Knowing and Unknowing the Egyptian Public
by zunguzungu
“One of the greatest obstacles to any fruitful theory of genre has been the tendency to treat the genres as discrete. An ideological approach might suggest why they can’t be, however hard they might appear to try: at best, they represent different strategies for dealing with the same ideological tensions”
–Robin Cook, 1977 essay, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,”
I’ve been thinking about Jay Rosen’s piece on “The ‘Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators’ Article,” in which he defines articles like this, this, this, and this, as a genre by reference these formal markers:
1.) Nameless fools are staking maximalist claims.
2.) No links we can use to check the context of those claims.
3.) The masses of deluded people make an appearance so they can be ridiculed.
4.) Bizarre ideas get refuted with a straight face.
5.) Spurious historicity.
6.) The really hard questions are skirted.
Rosen has the beginnings of an answer as to why the genre has an appeal:
…here’s a guess: almost everyone who cares about such a discussion is excited about the Internet. Almost everyone is a little wary of being fooled by The Amazing and getting carried away. When we nod along with Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators we’re assuring ourselves that our excitement is contained, that we’re being realistic, mature, grown-up about it.
I think this is right, as far as it goes. But I begin with a citation from Robin Cook’s fairly canonical argument about cinematic genre because he’s emphasizing the importance of placing generic formations in their broader discursive context, and I think this is precisely what we need to do with this brand of writing, now that we‘ve (Rosen) identified its formal characteristics. Its coherence is linked to the problem it seeks to solve and how, the work it takes as its project to do.
Cook’s argument, for example, is that a Film Noir like The Big Heat and a Western like Rancho Notorious are not only part of the same conversation — which he argues here, for example — but that the position they take in that conversation (how they resolve the problems they raise) is at least a partial function of the narratives encoded in the generic structures they employ. To oversimplify: while the Western and the Film Noir are talking about the same kinds of social tensions, anxieties, or contradictions, the position they take on those questions (the answers/resolutions they give) are distinctly organic to their particular generic forms. Context, then, is key: we understand the relationship between Western and Noir (and the function of those generic markers) by placing them as different dialogic parts of a single conversation.
The goal of doing so would be to liberate the concept of genre from its purely formal characteristics. By attacking “the foolishness of regarding [genres] as discrete and fully autonomous on the grounds of their defining iconography,” as Cook puts it, he wants us to see that the Western or the Noir are coherent ideological structures, not simply a set of clichéd forms. You know it’s a Western, in other words, not because of the simple presence of railroad, lawman, cowboy, Indian, etc, but because of the narratives that these motifs are being used to put forward, the particular kind of story the Western tells about history, progress, gender, and race.
My version of Rosen’s argument, then, would be this: it is a fantasy of a particular kind of credulousness, which is then so soberly refuted (by sober debunkers) that the overriding impression left for the audience is only of the performance of seriousness itself, and of the credulous enthusiasm which has been dismissed.
Take this bit of rhetoric — much derided — from Malcolm Gladwell:
…surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another. Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along. Barely anyone in East Germany in the nineteen-eighties had a phone—and they ended up with hundreds of thousands of people in central Leipzig and brought down a regime that we all thought would last another hundred years—and in the French Revolution the crowd in the streets spoke to one another with that strange, today largely unknown instrument known as the human voice. People with a grievance will always find ways to communicate with each other. How they choose to do it is less interesting, in the end, than why they were driven to do it in the first place.
The assertion of eternal verities (people will always) alongside controlled contempt (Please.) and the repeated invocation of what is and isn’t “interesting” all adds up to an argument from an authority derived from the seriousness of his rhetoric: we know he’s a serious guy because he sounds serious, and because the people he’s criticizing are saying things that go against eternal verities, and because they cause a serious person to need to control his contempt (and we know they are contemptible because he is serious). It’s a recursive tautology; what you get is a blank stage in which there are two actors, the twitter-utopian and the debunker, and the staging and background (and object of debate) left insubstantial, immaterial. The rhetorical foreground fills up the camera while the historiographic background is left out of focus.
