one passage from the Moran interview

It’s a nice interview with Dermot Moran. But I think this passage overstates the case somewhat:

“There was a very interesting article in the New York Times quite recently by a critical commentator complaining about the way in which the Egyptian and the Tunisia revolutions were presented in the US media as if they were victories for Facebook. The fact of the matter was that the Internet was down, as was the mobile phone system in these countries, for five or six days. So people were not mobilizing via Facebook or the Internet. There was external people doing that, raising consciousness, but within Egypt and Tunisia it was not done that way; they did it the traditional way by meeting each other than passing on traditional messages – like having a sense of going to the square at the same time or whatever.”

Facebook did in fact play a big role in Egypt, just as Twitter did. (And I say this as someone who has multiple gripes with Facebook.) True, they were all shut down for the first X number of days. But the “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook group was of major importance in laying the groundwork for what happened here.

Also, there’s not a simple distinction between inside/outside people. For example, much of my own information about the revolution as it was in progress came from Facebook, from Egyptians I know who happened not to be in Egypt and thus had web access, but who were calling friends and family in Egypt and summarizing those reports on the web. All very important.

That said, Moran is certainly right that the Egyptians quickly figured out how to capitalize on more traditional means of communication when Mubarak pulled the plug on the internet. I’m a firm believer in the theory that this strategy backfired: once the internet was turned off, people had no other source of news than to go out on the street, and the protests swelled even further.