Clicks, Cabs, and Coffee Houses: Social Media and Oppositional Movements in Egypt, 2004-2011

Abstract

To deepen our understanding of the relationship between social media and political change during the Egyptian uprising of early 2011, events in Tahrir Square must be situated in a larger context of media use and recent history of online activism. For several years, the most successful social movements in Egypt, including Kefaya, the April 6th Youth, and We are all Khaled Said, were those using social media to expand networks of disaffected Egyptians, broker relations between activists, and globalize the resources and reach of opposition leaders. Social media afforded these opposition leaders the means to shape repertoires of contention, frame the issues, propagate unifying symbols, and transform online activism into offline protests.

Speaking ‘unspeakable things’: documenting digital feminist responses to rape culture

“…In this brief literature review, we contextualize our project within a moment of both feminist resurgence and challenge; one where the opportunities afforded by digital technologies are recognized (Castells, 2012;Gerbaudo, 2012;Hands, 2011;Harlow, 2011;Howard & Hussain, 2013;Lim, 2012Lim, , 2013Penney & Dadas, 2013), yet not necessarily fully understood by scholars. Below then, we address how scholarship on popular feminisms and popular misogyny (including what we describe as 'rape culture') and the use of digital technologies to affect social change, shape the context for our inquiry into girls' and women's use of digital technologies to expose and challenge rape culture and misogyny.…”

“…Scholars have been particularly interested in this question over the past decade, suggesting that digital media is being used to organize around political issues (Chattopadhyay, 2011;Juris, 2008;Mendes 2015), build expansive communities of deliberation and action (Gerbaudo, 2012;Lim, 2012), and disseminate information widely throughout both online and offline spaces (Lim, 2012). More specifically, feminist scholarship has mapped how girls and women are creating online cultures of support for victims of sexual assault and violence Mendes, 2015;Puente, 2011;Rentschler, 2014), generating and circulating feminist discourses that counter patriarchal ones Mendes, 2015;Shaw, 2012;Thrift, 2014), and interrupt rape culture through a variety of creative interventions, such as the mobile phone app 'Not Your Baby' (Rentschler, 2014) and the organization and participation in the global SlutWalks (Ringrose & Renold, 2012;Mendes, 2015).…”

Reconfiguring and Remediating Social Media as Alternative Media: Exploring Youth Activists’ Digital Media Ecology in El Salvador

“…For example, Zhang and colleagues (2010) found a positive relationship between SNS use and civic participation during the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Similarly, Lim (2012) found that protesters used Facebook to create online and offline networks that facilitated mobilization in Egypt during the Arab Spring. In Latin America, studies show that Facebook has played a central role in numerous protest movements, such as those in Guatemala (Harlow, 2012) and Colombia (Neumayer & Raffl, 2008).…”

#RhodesMustFall: Using social media to "decolonise" learning spaces for South African higher education institutions: A cultural historical activity theory approach

“…Across the world students have used social media to organize protests and distribute messages about various socio-political and socioeconomic issues. These contexts vary from Western, first world contexts such as Occupy Wall street (Gerbaudo 2012), the "indignados" movement in Spain (Gerbaudo 2012) and "Unibrennt" in Austria (Maireder and Schwarzenegger 2012) to third world contexts like Chile (Valenzuela 2013) and Egypt (Lim 2012;Gerbaudo 2012). Through these studies, we have learned how students use social media to communicate and organize themselves and how social media can provide a way of mobilizing disparate groups without real leaders or "soft leaders" (Gerbaudo 2012;Maireder and Schwarzenegger 2012).…”