Rosen suggests that this allows the “really hard questions” to be skirted, and that’s true, but I think it also accomplishes something else through the blankness of the absent backdrop: the Western generalist (Gladwell) gets to retain Serious Authority. The man who knows nothing about Egypt still gets to Seriously Know, precisely because it‘s only a dialogue between two Western speakers. And this, I think, is the real key. It isn’t just that really “hard” questions get skirted; it’s the fact that Egyptians are driving this narrative — and that if we want to understand it, we have to know something about Egypt in its particularity — that makes these people nervous.
After all, the question of social media will, in the end, always turn into a question of the particular social reality it’s mediating. Which is why I would add to Rosen’s list another generic trait: the invocation of “people will always” as an explanation, something that always strikes me as a sign of a weak and unadventurous mind. People don’t “always” do anything. People are unpredictable. But they don’t do strange and unexpected things because they‘re irrational; people get called “irrational” when their rationality is not as apparent to us as we’d like to think it is. People always do what they do for a reason, but when we don’t know what that reason is, calling it irrational is a way of papering over the fact that we don’t actually understand.
In this case, for example, the idea that “People with a grievance will always find ways to communicate with each other” is flatly inadequate. Egypt had a grievance for three decades, yet they only started finding a way to communicate and coordinate with each other (on a massive scale) in the last few years. The Egyptian uprising happened when it did for good reasons, and eternal verities about what people will always do give us less than no purchase on that problem. But to even have the conversation about social media starts taking people like Gladwell way out of their comfort zone.
In other words, to understand why the Egyptian revolt happened when it did, we’d have to learn something about Egyptian history, about the Kifaya movement, and about how Egyptians were actually using blogs and facebook. Which would mean that a generalist intellectual about everything (and nothing in particular) like Malcolm Gladwell would suddenly find himself having to listen to a specialist like Charles Hirschkind, or even — ye Gods! — Egyptians themselves. But it’s less about who as what; the source of Hirschkind’s knowledge about how blogs were used to lay the foundation of the Egyptian revolution is, ultimately, not his own Deeply Serious intellect, but the fact that he’s been studying the formations of publics in Egypt for decades now. It’s the fact that Egypt is particular and similar only to itself (and that he’s been paying attention to it) that allows him to weave together this narrative, for example:
What was striking about the Egyptian blogosphere as it developed in the last 7 or so years is the extent to which it engendered a political language free from the problematic of secularization vs. fundamentalism that had governed so much of political discourse in the Middle East and elsewhere. The blogosphere that burst into existence in Egypt around 2004 and 2005 in many ways provided a new context for a process that had begun a somewhat earlier, in the late 1990s: namely, the development of practices of coordination and support between secular leftist organizations and associations, and Islamist ones (particularly the Muslim Brotherhood)—a phenomenon almost completely absent in the prior decades. Toward the end of the decade of the 90s, Islamist and leftist lawyers began to agree to work together on cases regarding state torture, whereas in previous years, lawyers of one affiliation would almost never publicly defend plaintiffs from the other.
Gladwell can’t take part in this conversation, except by dismissing it. Which is why he must dismiss it: to deal with it on its own terms — a topography of knowledge defined by a meridian set in Cairo — would lead him away from his ability to speak about all people all the time. It would prevent Western Authority from having a monopoly on the truth of all people.
Let me push this even farther. Rosen writes that “everyone is a little wary of being fooled by The Amazing and getting carried away,” and this, again, seems right to me, but I think the fear runs deeper than simply a desire to not look foolish or of being wrong. Revolution is scary because it’s unpredictable. Hell, democracy is scarily unpredictable. And respect for democracy will require accepting that the Egyptians might do things we wouldn’t do if we were in their place, choices that may seem — to us — irrational, but only because the source of their rationality is unavailable to us. It will mean accepting the legitimacy of political rationalities we may not share, and which dismissing as “irrational” would only reveal us to be crypto-colonialists, willing to allow them to have democratic choice only between the options we’ve chosen for them.
Note, for example, how many Western commentators have demanded guarantees that a democratic election in Egypt will produce a government we like. And the assertion that if democracy leads to Islamist rule (of any type), then obviously Egypt isn’t ready for democracy. The colonialist assumption of privilege that underpins that kind of thought process is staggering, as is its explicitly anti-democratic preference: before we can accept Arabs making choices for themselves, we have to know what those choices will be. Only choices that have already been vetted in Washington are to be allowed. And thus: only we get to have democracy.
