Lucia — What Kind of Social Media?
Topic(s): Egypt | Comments Off on Lucia — What Kind of Social Media?This is a post from a ‘Twitter Revolution Must Die’ Thread on the IDC mailing list. Please follow the link below to see pages from the pamphlet distributed.
-rg
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Thanks all, nice discussion.
It’s also worth pointing out that Facebook and Twitter facilitated the Mubarak regimes’ agency as well, and that in fact the strategic pamphlet distributed by organizers of the resistance asked that it not be circulated via those or other website channels because they were being monitored by the police and state security:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/01/egyptian-activists-action-plan-translated/70388/
Instead, it was distributed mostly via very old-fashioned means – photocopying and being handed out to other demonstrators.
Yes, “lived experience is synonymous with mediated experience.” The problem is that in much discussion of the enabling uses of technology, somehow that observation always gets used to collapse the very real differences between various *kinds* of lived, mediated experience – as if there is NO difference at all between sitting at a computer typing, participating in a demonstration, putting one’s body on the line to jam the machinery of power, or (to return to the earlier discussion about the classroom) engaging in a face-to-face conversation or experience with others in real time and space. What always seems to get elided are the unique qualities of open-ended, emergent, embodied experience.
Social media can be useful tools that aid in communication and change, but actually engaging with others in real time and space is necessary for transformation, whether of ideas or of a political order.
Lucia
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Link to original pamphlet:
http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2011/01/29/thawra2011_lo.pdf
Link to English translation of some of the pages:
(The pages included are 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 12, 13, 22, and 26)
http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2011/01/29/egyptianrevolutionaryguide_9pages.pdf
Article from ‘The Atlantic’
Egyptian Activists’ Action Plan: Translated
Egyptian activists have been circulating a kind of primer to Friday’s planned protest. We were sent the plan by two separate sources and have decided to publish excerpts here, with translations into English. Over Twitter, we connected with a translator, who translated the document with exceptional speed.
What follows are side-by-side translations of nine pages from the 26-page pamphlet. They were translated over the last hour and pasted up in Photoshop to give you an idea of what’s in the protest plan. While the plan itself contains specifics about what protesters might do, these excerpts show how one might equip oneself for clashes with riot police. Egyptian security forces have repeatedly beaten protesters as the level of violent repression of demonstrations has ratcheted upwards. For more context on the pamphlet itself, the Guardian UK ran a summary of it earlier today.
As you’ll read, the creators of the pamphlet explicitly asked that the pamphlet not be distributed on Twitter or Facebook, only through email or other contacts. We’re publishing this piece of ephemera because we think it’s a fascinating part of the historical record of what may end up becoming a very historic day for Egypt.