Explaining
Egypt´s social media landscape by looking at hard data: the 2010 Egypt Human
Development Report
Throughout our
research we have come to certain interesting findings concerning the question
who is active in the social media landscape in Egypt? First and foremost we
found that the most active group behind twitter, facebook and within the
blogosphere is the group of young adolescents, aging from 20 to their late 30s.
Secondly, we found that surprisingly to some of our followers maybe, a great
number of those active in Egypt´s social media realm were women. Thirdly,
topics that resurfaced in blog entries, twitter feeds or facebook postings were
the following: youth entrepreneurship (in all kinds of areas, culture, economy,
media, finance etc.) gender issues (especially after the scandal concerning the
SCAF testing female demonstrators’ virginity) and youth participation in
governance.
To find out why it was especially young adults that
were the most active in our findings, why women played such a significant role
and why the before mentioned topics were among the most debated ones we will
turn to the Egypt Human Development Report in order to find numbers which might
help us understand the phenomena that we witnessed during our time spent
researching.
First of all,
the cover of the Egypt Human Development Report 2010 in itself is a key to
understanding the role that young people played and still do in the realm of
Egypt’s social media: “ I’m a proud Egyptian”, “…but how can I show it?”
Those are the
words put into the mouth of the Egyptian youth that is starring on the cover.
They are proud Egyptians, however feel locked up and pressed against the wall
with no way out to demonstrate who they are, what they feel towards their
country and no idea how to improve the dangerous situation that Egypt has been
driven to by the hands of Mubarak and his fellow cronies.
If Mubarak would have been aware of this growing
discontentment rising inside Egypt’s youth, he might have been more careful
where to tread, since youth hold the power for change, and youth is the part of
society that takes it upon itself most of the time to renegotiate a new social
contract between the state and its citizens.
According to the UNDP report from Egypt, the number of
those aged 18-29 numbers 19.8 million. This segment is larger than ever before in
Egypt and is thus described as a youth bulge. Looking at this one number only
makes it obvious to the reader that right now, Egypt is standing at the
crossroads, whereby its youth may translate into a window of opportunity or
whether in the words of the UNDP report an “unemployment curse”.
Even though the question of Egypt’s youth future
remains to be settled, the sheer number of youth entails a dynamic which helps
explain their active participation in the social media field and their favorite
topics chosen during and after the revolution.
The amount of young people in Egypt has led over the
last years to a phenomena called “youth exclusion” which means that many of the
young people today are either not well educated, out of work or unable to marry
and have a family because of the first two reasons. This in turn leads to
something called “waithood”, which is a period in which they simply wait for
their lives to begin, in which they dream about a better future and being able
to work however during which their hands are tied and all they can do is sit and
wait. This means, being at home, out of work, continuing living with your
parents, not being able to find a partner and not able to lead a satisfying
love life of course. This frustration vented itself in the field of social
media, it was expressed and shared by many and since the age group early
twenties until late thirties was the one that was hit the hardest by
unemployment and social frustration it is no wonder that this age group which
was also more used to the new tool of social media, found its way to express
itself through those media the best.
How come
women were so present throughout our research and that especially in the
blogosphere?
Women and girls
in particular are among the groups directly affected by deprivation in
education, work, and basically the enjoyment of natural rights enshrined in the
Egyptian constitution and international treaties.
According to the UNDP report, “In Egypt, social
conditioning (by the family, the legal systems, and the market) creates the
roles to be played by both boys and girls in their society, and defines their
interaction in public and private spheres. The survey on Young People in Egypt
(SYPE) indicates a considerable discrepancy between young men and women with
regard to education, labor market participation, and participation in political
life. There exist a number of negative practices and factors that impede the
advancement of woman's role as an individual and citizen with rights and duties
in the community, including the prevalence of sexual harassment in public
places and at work, violence against women and female genital mutilation (FGM)
still at a rate of 80%.”
Furthermore,
Egypt is rated number 120 among a total of 128 countries on gender gap
measurement. The report continues to describe on its website that “Women
participation in the labor market is among the lowest in the world, for
example, young women (aged 18-29) represent 18.5% of the Egyptian workforce compared
to more than 50% of men and only 11% of young women participated in the last
election, compared with 20% of men.”
If one were to argue that women
chose to stay at home voluntarily and not work, one could answer that argument
by stating that no, it is rather the lack of equal opportunities in the work
place, families holding women back in the name of traditions or employers who
are clearly in favorable bias of a man rather than a woman.