To return to the conversation about new media, one of the pitfalls of dubbing this a “facebook revolution” would be if we allowed the social topography in which facebook is used to disappear. The straw man that people like Gladwell invent are doing this, turning Egyptians into tools of their media tools. But this is also precisely what Hirschkind is not doing when he places blogs and facebook in their socio-political context: it is precisely because of pre-existing political problems — the fact that Islamists and secularists were not talking to each other — that blogs and other online organizing platforms, like facebook, could become so useful. Conversations that could not be had in person could be had online, which then led to face-to-face conversations, which then made collaborative action possible.
To build on what seemed to be the consensus of Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the importance of social media is particularly to be found in the sense and performance of Egyptian public identity that it enabled, both the identity and political rationality which were suddenly seen to widespread. Routine state terror has been omnipresent for decades, but what we heard over and over again was that a facebook page like “We Are All Khalid Saeed” could became a means of rendering that experience — which so many people silently had in common — something which could be publicly knowable as a common experience. This move — taking something privately experienced, and making it publicly knowable — is a powerful thing.
As Edward Said put it in Permission to Narrate (in a quote I was reminded of here):
Facts do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain, and circulate them. . . . as Hayden White has noted in a seminal article, “narrative in general, from the folk tale to the novel, from annals to the fully realized ‘history,’ has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, authority.”
Before the recent past — goes this interpretation — state terror in Egypt was ubiquitous, but it was not so easily and widely known to be ubiquitous. So however common it might have been, each fact and incident of torture and state violence was mostly knowable as isolated, particular. Which makes sense: in a country whose media was tightly controlled by a dictatorial apparatus, there were few available socially acceptable narratives which could absorb, sustain, and circulate them. Moreover, even if everyone knew that state terror was ubiquitous, they didn’t necessarily know that everyone else knew it too: they might have known that they — and anyone — could suffer the fate of Khalid Saeed, but they didn’t know, for sure, that everyone else knew this as well. In other words, Egyptians might have been united by the fact of being vulnerable to be tortured to death by their government, but the internet allowed them to see and understand that they all understood themselves to be this, that all were united in disgust and rage. This is the fertile seed-bed for revolt: knowing that if you stand in front of a tank, you will not be alone in doing so.
And this is what I think the main function of the “Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators” article, and the ideological function that defines its genre: the disappearance of Egyptian social consciousness as the prime driver of events. Against the straw-man of techno-determinism, someone like Gladwell is enabled to argue that this has nothing to do with what Egyptians think of Egypt, nothing to do with a century of accumulated thought, emotion, identity, and narrated experience — most of which is unavailable to Gladwell, and which most Americans find strange and foreign. Instead, it is something safe and easy, something we, in the West, can safely opine and claim authority over: ourselves. The French revolution, the fall of communism, and Universal Western History. In an implicit — but constitutive — dialogue with those who would tell us that this is about Egypt, it comes along to tell us that it’s not.
zunguzungu 
“Moreover, even if everyone knew that state terror was ubiquitous, they didn’t necessarily know that everyone else knew it too: they might have known that they — and anyone — could suffer the fate of Khalid Saeed, but they didn’t know, for sure, that everyone else knew this as well.”
Nailed it.
I did an interview with Wael Abbas and Alaa in 2008 which touches on some of these themes:
http://hub.witness.org/en/WaelAbbas
You make one unsupported assertion here: “… another generic trait: the invocation of “people will always” as an explanation, something that always strikes me as a sign of a weak and unadventurous mind. People don’t “always” do anything. People are unpredictable.” that I have to disagree with.
There are broad, well recognized tendencies in human nature and human civilization that are, in fact, cyclical, sturdy and predictable to the extent that one can say “people will do x” if not always exactly when. Empires, commercial, military and religious, have been built upon this notion that human nature does, in fact, have an eternal verity to to it; is it not also the basis for modern schools of moral and cultural relativism?
Historians from Herodutus on up have used past behavior and alien behavior as models to illustrate and predict contemporary mores. Gladwell, without any special qualifications, is perfectly within his sphere to assert that an oppressed people, hungry and abused, will make a popular uprising.
