as a “virus.”

Sen. John McCain: “This virus is spreading throughout the Middle East. The president of Yemen, as you know, just made the announcement that he wasn’t running again. This, I would argue, is probably the most dangerous period of history in—of our entire involvement in the Middle East, at least in modern times.”

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