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From Flickr user chairmanblueslovakia
With “Slutwalks,” a Protest Meme Takes On the World
The "slut walk" started in Ontario, Canada in response to a police officer's off color comment regarding an assault victim's clothing. He said that rape victims should stop dressing so provocatively if they wanted to avoid becoming victims. A near-movement against this attitude of blaming the victims for sexual assault has evolved since then, and taken nearly every continent by storm. It's a good example of how a meme-worthy message can turn what was once a boring, common tactic (a march, a protest, a demonstration) into a campaign with legs (no pun intended). So far, Slut Walk has made it into over 60 cities. Some examples:
From the Ramy Essam Facebook page
Music of The Revolution: How Songs of Protest Have Rallied Demonstrators
Music almost always plays a pivotal role in protest movements, with songs and chants unifying dissidents in their rallying cries. Unlike movements of decades past, however, protest music made popular during the recent revolution in Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond spread virally with the help YouTube and Facebook. Abdulla Darrat, co-founder of the EnoughGaddafi.com site in Libya, has said, “[These musicians and emcees] very successfully put into words a lot of the sentiments that young people in the area are carrying with them, and they're voicing really the struggle of...everyday people.” Here's a roundup of some of the music coming out of the MENA region, including music from El Général, Ramy Essam, and Cairo-Kee.
An Internet Revolution? At Least In Signs
At the New York Times this weekend, Ben Zimmer noted the playful wordplay taken up by Egyptians during their Tahrir square sit in: "playing with language is often one of the few ways to challenge an oppressive political system." It was also a way to give an identity to their revolution. This is something that's harder to come by for 21st century movements, considering that they're often more decentralized and horizontal. What do the protest signs from Tahrir square tell us about how Egyptians defined their revolution?
Tunisia, Egypt and the Importance of Retweets
Where is the international media? Tunisians wondered aloud in the early days of their December demonstrations. Many, it seemed, were off celebrating the new year.
Fortunately, neither Tunisians nor the rest of the world had to wait until major networks picked up the scent of revolution to follow the news. That was because people on the ground were spreading the word via Twitter, Facebook and blogs, and these messages were then being retweeted by international onlookers with big audiences. Citizens using social media and mobile phones actually ended up not only setting the agenda for the mainstream media, but providing networks like Al Jazeera and France 24 with their content by feeding them videos taken on cell phones and Tweets from the ground tagged with the hashtag #Sidibouzid. If we've uncovered one unequivocal addition that the internet brings to the table with regard to social movements and revolutions, it's its ability to better let protesters get their own stories out.
From Flickr user Ramy Raoof
The Dictators’ Backlash to Uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa
Protest has reverberated through the Arab world since Mohamed Bouazizi's self immolation on December 17th, but are copycat protests always a good thing? Not if authorities are more prepared than demonstrators.
Protests Spread to Sudan—Why Weren’t They Successful?
All eyes right now are on Egypt, but the energy of demonstrators there has spread to neighboring Sudan, where multiple demonstrations took place at universities in the capital of Khartoum on Sunday, January 30. Inspired by the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, organizers used Facebook, texts, and e-mail to call for Sudanese citizens to take to the streets and demand the resignation of President Omar al-Bashir.
Unfortunately, Sudanese activists appear to have organized in haste, without having a strong plan of action in place. This lack of coordination resulted in what appears to be widely unsuccessful protests. Riot police were ready to confront demonstrators and there were numerous reports of mass arrests and attacks, with one student dying from injuries sustained in the clashes.
From Flickr user Ramy Raoof
Ways to Follow What’s Happening in Egypt
We've rounded up some of the best sources for following the events in Egypt.
From Flickr user Sarah Carr
5 Things You Can Do To Support Egyptians From Anywhere
It's the weekend! And a possible revolution steams forward in Egypt. The stakes are incredibly high - a point underlined by the news that activists targeted for their involvement in the failed 2009 uprising in Iran were hung yesterday - so it makes sense that international onlookers are looking for any way that they might be able to help. Here are some things that you can do if you're not in Egypt but you want to do something.