Perhaps a refinement of the sentiment that “people always will” arguments are shoddy would be instead to say that this kind of observation is so generic as to be without benefit to the argument one is making.
This is the standard rebuttal to consensus gentium when it crops up in written argument and might serve better. Instead of disputing Gladwell’s assumption directly, simply attack its lack of relevance(which you do throughout; this one assertion is neither true nor necessary).
Will have to think about that. But I do feel a need to pipe up periodically to the effect that what is so often taken to be “human nature” is often a set of assumptions privileging a very particular and limited conception of what humanity can be. And I really do think people are unpredictable, because people are a lot more different from each other than we often are comfortable realizing. There’s a limit to that generalization, of course, but I suspect I would put it quite a bit farther than you would (and that’s fine).
Moreover, your “one can say “people will do x” if not always exactly when” demonstrates exactly my point: if people will always revolt, then Gladwell has nothing interesting to say about why they revolted when they did (as opposed to the first thirty years of Mubarak). Why has this revolution succeeded now? It’s not the only question to ask, but it’s an important one, and it’s the one that looking at social media helps us answer.
I don’t know- Couldn’t a simpler reduction to say that social media is simply the context of the times, neither an actor or a facilitor beyond its simplest, most obvious function?
Also, “people will always” can take much more pointed and sometimes subtle forms. I heard a commentator express recently that Egypt hadn’t risen up earlier because it was a fellahin culture, accustomed to exploitation and unused to the thirst for democracy, and that the Iranians had risen up so much earlier(1979) because theirs was a culture of empire and self-determination. How’s THAT for a ugly argument? 🙂
But it feeds from that same, useless “people will always” line; “people will always x: when these people did x it is because they are y”, instantly, a fallacy that rests on the authority of the speaker and can be hard to challenge factually no matter how baldly wrong it is.
I don’t think you and I would disagree if I said that human nature is an observable phenomenon and human behavior is grossly predictable(a hungry man will seek food, a thirsty one will seek water), but in every historical event, one should never rely on “people will always” to understand what happened.
It’s always more fruitful to examine the context and the events as they happened, because the other way is a sure, short step to making the world fit a pre-defined point of view rather than seeing clearly.
I have a different complaint to make about this – namely that you haven’t really done justice to what Gladwell wrote. These are the sentences you are taking issue with:
“People with a grievance will always find ways to communicate with each other. How they choose to do it is less interesting, in the end, than why they were driven to do it in the first place.”
You claim that the generalization in the first sentence is symptomatic of a “weak and unadventurous mind”. Really? What is the problem here, other than it amounting to something like a truism? I don’t think it’s enough to simply assume that all generalizations about human behavior will turn out to be false, thanks to the apparently infinite creativity of human beings. The reason Gladwell’s statement is perfectly reasonable in this context is because he is clearly talking about *social* grievances, and the social is intimately (I would say, necessarily) connected with communication. But even if one disagrees with this assumption, what specifically do you want to oppose to Gladwell’s assertion? That people will not, in fact, always find ways to communicate with one another? Doesn’t this go against the very claim you make for human creativity and inventiveness?
And Gladwell’s second sentence clearly indicates that far from dismissing the *reasons* behind the actions of the aggrieved, it is precisely these reasons, and not the means chosen by those actors, which should be of primary interest to us.
You’re probably right that Gladwell has nothing interesting to say about the contingencies of this particular uprising – but then his general thesis (written months earlier) had to do with the importance of solidarity among social revolutionaries, and how that kind of social bonding can’t easily be replicated on Facebook or twitter. It’s an argument that is meant to apply generally, I don’t think what happened in Egypt constitutes a counter-example to it.
B”HGood Golden Oldie.We might be able to change the date to 2011 with the same carootn. Once again we are waiting to see if we will make peace with Egypt’s Pharaoh.The peace we did have was mostly a cessation of killing.The most life saving thing that I can discern is that since the year of the carootn many Israelis have quit smoking. The fact may be that our percentage of foolish (death defying) smokers is about average for the world.AM YIRAEL CHAI (if we give up cigarettes)which have killed more Israelis than our wars.
