Techies on the Ground: Revisiting Egypt 2011
| Author(s) |
Laila Shereen Sakr
|
| Contact |
Laila Shereen Sakr, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4010, USA. E-mail: ssakr@filmandmedia.ucsb.edu |
| Issue |
CyberOrient, Vol. 13, Iss. 1, 2019, pp. 43-61 |
| Published |
December 20, 2019 |
| Type |
Article |
| Abstract |
This article studies social media and popular social movements in the early 21st century
in the Middle East and North Africa, with a focus on Egypt. Rather than ethnography
or political theory exclusively, I employ a data analytics of analyzing tweets, posts, and
blogs to describe the political culture of social media. And then I perform the results
under the guise of the Arabic-speaking cyborg VJ Um Amel. The article argues that the
Egyptian experience of revolution and counterrevolution reveals the indispensability,
the promises, and the limits of digital communication across borders and languages. |
| Keywords |
social media, Arab Spring, data analytics, cyborgs, software localization
|