Sexual harassment and violence (domestic as well as
out of the home) are additional evils, that Egyptian women have to deal with.
50% of the UNDP report’s women samples have been a subject of sexual harassment
in their lives already, mostly this happened in public transport and almost
none of them reported those cases to the police. Another shocking number that was to be found
in the UNDP report was that about “86% of young men and women believe that
beating their wife is justified in certain circumstances, and under the pretext
of the right of the husband to his wife. “
Thus, the precarious situation many Egyptian women
find themselves in explains why especially the female gender has increasingly
reached out to the tool of social media to make its voice heard, to tell its
own story of what is happening in Egypt today and of how they want to see their
country change for the better. Social media has given Egyptian women a tool to
speak out and make their claim for a just and equal society in which they as
well are considered citizens with full and inalienable rights.
Before we will pursue to the next section we would
like to point out here the dominant role that was played in this matter by the
Egyptian Mona Eltahawy. Through blogging and tweeding mostly, Eltahawy
continuously stressed the role of the Egyptian woman before as well as after
the revolution and claimed for something close to a sexual revolution having to
take place to change the social status of women in Egypt. In a recent article
that was published by the Guardian Eltahawy is quoted as saying "Even after these 'revolutions,' all is
more or less considered well with the world as long as women are covered up,
anchored to the home, denied the simple mobility of getting into their own
cars, forced to get permission from men to travel, and unable to marry without
a male guardian's blessing – or divorce either.
An entire political and economic system – one that treats half of
humanity like animals – must be destroyed along with the other more obvious
tyrannies choking off the region from its future. Until the rage shifts from
the oppressors in our presidential palaces to the oppressors on our streets and
in our homes, our revolution has not even begun". [1]
How come
that the topic of youth entrepreneurship is so dominant in the social media?
We encounter
youth entrepreneurship in Egypt nowadays in the forms of NGOs on facebook
advocating youth leadership, in the form of bloggers talking about great new
entrepreneurs as role models for the youth, in the form of actual youth
entrepreneurship in organizing demonstrations, discussion forums etc. When
before the revolution the media was depicting the Egyptian youth as lethargic
and the outside world didn’t think much better of the Egyptian youth, the
picture has changed a lot. We learn from the UNDP report that Egypt’s youth has
actually a fantastic reputation as being one of the most active and
entrepreneurial youth worldwide. Compared to 43 other countries in the 2008
Global Entrepreneurial Monitor, according to the UNDP report, Egypt ranks
11th in early stage entrepreneurial activity. There are some 2 million youth in Egypt under
30 years who have setup a business. Interesting as well is the fact that the
age groups of 18 to 24 years and the one from 25 to 34 years have the highest
entrepreneurial rates of “12% and 15% respectively”.
These numbers show that Egypt has an enormous
potential and that the entrepreneurial spirit that was so far exclusively
attached to the US might have well packed its bags, and moved on from the
States to settle in Egypt for the near future. According to the UNDP report, it
is Egypt’s entrepreneurial spirit itself that might be able to lessen the
impending crisis of unemployment in Egypt, by creating the majority of jobs and
enterprises that are needed in the next few years. In so far, the entrepreneurial spirit that
was mirrored by Egypt’s social media over the last year was not only a mirage
but a serious and important signal of hope. Those young people present online
and organizing themselves as activists, politicians, youth leaders, volunteers
etc. are a true sign of a real possibility of change sweeping over Egypt in the
years following the revolution.
The UNDP report has thus been able to prop up a vague
argument (that of the feeling of an existing entrepreneurial spirit that was
manifested in social media discourses) with hard data. It will be interesting
to follow up on Egypt’s future development of its own youth resources. But most
important of all, what is the reason why the issue of youth participation in
governance has become so dominant of social media discourse?
Youth
participation in governance
Even though the
answer to the question might seem too obvious and too easy to find; we still
think that this question is important to ask, especially because while reading
the UNDP report of 2010, a very different picture was painted before our eyes.
In 2010, the UNDP report painted a
picture of an Egyptian youth that was perceived as being either passive or
living in an environment that was not able to provide them with the support
necessary for socio political inclusion of the young.