Generally I do not learn article on blogs, hoeewvr I would like to say that this write-up very pressured me to check out and do so! Your writing style has been surprised me. Thanks, quite nice article.
i wish i could control it ireasl should be palestine and i agree with you never make peace with ireasli government but make peace with ireaslis who dont support the murder
I love this picture. My first thgouht before I read the post was he’s made a drawing of the pyramid. I can’t believe this was a camera shot. My husband would love this because he wants to go to Egypt someday. Thanks for sharing. Have a nice night, what’s left.
And to think I was going to talk to someone in person about this.
we have to know something about Egypt in its particularity – that makes these people nervous.
When has not knowing about things, particularly foreign things, ever made these people nervous?
You are overthinking this.
Twitter and Facebook are turning everyone into a journalist. That’s bad news for Gladwell and co.
“Overthinking” is my middle name. 😉
Love is such a beautiful thing prbaboly the best of things Without it the world would be a big grave yard, with dead people walking.From Egypt with love to everyone in the world.
I’ve read a lot about Forex, but I’ve never seen a proven pftrialboe forex strategy, despite the claims of some scam web sites.Playing Forex can appear alluring, but the majority of people who try it lose money. All you have to do is do a web search on the words Forex and lose to see this is the consensus.Forex is what we call a zero sum game. You are making a bet with someone else about whether a currency will rise or fall. For every winner there has to be a loser. If you are smarter than the average player, you may make money. If you are dumber than the average player, you are likely to lose money. Most of the people making the bets in Forex are highly trained professionals at banks and other institutions. You are unlikely to beat them at this game.Actually Forex is not quite a zero sum game. It’s a slightly negative sum game as the Forex broker takes a small percentage each time in the spread. It’s a small amount but over a hundred trades, it ends up being a considerable amount of money. So the average player is likely to lose money, and remember the average player is a highly trained professional and probably smarter than you.There is a lot of luck in Forex, and if you play it, you will have some periods of time where you make money. This is usually because you are having a lucky streak, not because you have suddenly become an expert Forex player. However, most people are unwilling to admit their success is due to luck. They become convinced they have a system that works, and lose a lot of money trying to refine it.Further complicating the problem is the large number of Forex scams on the internet. Most Forex websites are of questionable honesty. You will find many people on the Internet that claim they made a lot of money using Forex. They are usually liars trying to make money. They will say: Go to Forexcrap,com/q2347. The q2347 is a signal to the Forexcrap site that you are being referred to them by q2347. If they sell something to you, q2347 gets a kickback. These coded signals can be hidden by different methods in the link. Other people will refer you to their own private website or blog for the purpose of trying to get money off you. Also there are a good number of trolls out there that like to pretend they are successful forex traders just for the fun of it.I would recommend not trying to do Forex at all, unless you are a trained professional. It’s like playing poker with people better than you, with the house constantly taking a small percentage from the pot.
That’s a well-thought-out answer to a challenging question
More posts of this quality. Not the usual c***, please
The warfare to provide equity and rationale to the costs and management of car insurance will be difficult-struggled. No Quotes Chimp anticipates the strong and established powers of the insurance organization to concede their tremendous strength readily. Actually, it may need years of lively customer activism to block the costs exploitationes of the auto insurance business.
there will be no peace with you Israel, untill you mnaage to give Palestinians their rights.. after that we shall talk about peace, otherwise we’re sorry we don’t make peace with murderers (not anymore)..From Egypt with caution.
Deep thinking – adds a new dinmosien to it all.
The pictures are sniutnng But what do you expect with such a beautiful bride and handsome dad. It just makes me wish all the more that I could have attended your special day. Can’t wait to see more, especially family shots with Cheryl and D.W. Love to you all Auntie Jo
As someone who studies Egyptian culture, I agree with you that it’s difficult to say anything interesting about Egypt without actually being knowledgeable about Egypt. However, I disagree with these statements, which suggest essentialism and a radical East/West distinction of the sort that Edward Said debunked in Orientalism:
It’s precisely because these statements are false that someone like Charles Hirschkind, or someone like me, can (a) learn Arabic as a foreign language, study Egypt’s particularities and understand the rationality of what goes on there (which is actually not so different from the rationality of what goes on in other parts of the world), and (b) understand how events in Egypt are in many ways similar to events in other parts of the world, and can be analysed in basically the same terms, without neglecting their particularity.
Of course, and I don’t disagree with you at all (citing Hirschkind as an authority on Egypt, after all…).
