Egypt media project

Project about political actors in social media in Egypt


In our Arab Media class we began to work on a project which would reunite the most important political actors using social media in Egypt. We based our work on actors working with twitter, facebook and blogs. Therefore we proceeded by first searching for the most followed actors on twitter and the most linked groups, pages and actors on facebook. Simultaneously we searched for blogs which seemed to be up to date and read by a lot of people. Afterwards we looked at the actors' profiles in more depth and did some background research on each of the actors in order to be able to establish their importance and to distinguish between independent actors, political parties, mainstream media and NGOs and lobby groups.

We started our media project about Egypt with the aim of establishing a complete and coherent portray of the media landscape in Egypt. Therefore we organized our work into two sheets, the links of which you will find under this text.

The first sheet divides the media landscape into different types of actors in Egyptian media. The five columns represent independent actors, political actors and parties, mainstream media, lobby groups and NGOs and finally thinktanks. Those columns list the most important actors in each sphere according to their relevance for the Egyptian media landscape. Through different colors we illustrate exactly how important we consider the actors to be, very important (red), important (orange), relevant (light blue) and hardly relevant (dark blue). Furthermore we divide the actors according to their mean of media into four rows. The first one lists actors that are active on twitter, because one finds the most actors on twitter. Secondly we list the most important actors on facebook. And finally we also list the actors from the blogosphere and youtube.

The legend next to the grid on the first sheets explains the significance of the different colors attributed to the actors and that the star next to certain actors points out that you can find further information on those political and independent actors on a second sheet.

The second sheet provides additional information on the political and independent actors because their use of the media interested us the most during our project. Given that we were able to find the information we sought after, in most cases we were able to indicate the actor’s  gender, age, place of residence, occupation, university, applied language, media activity, political orientation, facebook pages and blogs. On the sheet we list first the independent actors and secondly the political actors according to their relevance. We used the same colors as on the first sheet to illustrate the importance we attribute to them. This sheet allowed us to get a better idea of who the actors are.

Especially in regards to the continuing Egyptian revolution it is very interesting to look at the role of social media and the involved actors in the revolution. The sheets aim at giving an impression of the different actors and media and their importance for the revolution.

Link to the sheets of our media project:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ahnk2dEllPTWdHhNQkh3TzVvZVF3dmhteHdQYjlmT3c