Specifically focused on Egypt. Facebook and its potential to electrify the Arab world are very much on the minds of people looking at the Middle East of late – I attended a conference on Friday on Obama and the Global Media where the keynote speaker focused almost entirely on Facebook and how students of Middle Eastern Politics can hope to understand it. (I stole the “echochamber or town hall” bit from one of the panels – too good not to re-use!). I’m looking forward to hearing what our friends at the Egypt blog have to say on this piece; its greatest strength, in my opinion, is in its devotion to the communication of facts about the events, outlining what's happened in this Facebook movement. I’ve been an FB members since shortly after its inception in 2004, and so I find the awe with which Facebook is generally approached by those for whom it hasn't been a feature of their entire adult social lives a little tiresome; this piece avoids that in many ways. Here is an excerpt:
When I spoke to Wael Nawara, a 47-year-old Ghad activist who is a co-founder of the party, he explained why, for him, getting on Facebook was such a big eye-opener. If you look at Egyptian politics on the surface, he said, you might think that the Muslim Brotherhood is the only alternative to the Mubarak regime. But "Facebook revealed a liberal undercurrent in Egyptian society," Nawara said. "In general, there's this kind of apathy, a sense that there is nothing we can do to change the situation. But with Facebook you realize there are others who think alike and share the same ideals. You can find Islamists there, but it is really dominated by liberal voices."
This bit, to me, underlines the ‘networking’ part of 'social networking site’. Facebook in this context lets people know that they are not the only ones who feel the way they feel, and in this reflection there is amplification. This is, in my opinion, a sound rebuttal to the idea of interest groups online as an echochamber: even if people with exclusively similar views only communicate with each other through the internet, them talking back to one another day after day stokes their ideas and forces them to amplify, change, and develop. There is no stasis.
