Wael Ghonim
Revolution 2.0: the Power of the People is Greater than the People in Power. A Memoir,
Fourth Estate, 2012
The role of the new information and communication technologies – in particular the new “social media” or “social networks”, like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter – is more and more the subject of debates, and also of disagreement. How much does the so-called “Revolution 2.0” (the web’s most recent technological evolution, that of Facebook, etc.) count, what weight does it have in the processes of social and political change? To make a specific example, how great an influence has it really had on the so-called “Arab spring” between 2011 and 2012? According to the statement, made during a conference of scientific journalists in Doha, of an Egyptian activist who participated in the ousting of Mubarak’s authoritarian regime: “We were using Facebook to plan the protest, Twitter to coordinate it and YouTube to recount it to the world”.
The book by Wael Ghonim, a young militant of the opposition to Mubarak, Google’s manager in the Middle East and among the protagonists of the revolutionary process which led to the decisive “day of anger” in Tahrir Square (January 25, 2011) and then to Mubarak’s resignation (February 2011), helps us to reflect on such issues. The book is essentially a recount of an extraordinary, for many aspects, human and political experience, between streets and jail, a striking personal testimony, and does not have an explicit theoretical dimension. But it allows us, despite its factual-reporting limits, to reflect on the role and influence of the new technologies on the social and political (besides, of course, cultural) changes occurring in many parts of the world.
No doubt the new interactive and global tools (for the first time in history the world can be connected with a network) are today an extraordinary resource for the promoters of protest and change: from the militants of the Arab revolutions to the Spanish “indignados”, to the “Occupy Wall Street” activists. In the case of Egypt, Ghonim sparked that mass protest through the creation of a web page named after the young protester Khaled Said, tortured and killed by the police in June 2010. That initiative and the great networking process that followed has certainly contributed in a decisive way to the growing of the Egyptian revolt.
But, as many analysts observed, the conditions to make political change possible are much more varied and complex, and are not limited to the technological dimension. Decisive is the institutional, economic, social, cultural, domestic and international context in which the technological factors are situated and operate. In addition, the real weight, the presence and influence of the new technologies in social life are often overestimated. The experience of the Arab revolutions and the empirical data concerning those events, from Tunisia to Egypt, confirm that. As to YouTube, for example, the percentage of users over the total population in the Middle East area (data for October 2011) was highest in Israel (47.12%) and Turkey, and then in the Arab Emirates, in Lebanon (30.06%), Jordan and Tunisia (26.25%), while in Egypt it was only 10.23%. For Twitter (data for September 2011) in the top ranks for presence over the total population there were Bahrain (3.43%), Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, while Egypt and Tunisia were, respectively, only at 0.15% and 0.09%.
One could suggest, instead, a still determining role for the “old” TV medium, in particular for satellite TVs like Al Jazeera, owned by 96% of Egyptian families. Television sets, news passed by word of mouth (a proximity communication often decisive in social life), networks of relational associations (think of the Islamic ones, like in particular the Muslim Brotherhood) contributed to a great extent, together with the new “social media”, to building up the conditions to make the protest possible and successful.
On a theoretical and political plane, what seems to me more significant in the “Revolution 2.0” as told by Ghomin, is the “glocal” tremendous potential of such means. In the different contexts (institutional, economic, social, etc.) that ultimately determine the possible influence of the technological factors, not to be overestimated, what remains anyway an undoubtable fact is that, for the first time in human history, “local” and “global” can be put together on the web in an interactive mode. One can make politics, promote the public debate, even build up protests and revolts from any “place” towards any other “place”, from any “square” (the “agorà” of ancient Greeks) towards any other “square”. The exercise of a multi-level (from local to global) citizenship, which theories and movements like the federalist one aspire to and struggle for, becomes for the first time concretely and technologically feasible. The “social media” are therefore a potential tool and a resource that, even in different contexts, no political movement willing to act efficiently (hence necessarily with a trans-national character) can do without nowadays. It is not only Wael Ghonim’s Egypt that has changed and can change further thanks to the new tools, but are the continents and the whole world that can do the same.