In the first line you quoted, I mean that we shouldn’t understand Egypt by reference to the French revolution; we should understand Egypt by reference to Egypt (inclusively, of course, with the important position it holds in the larger Arab world as part of that). This is not East/West essentialism — or certainly isn’t meant to be — but simply the fact that every place is much more like itself than anywhere else. I don’t think we disagree on that point at all, though certainly it’s a tricky point to articulate well; the line between localism and comparativism is always hazy.
On the second quote, you need to see the word “unavailable” in the context I’m using it, the argument that precisely because we don’t know as much about being Egyptian as do the Egyptians, we don’t get to second-guess their choices. These are the key grafs:
and especially
I’m not saying that we *can’t* know more about Egypt, just that (for the vast majority of us) we shuold be very aware of how little we know, and for that reason, have some humility about deciding when and where and on what terms the Egyptian people are allowed to have democracy. Again, I suspect we don’t really disagree about this.
OK, OK. I guess my emphasis would have been different. Sure, it’s good to tell opinionated, judgemental people who don’t know anything about Egypt that they’re ignorant and in no position to judge what goes on there. A lot of people definitely need to hear that, as uncomfortable as it may make them. But I’d also add that this knowledge is within their reach: they can learn Arabic, live in Egypt, study its history, etc., and then what goes on there will make a lot of sense to them. It’s not some great esoteric mystery. And if they’re really in a hurry, there’s a lot of good academic research that they can read, by Egyptians and others.
Also, please be more careful about how you use the word “we”. Some of your readers might be Egyptians, or non-Egyptians like me who actually do know something about Egypt.
great post, but i think one needs to read gladwell in the context of mainstream punditry, as the bearer of one onerous cliché duking it out with the bearers of the other, rather than fixing on his rhetorical tricks. in other words, he’s not talking to hirschkind, he’s talking to clay shirky and andrew sullivan, who use the same strategies as he does. it’s just not accurate to deny that techno-utopian credulousness was (and is) rampant in the msm (though its peaks declined between iran and tunisia, and again between tunisia and egypt). what can be misleading is that it often takes on cynical form – the headline says something like “FACEBOOK REVOLUTION IN TUNISIA” while the body of the article has some sort of disclaimer, like “some experts question whether facebook was solely responsible for recent events.”
checking generalist overreach with specialist expertise is necessary, but every serious pundit has a demystifying “we have to look at the facts” moment (a rhetorical move that works just as well against enthusiasm as cynicism): gladwell’s “How they choose to do it is less interesting, in the end, than why they were driven to do it in the first place” is his, right after the generalization you pick on, which relies on a truism to counter unreflective exuberance about ‘the politics of social networking.’ the erasure of egyptian authorship you point out in the “twitter can’t topple dictators” article is precisely mirrored by the “twitter can topple dictators” article.
i’d say both draw their expectations from what their authors think twitter and facebook are for us, rather than looking at what they are for egyptians, tunisians, iranians, etc. the position they fight for isn’t serious knowledge, but privileged ignorance. how to frame our ignorance in pleasing ways, and the competition to become the author of that frame. for the consumer, which option to choose from this menu is largely a matter of taste — this is affirmed in AP-style pieces which include both ‘straw men’ in the same article.
here’s some twitter-utopian articles, just so no one thinks i don’t uphold standards of objective evidence:
http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/02/11/6033340-power-of-twitter-facebook-in-egypt-crucial-says-un-rep
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/facebook-twitter-and-the-_b_788378.html
http://www.alternet.org/story/149545/
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/hu2/English
Thank you for this weblog. That’s all I can say. You most denfiitely have created this blog into one thing that’s eye opening and important. You clearly know so much concerning the topic, you’ve covered a lot of bases. Great stuff from this part with the world wide web. Again, thank you for this weblog.
