The Agency of the Grassroots: Egyptian Diaspora Empowered by Social Media

Many influential scholars are very pessimistic about the agency of the deployment of media by grassroots. Appadurai (1990), innovatively identifying five disjunct dimensions of “scapes” in global cultural economy, asserted that mediascapes are only tools of nationstates to pacify separatists or potential ideas of difference.

"National and international mediascapes are exploited by nationstates to pacify separatists or even the potential fissiparousness of all ideas of difference…exercising taxonomic control over difference, by creating various kinds of international spectacle to domesticate difference, and by seducing small groups with the fantasy of self-display on some sort of global or cosmopolitan stage."

While Cinclair & Cunningham (2000) explored how diasporas make use of communication media, they only exemplified how diasporas redefine the cultural identities in hybrid terms, the transcendence of the dichotomy of home and host via television.

But where is the agency of the grassroots in political movements? With the development of media technology and the wide spread of social networking media in recent years, do we have enough reason to reconstruct the role of media in the political movements? The Egyptian revolution facilitated by Egyptian diaspora using social media tools (Blogs, Facebook, Twitter) lends some supports to this inquiry.

Social media has played a remarkable role not only in how Egyptians used it to organize the anti-government protests, but in how the Egyptian diasporas have witnessed, relayed information and influenced the world order. Although mainstream media are belittling the power of social media by claiming that the access to internet has been blocked, uses in Egypt can always find ways to bypass Twitter and Facebook blocks through mobile and third-party apps, proxy sites, software, VPN…On the other hand, the Internet block raised no less anxiety of the Egyptian Diasporas than people in homeland. They use telephone to get information from protests and spread them out through social media (@Jan25voices). They are important nexus linking the local and the global. Serving for this desperate demand, Google, Twitter and SayNow engineers released "Speak to Tweet" for Egyptians, a service that turns voice messages into tweets with the #Egypt tag attached. Egyptians could use their landlines to call one of three international numbers and leave messages.

Many many Egyptian Americans utilize this information to criticize what the Western media is getting wrong. It is very important to shape the narrative and get it to stick, especially in situations of crisis because history is always written by the victors and the powers. For example, a New York-based Egyptian blogger interviewed by CNN and appealed to the media to change the words “revolt” and “uprising” and “revolution” and not “chaoes” and “unrest”. Then, CNN changed its on-screen headlines from “CHAOS IN EGYPT” to “UPRISING IN EGYPT”.

Organized via Facebook, many Egyptian diasporas marched and protested in Los Angeles, San Franciso, Washington, New York and in cities around the world, demanding that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak relinquish power. Pressures from the mediascape and ethnoscape forced Washington to make a subtle, but incontrovertible shifting of the U.S. position. They declined to articulate explicit support for Mubarak. Ironically, the power of empire can be "positive" and "desirable" in some sense.

That said, it is still very interesting to explore the motivation of the active deployments of social media of the Egyptian diasporas. I think we can address these or related issues from other angles in the coming weeks (e.g., Hybridity, Community…).