Blog Critique: Bridges Between Cultural and Digital Worlds in Revolutionary Egypt: Srinivasan

I know this selection process was quite random, but Rebecca nailed it in terms of picking the appropriate article for me to dissect and assess. I have always been politically and globally conscious, and share the same love for analyzing political grass-root organizations as Ramesh Srinivasan does. Curious to see how Srinivasan fueled his interest in global activism, I researched a little about him. Ramesh Srinivasan is an associate professor at the University of California-Los Angeles in information studies. This field of specificity closely looks at how news and information is spread on both local and global scales. Clearly he loves this subject as he traveled to Egypt to further understand and grasp the concept of social media and its ability to bind, bridge, and connect people across close and vast distances with one common goal or purpose (http://rameshsrinivasan.org/pages/about/). 

He is noted for utilizing his prior knowledge of anthropology and sociology to display a different lens of information studies. This is evident in his perspective piece titled, “Bridges Between Cultural and Digital Worlds in Revolutionary Egypt,” which utilized ethnography, sociological research designed to explore cultural phenomena, in Egypt during the 2011 Arab Spring. He closely worked with, and interviewed participants of the argued “digital revolution,” that ranged from the educated, young, elite to the illiterate, not technologically connected working class. This variety in demographics allowed for him to further understand the complexity of an “imagined and directly experienced” network, which I found quite fascinating. Too often, the media solely focuses on the activists who are more vocal in the protest. With doing so, the story is largely incomplete. There is a massive audience in revolutions who do not have a loud voice, but participate equally nonetheless. Through his ethnographic study, Srinivasan met with participants, who, despite this revolution being heavily noted for its use of a global networking infrastructure, did not obtain their information pertaining to the event via Facebook, Twitter, E-mail, but from the television and word of mouth. We often associate this revolution too much with its utilization of social media, when in fact like any revolution, standard communication worked just as effectively.

However, social media did play a tremendous role in the shaping and modeling of this revolution and should not be discredited or belittled. Social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, became a major outlet for opposition and dissent. The medium also bridged and networked hundreds and thousands of people together. Srinivasan explains that when Mohammed Boazizi lit himself on fire in protest of the Zine El Abidine Ben Ali regime in Tunisia, hundreds of people witnessed it, but then they filmed it and took pictures of it, documented it. This documented information was then picked up by journalists in far away countries, who then voiced their opinions and in a matter of moments, Boazizi’s dissent was heard and followed. It’s all so interesting.

For me, reading this article brought up one incredibly crucial aspect of “digital revolutions” that Srinivasan, in my opinion, opted not to address. He explains how the Internet facilitates anonymity, which leads to “leaderless” revolutions, allowing for activists to communicate their oppositions without revealing their identity and in turn making them a traitor of some sort. That makes perfect sense in a suppressive country where freedom of speech is repressed; anonymity is an outlet for this type of political dissent.  The reason though, that dictators and regimes have such a hard time controlling these “digital revolutions” is because the Internet is not truly governed. Yes, we may have rules subjected by big time movie corporations who don’t want people pirating their movies for free, but government’s cannot really suppress the information that is exchanged and obtained from the Internet when many communities share it. Yes, you have instances like China, whose government attempts to control information exchanged on the web, but they clearly can’t control all of it when dissent is still traded through these social media sites. It would’ve been interesting to hear Srinivasan’s take on this concept as it dictates so many of today’s political revolutions, like the Hong Kong protests.