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 (
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.