Possible reasons
for the superficially perceived passiveness of the youth were restrictions on
freedom of expression, the emergency law, arrest of activist bloggers which led
to a predominance of the culture of fear when it comes to political engagement,
youth centers focusing on sports rather than on training youth leadership,
corruption, nepotism, youth coping with personal problems such as poverty,
unemployment etc.
This means that
the UNDP report of 2010 argues that the before mentioned circumstances hindered
the Egyptian youth to take matters into their own hand. The report stated
clearly that it was not apathy or indifference that kept the young adults at
bay but an absence of an enabling political, social and overall economic
environment.
Furthermore, the
report went on to list ideas and plans of action in order to enhance political
engagement of the youth, such as: “Establishing the culture of participation
among youth through educational institutions, civil society organizations and
media; Expanding programs of political education and developing programs on
leadership skills, which will enrich youth knowledge, enhance their
participation in socio-political life and enable them to exercise the rights and duties of citizenship; Encourage
youth to express their opinions, instead of controlling them in the framework
of a patriarchal system that undermines their abilities etc” Reading all this
after the revolution took place in the year 2011, this section of the report
acted as an eye opener for us.
Clearly, the report helped in understanding the
dynamics within the field of social media in Egypt. We learned more about the
situation of the Egyptian youth, why they feel marginalized, why they felt
pushed to act, why women especially used the blogosphere and in general new social
media as a tool to further their cause, why social media forums le the
discourses that they led etc. However, even the UNDP report highly
underestimated the Egyptian youth of what it was capable of. By the end of 2010
the discontent and the organization among Egypt’s youth had reached a level
that no one was able to foresee. Instead of the government, NGOs or another
institutional actor applying the suggestions made by the UNDP to improve the
fate of Egypt’s youth, they finally took matters into their own hand, used the
tool called social media to spread their cause and toppled a regime that was
widely thought to be invincible.
Nevertheless, it is important to mention at this
point, that the revolution was not only meant to fight a dictator, to fight a
regime, no it was more than that. A s the discourse in the social media
networks have shown us over the last months, this revolution was a revolution
against the entire system, against the rules of the game that have been applied
so far. By scrutinizing social media in Egypt we found talk about youth
participation in governance, democracy whatever that might entail, gender
equality, minority rights, religious freedom, constitutional projects,
entrepreneurial spirit among the youths and so on, which has clearly shown that
the revolution was aiming further than just to overthrow Mubarak.
The discourse at least in the social media we observed
strives for something much grander than that, it strives for a change in the
system itself. Be it the anti- Scaf groups on facebook, the bloggers that
continue to speak their minds freely or the constant update of activists on
twitter about the latest political developments in their country, the youth
that is active in social media in Egypt is hooked and will hopefully remain so.
Egypt’s youth has not only taken to the street, to the pen or to the microphone,
no they have taken it to parliament.
Thus we can conclude, that looking at the UNDP report
is absolutely necessary in order not only to understand why the main actors are
coming from a very specific age group and why their gender matters, but also in
order to understand the discourse that we found in different types of social
media (especially in the blogosphere and on facebook, since as we have
established before in our research that twitter has become more of a news
outlet than a discussion forum, or a place where people speak their minds).
Only by realizing the situation in which the Egyptian people live, the
challenges they are tackling every single day, the precarious situation many
women find themselves in and the dreary outlook of their possible future most
of them have, could we follow the significance of the discourse that was led on
facebook and within the blogosphere. We would understand the topics that were
chosen to be the most important, we would understand the importance or the
magnitude of how the discourse became politicized among the youth and what a
watershed the Egyptian revolution truly was and still is.
However, where the UNDP report failed, as most of the
other analytical works that were produced prior to the revolution, was in estimating
the gravity of the situation that the Egyptian youth lived in and their
readiness to go out and defy the political status quo no matter to what cost.
The UNDP report helps us explain what our eyes had witnessed and what we have
read in different social media resorts, however to really understand the process
as well as the historical weight of what we are observing right now much more
research will have to be done in the future.
Source
Conclusion
Throughout the entire time spend
researching online, hunting down people on twitter and discovering what there
is to discover in the blogosphere of Egypt we were continually amazed at how
much material is out there, at how many people are active on the net and what
kind of different forms and shapes online activism can take. In the following we will mention each
different form of social media separately before coming to an overall
conclusion about who is dominating the media landscape in Egypt right.
