Tweets and the streets

In under 200 pages, a book leads even complete novices through an original discussion of the relationship between the Egyptian revolution and social media.

Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the streets. Social media and contemporary activism, PlutoPress 2012 (pp. 208; €17.50)

On 6 June 2010, Khaled Said, a 28-year-old Egyptian man, was taken by police from an internet café in Alexandria, where he had been updating his blog, and brutally killed. The image of his mutilated face began to circulate on the web, provoking discussion, comments and articles. The violence of Mubarak’s regime was fiercely criticised: “It could have been me” hundreds of young, middle-class Egyptians started to think. Wael Ghonim, a 30-year-old Google employee, created a Facebook page called “We are all Khaled Said”. In the space of a few days it had over 36,000 followers, making it the country’s most popular anti-regime page. It was the start of the revolution, a roll of the dice by the “Facebook generation” (shabab-al-facebook) that aimed to transform the outrage of the comments into real protest.

The sociologist shows how Facebook and Twitter helped young Egyptians (just as it did young Spaniards and Americans) to build a strong emotional connection to the idea of struggle

The role of social media in the uprising in Egypt’s Tahrir Square, in the demonstrations by the Spanish indignados, and in the Occupy movement is the subject of Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism, a book published last year by Pluto Press. The author, Paolo Gerbaudo, is a Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London. He was previously an associate professor of sociology at the American University in Cairo, where he lived for some years. His analysis is therefore the product of a close affinity with the environments that nurtured the movements he discusses. This insider’s view — though the text never loses the objectivity of a sociological study — is one of the strong points of the book, which includes hitherto-unknown names, events and tales from those days of protest.

Paolo Gerbaudo, *Tweets and the Streets. Social media and contemporary activism*, PlutoPress 2012. Page detail

In under 200 pages, Gerbaudo succeeds in leading even complete novices through an original discussion of the relationship between the Egyptian revolution and social media, though he never mythologises its role, as much of the Western press have (as the book makes clear, at the time of the demonstrations, only 25% of the Egyptian population had access to the internet and only 4% were on Facebook). The key phrase for understanding this relationship, in Gerbaudo’s view, is “emotional tension”. By using concrete examples and case studies throughout the book, the sociologist shows how Facebook and Twitter helped young Egyptians (just as it did young Spaniards and Americans) to build a strong emotional connection to the idea of struggle — whether this was against Mubarak or against economic inequality. Social media were not simply tools to spread information: they helped to create what the writer calls a contagious sense of anticipation or momentum before the protests, an “emotional attraction” to sit-ins and demonstrations. This “emotional” use of the web — the Facebook page runs by Ghonim offers a clear example — allowed a huge number of young people to break away from their isolation, and the distance that the computer screen imposes, become personally involved and go down to the squares alongside other people.

At many points in the book, Gerbaudo insists on the idea that the revolution in Tahrir Square was not a “peer to peer” phenomenon — a struggle that was started in life and developed on the web. It was rather a movement constructed “shoulder to shoulder” and tied to real-life participation. Online, the Tahrir protesters could find tactical and organisational tools, but most of all a kind of union, or recognition, a common narrative that allowed even individuals separated by distance (in terms of class, interests, priorities and aims) to feel part the same single group — and to occupy the squares together.

As well as revealing the emotional side to the use of social media in the protests in Egypt, Spain and the United States, Tweets and the Streets goes to the heart of the decisional and organisational dynamics that — via social media — meant that these movements marked a break from the past. In this way, Gerbaudo tackles the problem of leadership in a revolution that aimed to be completely horizontal and “2.0”, one where everyone was both a user and a creator at the same time. However, even here leaders — although “reluctant” as the author calls them — did emerge, and were often the same individuals running pages or accounts that sent news of the movement to the outside world. The book also focuses on the rhetoric of spontaneity. Although this helped the protests to develop, Gerbaudo argues it was in reality “well organized” by “soft” leaders able to create a frame in which self-expression was possible without the loss of the aim of unity.

The book also takes a position on the dialectic between the continuity and disappearance that characterised these protests and their instruments (on Twitter, a message disappears after five days, and on Facebook an event is lost forever once its date has passed). In short, many questions remain open. Gerbaudo tries to answer them with examples and stories from the more 80-plus activists interviewed — and with a deep analysis of the dynamics at work. This is an important book, and clearly a useful one: it will act as a guide to a huge topic and one which can only return in the future to occupy the squares of online discussion — and, of course, the real ones as well. Francesca Sironi (@SirFr)

Tweets and the streets

In under 200 pages, a book leads even complete novices through an original discussion of the relationship between the Egyptian revolution and social media.

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