Egypt's Facebook Rebellion

[Continuing to think about the role of technology in political activism...]

The Washington Post ran this article about the "Facebook Activist" in Cairo.

Ahmed Maher was a 27-year-old activist who created a Facebook site which got 74,000 registrants in the past 2 months.

Even some of Egypt's older, more disillusioned proponents of democracy had let themselves hope that a social networking Web site created by American college students could become an electronic rallying point for protest against President Hosni Mubarak's 27-year rule.

But the experience of the Facebook activists showed the limits of technology as a means of organizing dissent against a repressive government. Maher would end up among what rights groups said were 500 Egyptians arrested during two months of political activism in Egypt -- and find himself stripped and beaten in a Cairo police station, he said.

The group had run a successful protest in April against rising food prices, and they were planning for another strike on May 4, which would mark Mubarak's birthday.

But the protest was a failure: the government had taken actions to calm the people beforehand, and few people turned up for a general strike.

Poor people, even more than the middle class, knew what the strike was about, Hibba Imam, 22, said in the decayed and crowded quarter of Imbaba. "The connected people, they don't feel the suffering. They don't see the bread lines," she said, adding that she had stayed indoors until Sunday afternoon. Imam had heard of Facebook, she said. Many others in the neighborhood said they never had.

...

Afterwards, Maher was arrested and beaten for hours by police demanding more information about the Facebook groups.

I would recommend to read the Post article, because it's very well-written. It provokes a lot of questions: How much of online activism is just talk that won't translate into action? What role does technology have in creating real-world change? Is a technology-based revolution going to be working with the right people? What does it take to get people to actually protest; what kinds of injustices must we face before we are ready to shatter the known reality?

The general strikes in France, '68, were successful (in getting people to strike, I mean) because the affluent students managed to bridge that gap to the workers.... I have the same feeling when I read this article as I do when I think about '68. It is a feeling of sadness, the sadness that comes when these realities collide -- the young hope for change colliding with the gravity of the boot & the gun. Something about the sound a revolutionary dream makes when it bursts. You have to listen closely to hear it, but it does make a sound ...