Talking about twitter first: After
finding out who to follow and keeping up with the amount of tweets the people
we subscribed to produced, we were faced with the difficult question whether
twitter still solely accounts for being a social network or whether twitter has
actually evolved into a news media institution aiming more at informing people
about current events as soon as they happen than facilitating its users to
socialize. After following our twitter subscriptions for almost two months we
have come to the conclusion that even though you still find many personal
tweets among the political ones, twitter is clearly on the verge of turning
itself into a news outlet rather than a gossip hot spot. Twitter has clearly
been used by Egyptian activists to spread information about who has been
arrested lately, who has been freed from prison, where protests are planned,
where they occur, where violence is been used by the police, which statements
were brought by Egyptian politicians etc.
Twitter now plays a much more important role than before the revolution,
it is not just used to mobilize people but to inform them about what is
happening in Egypt on the ground 24/7.
However,
we couldn’t help but notice that the people who use twitter and who communicate
with each other (re-tweet their tweets or comment their tweets) are usually
from the same political camp, meaning that twitter as a tool of spreading
information or mobilizing different groups only works in limited ways: like minded people follow each other on twitter
and communicate their ideas, opinions and pieces of information towards each
other. This means that twitter is a very selective and restrictive form of
social media, as well as an elitist form of social media since after doing some
background info checks on the users we found had the most followers, the ones
who tweet are usually from a higher social class and often times correspond to
those people who are the driving force in the Egyptian blogosphere. Adding on
to that, sometimes it proved to be very difficult to us to assess into which
category some of the people had to go into, since it was not always obvious
whether some of our subscriptions were truly independent or not.
Moving
on to the blogosphere, a similar picture is drawn in front of our eyes. If one
scrutinizes the blog roll that the most prominent Egyptian bloggers demonstrate
on their webpage, it becomes clear that there is a fixed group of bloggers who
all follow and support each other, again a selective community of online
activists, which makes it difficult to estimate how much influence they wield
over the average Egyptian’s opinion building process. It was also very
difficult to assess the importance of a blog in general, since blog entries go
mostly uncommented and blogs do not show the number of normal people they are
followed by. On a more positive note however we witnessed that especially the
blogosphere gave the voice of Egyptian women the chance to express themselves
freely. It was coherent with what the Egyptian journalist Shahira Amin has told
us in the interview that she gave us: Women are becoming more and more active
and present in the Egyptian media landscape. This is why we think that the
blogosphere might develop into an even more important online sphere that would
allow women as well as certain minorities within Egypt the chance to speak
their mind.
Facebook
was a very interesting phenomenon, since facebook proved to be the most
socially liberal form of social media interaction, meaning that on facebook the
discussions that took place were much livelier; people from obviously different
social classes had a chance to interchange their opinions and get in touch with
each other. Facebook, the social media that is the most widespread all over the
world and thus the best known, still seems to be holding on to its prestige as
the number one social media. It allows for more discussion (since it is not
limited to a certain number of characters like twitter) and seems to attract a
greater variety of people which makes us tend to think that the influence that
facebook groups and prominent facebook users have over the average Egyptian
might me more important than the influence of other social media.
Nevertheless,
the conclusion of our project might not be as simple as it seems. Throughout
our work we have started to ponder about the possibility of different social
media maybe having each carved out their specific niche in the realm of social
interaction: Twitter represents the information platform, Facebook represents
the discussion forum and the blogosphere represents the megaphone for voices
unheard of before or ignored by the Egyptian society, with some of them even
gaining the status of celebrities on the international scene (sandmonkey). Is
it possible that social media has undergone a sort of division of labor?
All
in all it will remain incredibly interesting to follow the development of
social media not only in Egypt but in the entire Arab world from close up. The
Arab Media Influence Report found in 2010 that Egypt was the fastest growing
media market in the entire MENA region, Baradei’s facebook page became one of
the most popular sites online in Egypt in 2010 and proved to act as a catalyst
of anti-government demonstrations. In 2011 the same report published a new
finding, that in August 2010, Arabic became the fastest growing language on
Facebook and that a shift had taken place from the key words used in most of the conversations
on Facebook led by Egyptian users from socio-economic terms to political terms.
The key words that are now used by Egyptian users are according to the report Revolution, Corruption, Mubarak, Minister, NDP, Parliament
and Freedom. These facts and examples go to show that social media will
remain an active part of the political discourse in the future. It certainly
will not determine political discourse but it will enlarge, spread and
diversify it.
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