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>> 139 5 Tweeting into the Future Affecting Citizens and Networking Revolution Egyptians took to the streets in 2011 in a revolution that would overthrow a regime that had controlled the country for three decades. In the midst of the unrest in Egypt, the New York Times website featured an image: a woman holding a scorecard that read “Facebook: 2, Dictators: 0” (presumably, mocking the deposed dictators in Tunisia and Egypt). The revolution became known (both in and outside Egypt) as the “Facebook Revolution” as news organizations such as Fox News, CNN, and the New York Times reported that Egyptian Facebook users laid the online social networking groundwork essential to the political activists.1 In particular, news media cited the Facebook page entitled “We Are All Khaled Said,” which quickly garnered 130,000 fans after it was created to honor a businessman who was beaten to death in 2009.2 Said was killed after he reportedly posted a cell phone recording of corrupt police dividing the goods seized in a drug bust. The page became the largest dissident page in Egypt and a main location where the initial January 25 protests were planned.3 The protests touched off dramatic and violent clashes among state military, citizen and mercenary thugs, and protestors throughout Cairo, but primarily in Tahrir Square. President Mubarak’s ultimate resignation on February 11 was met with widespread national celebrations. Clearly, internet-based media were important in the story that unfolded in Egypt. The number of people with Facebook pages in Egypt increased more than 400 percent between 2008 and 2010, a significant increase even though that still meant less than 4 percent of Egyptians were online.4 Yet, the “Facebook Revolution” label is also clearly problematic. A revolution on Facebook might not reflect a revolution on the ground. For example, in Iran in 2009, messages about state violence against protesters flooded out over the internet and news media. A cell phone video recording Nega Agha Soltan’s death became such a profound focus of Twitter posts and reposts that the 140 > 141 “novelty years, transitional states, and identity crises” of a new medium are especially useful in determining a technology’s shape. The novelty years of the blog were instrumental in shaping visions of the social media networks that followed. As this chapter illustrates, news media initially represented blogs as “unmediated” and authentic proxies to individual users. This representation dovetailed with those cultivated in particular by users and academics who imagined the internet’s new blogs as able to fill the vacuum left by skepticism about commercialized news media and mass culture: if the blog could supplant newsroom standards of objectivity with radically authentic subjectivity, then bloggers themselves could be an antidote to dysfunctional and corrupt news media and its corporate culture. Envisioned by users, news media, and academics as offering authentic participation, blogs also became for these cultural agents vehicles for individuals to push back against corporate media interests and reclaim power through democratic means. As blogs gave way to microblogging and other social media, companies like Twitter capitalized on these visions of blogging and mapped visions of political legitimacy and authenticity onto a new (but related) technological practice. Ultimately, all of these shifts together worked to reconfigure new media political participation as idealized and revitalized democratic civic engagement and was part of a larger policy shift toward governmental “transparency.” In this context, the Facebook Revolution frame made sense. The frame capitalized on visions of the internet as authentic, as democratic, and as a space where transparent and benevolent nationhood happened. It functioned as a strain of discourse that reassured Americans (but clearly not all) that the revolution would promote “the right kind” of democracy, one that would support capitalism and U.S. national interests. It metaphorically extended the American virtual nation abroad through the corpoNation. But the frame also highlighted the ways Egyptians at home and abroad participated in diasporic nation-building, in the ways international news coverage tapped visions of and options about the protests from a variety of sources. It noted the messiness that is nation in the face of a transnational medium and acknowledged that the internet is not cleanly only nation or only transnation , but both. The Rise of Blogs: Auteur Bloggers and the Internet’s First Scalp In 1999, when approximately fifty blogs existed, a Chicago Tribune article titled “She has Seen the Future and It Is—Weblogs” compared reading a blog to “breaking into a psychiatrist’s office and rifling...

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