<p>In advance of Friday's "day of rage" protests, Egyptian's <a href="http://www.cpj.org/internet/2011/01/watching-egypt-disappear-from-the-internet.php">lost their ability to access the internet</a>. By cutting off all access to connection tools, Hosni Mubarak has acquianted Egyptians with the situation of people in places like Cuba or North Korea. Internet access in Egypt is 21%, with r<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/28/AR2011012804554_2.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2011012805186">oughly 160,000 blogger</a>s, and censorship had before been negligable. So that was more of a shock. <strong>How did this change the way protests continued, and the world followed? </strong></p>
<h3>Getting Information Out</h3>
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<p>Cuban bloggers are used to phoning in their blog and Twitter posts so that people off the island can publish them to the web. That's what Egyptians started doing yesterday (Friday) morning in Egypt, most notably using a Twitter feed called January 25 voices which has been Tweeting information received from landlines. We've compiled here (left) some more Twitter handles that are managing to get information out (this is a mixture of closer onlookers who are not in Egypt (@alaa,...) and people who are inside the country and have managed intermittent access mainly through the resources of international media outlets (i.e. @bencnn). Let us know any we're missing.</p>
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<h3>Protesting without the Newest Comm Tools</h3>
<p>It can be done! One reason that the internet getting shut off didn't have the abating effects that Mubarak may have hoped for is that people expected it and prepared. Activists were going from home to home by foot, knocking on doors and encouraging people to take part in Friday's protests. The social networks (the old kind of social network) provided by mosques has aided activists attempts to mobilize people. As Marc Lynch <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/abuaardvark/status/31050440934166528">Tweets</a>:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">On Friday, people knew where to go already; they had already been mobilized. If they hadn't already been mobilized, then 20th century tools may not have come out of the woodwork on Friday. But they were and they did. Here are some examples: -</p>
<p>NDI Tech's Katherine Maher <a href="http://blogs.ndi.org/blog/2011/01/what-happens-when-eighty-million-egyptians-disappear">puts</a> it well: "The technology at this point is a documentary tool for history - the momentum is offline."</p>
<p><strong><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/mala/status/30856446396596224">Radio</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Ham radio -</strong> Ham radio hobbyists have started creating communications channels between Egypt and the rest of the world. Egyptians are sending morse code signals to the ham radios, its getting decoded and <strong><a href="http://pastebin.com/xBPEUaPn"><span style="font-weight: normal;">posted on the internet</span>. </a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Landlines</strong></p>
<p><strong>Dial-Up: INternational internet service providers are letting egyptians use phones an dmodems to dial into the internet. It's slow, but it works.</strong></p>
<p><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p>But being prepared to protest on Friday without technology says nothing about Saturday, and Sunday. Whether or not Egyptians will be able to keep people on the streets and coordinated without even the use of cell phones is a big if. Yes, lots of protests happened before mobile phones, but connection tools are important accelerants. That's why people are doing what they can to bring what connectivity they can to Egyptians inn case the internet and mobile services do stay shut off.</p>
<p>One possibility worth pointing out is that shutting down the internet wasn't entirely about shutting down protests, but rather spotlighting the ringleaders. They're the ones who are most likely to find a way to continue communicating even with 88% of the Egyptian network down. That's what the Citizen Lab director Ron Deibert <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/in-a-span-of-minutes-a-country-goes-offline/article1887207/">told the Globe and Mail yesterday.</a> </p>
<p>unforr</p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-left: 0px; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font: normal normal normal 12px/1.5 Verdana, sans-serif; color: #000000; padding: 0px; border: 0px initial initial;"><strong>Using Tech to Help</strong></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-left: 0px; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font: normal normal normal 12px/1.5 Verdana, sans-serif; color: #000000; padding: 0px; border: 0px initial initial;"><strong> </strong><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: normal; font-size: 10px;">How are people outside of Egypt not just following the protests, but helping activists? There are ways to facilitate activist to activist communications without internet and mobile networks, for example by creating an autonomous internet -- kind of like a much smaller version of the world wide web - that's not routed through the Egyptian network. Besides creating local networks, sat phones, numbers for dial up internet, and here are some other </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: normal; font-size: 10px;">tools/tactics protesters can use to gain connectivity w/o the internet:</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-left: 0px; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font: normal normal normal 12px/1.5 Verdana, sans-serif; color: #000000; padding: 0px; border: 0px initial initial;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: normal; font-size: 10px;"> </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: normal; font-size: 10px;">-Daihinia: an app that extends the range of a network of devices that aren't connected to the larger internet but are connected to eachother; adding a chat client, like Pidgin, to this allows activists to talk to one another</span></p>
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<p>- (it's too late for this now in Egypt) One blogger has come up with the idea for "<a href="http://www.brepettis.com/blog/2011/1/28/apps-for-the-appocolypse.html">apps for the apocopse</a>" - apps which would prepare internet users for an internet shut off and allow them to easyily create local networks</p>It's the weekend! And a possible revolution steams forward in Egypt. The stakes are incredibly high, so it makes sense that international onlookers are looking for any way that they might be able to help. Here are some things that you can do if you're not in Egypt but you want to do something.
It's the weekend! And a possible revolution steams forward in Egypt. The stakes are incredibly high, so it makes sense that international onlookers are looking for any way that they might be able to help. Here are some things that you can do if you're not in Egypt but you want to do something.It's the weekend! And a possible revolution steams forward in Egypt. The stakes are incredibly high, so it makes sense that international onlookers are looking for any way that they might be able to help. Here are some things that you can do if you're not in Egypt but you want to do something.
With Twitter and Facebook Blocked in Egypt, Protesters Turn to Proxies
Massive anti-government demonstrations took place all across Egypt yesterday, with many on the ground turning to social networking tools to share instructions and news about police actions, their personal safety, and location information. Access to sites like Twitter and Facebook have been sporadically blocked inside Egypt and tech-savvy protesters are turning to proxies to access the platforms. Keep checking back here for the latest updates.
From Flickr User euronews
Technology and Revolutions: Did Tunisia End the Debate?
Tunisia's revolution began one month ago, after a 26 year old unemployed university grad lost his only source of income when police confiscated his fruit and vegetable cart and set himself on fire. This tragedy was the last straw for those that poured onto the streets and stayed there until the authoritarian president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, left the country in a helicopter.
So was it the first Twitter (Facebook, social media, internet) revolution? Or does it mark the last time anyone will ask this question? Here's a roundup of the best commentary that's surfaced over the past week.
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