In Egypt, is the keyboard mightier than the sword? (Feature)

By Andy Goldberg Jan 29, 2011, 2:36 GMT

San Francisco - The old saying goes that the pen is mightier than the sword. The new saying might be that the keyboard is mightier than the bullet.

That's one of the lessons of the extraordinary events currently unfolding on the streets of Egypt, and before that earlier this month in Tunisia, where the role of social-networking websites like Facebook and Twitter appears to have been central in fomenting the mass protests challenging long-standing regimes.

Anger at the Cairo regime had been building up for years, but according to most accounts, it was the viral spread of protest plans on a Facebook page amassing 90,000 followers that sparked the biggest challenge to the regime of President Hosny Mubarak since he came to power 30 years ago. Protestors then used the Twitter tag of #Jan25 to organize the protests.

Egyptian authorities certainly view the use of social media as a serious threat to their ability to quell the unrest.

At first they tried to selectively block sites such as Facebook, Twitter and the Swedish web-streaming service Bambuser. But they soon realized that users would quickly find ways to work around such blockages, using proxy servers to reach the sites, or by figuring out alternative websites. So authorities on Friday took the almost unprecedented step of completely blocking the country's internet links.

That the protests just continued to escalate following that action indicated that though Facebook, Twitter and others may have been shaping events on the streets of Egypt, it's still an anomaly to identify these social media sites as prime catalysts in the historic uprising.

That point was reinforced by Parvez Sharma, a Middle East expert writing in New American Media, who quoted an Egyptian friend, Negma, as she spoke to by phone Friday as she was about to take to the streets of Cairo.

'Don't assume that this is a Twitter and Facebook revolution,' she said.

'They have been useful, yes, but the majority of Egyptians do not have the Internet or smart phones. However the 'leaders' of the movement have used Twitter to communicate details to each other about which streets are blocked, where there is tear gas, their own coordinates. But, now, please know that no one is tweeting anymore.'

Nevertheless, Jillian York, a researcher at Harvard University's Berkman Centre for Internet and Society, says the role of social media has been greater than ever in Egypt, and certainly eclipsed its use in 2009 in Iran and earlier this month in Tunisia.

'For the past few days, I have been watching people on Twitter plan to use the hashtag #Jan25 for January 25. And I have also seen things such as Google Docs literally laying out plans for protests. And so in this case, I have seen a lot more public organization on the Internet,' said York.

'In Tunisia it was a bit less clear as to whether or not social media was being used to physically organize protests. As far as my Tunisian contacts told me, the majority of organizing happened on the ground, offline, and that social media was more of a tool to get information out of the country.'

Iranian blogger Omid Memarian noted that though the internet has taken away the ability of governments to control the narratives, it's a conceit of Western journalists and twitterati to call it a Facebook revolution, because the key driver of the protests has not been access to social media but long-term inequality, poverty and political desperation.

'There are many dynamics in place in these countries that contribute to the current turmoils and unrest,' he said. 'And mainly we have decades of repression in these countries.'

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