you were living in Austin. I just gogelod you up amazing this internet thing to make a long story, short. I’m a blast from your past in Quincy. The other day I was going thru some old mementos and stumbled upon a bunch of old Salt lick Press stuff that Jim sent me between 1971 and 1980, including 58 letters, 2 christmas cards and a wedding invitation. Dan thought you might be interested hearing from me. After going thru all the Salt Lick stuff, I ordered Jim’s A Quincy History from an obscure book mail order company, and read it non-stop. I wasn’t aware Jim published his journal, since we stopped writing in 1980 the year before it was printed. Brought back some great memories. Sorry to hear of his passing respond if you want to chat more.Bill
This is the ideal answer. Everyone should read this
The “over thinking” that bonobo suggests is a fault here might also be merely “thinking” – and the border between these two ought to be explained a bit if the criticism is to be more than an insult. If the accusation makes any sense, it might relate to the weakness of Gladwell as a target of criticism. The simplest description of why his essay was so unconvincing is that it replicated the very flaw he attributes to his straw man: a bizarre disconnection of the Internet from all other forms of communication. A theory of “Internet vs life” (or strong vs weak ties, or something; there is so little plausibility here that it is difficult even to characterize) falls apart when given the slightest critical reflection. So Aaron’s post is, in this sense, overkill.
On the other hand, the target is not really Gladwell, who is interesting and informative on some topics but not good here. The real subject is what qualifies a person to opine on the role of social media in the Egyptian revolution. We have read many such opinions, and a bit of general reflection on why so many of them seem inadequate is helpful.
For me, the most interesting thing here relates to “most people,” “rational,” and “unpredictable.” People everywhere were surprised by what just happened in Egypt; certainly the participants did not know what was going to come next. In many of the interviews and tweets there were acknowledgment of the radical uncertainty they felt.
Americans in important media and government positions demand even more than that the outcome of the Egyptian revolution be to their liking, they also require that these events be predictable. If they can’t predict, they simply judge events by the outcomes they can vividly imagine – that is, by fictional outcomes. I heard some amazingly fatuous remarks of this kind in a radio interview with Leslie Gelb recently, in which he retroactively adjusted the “odds” of his completely failed prediction about the revolution’s outcome. (Do detailed political descriptions of the future even deserve “odds?” I’m reminded of Brigadier General Pudding’s definitive work: “Things That Can Happen in European History,” 1930?/1973, unfinished.)
Reading this post, I think: perhaps “unpredictability” is the kind of generalization about historical events everywhere that is realistic and helpful. Note that the standard use of “realism” is very different. A realist, in regular political discussion, is somebody with the courage to accept the collateral damage associated with the necessary steps to produce good outcomes. Acknowledging unpredictability makes this sort of realism look very bad. One of the side effects of the Egyptian revolution, I hope, will be a reduction in the authority of people who claim to overstride the world with their predictions.
But I wouldn’t predict it!
Oh my ..I tried to like it. Good fiction must snpseud your disbelief’ that is what makes it good. Bad fiction just leaves you shaking your head and wondering huh? ..this was bad.I wonder if S.M. Stirling will sue? Aside from being an angst-ridden rehash of almost every apocalypse movie ever made, it’s basically Stirlings Dies The Fire’ book series fused with Twilight and Hunger Games.Electricity just stops? Our brains/bodies run on .yes indeed .electrical impulses. Evey human, every animal, life as it is known would cease.Other asides; The basic diesel engine runs just fine without any electricity, as do steam engines, bicycles, windmills, waterwheels, etc. If they can get a desert Eagle pistol to cycle 3 shots, they can run a diesel or steam engine. We had steam powered ships, trains, factories long before we had electrical powered anything. And if Uncle Miles can distill alcohol, he can make a steam engine. Hero built his aeolipile’ steam turbine in the FIRST CENTURY AD.Big cities just eroded for lack of electricity? As I recall, there have been large cities for centuries before there was electricity.Enough of the Twilight-style teen angst and Hunger Games fashion show already. It is very annoying. It looks like a GAP commercial.Would an ex-marine use an Elf sword? He’d be more familiar with a sabre. Would anyone use an Elf sword really? Actually, don’t get me started on the idiotic mix of armament. At least they did sort of explain why the common man/woman mostly had bows.Note: If they can make a percussion cap for a muzzle-loading musket, then they have the technology to make new cartridges and repeating arms instead. Assuming the gad-zillions of rounds of existing ammunition in the USA was somehow totally used-up in only 15 years time (not very likely). I tried to enjoy it I really did. But I could not ignore the complete disregard for the laws of physics, basic reality, and human history.All in all .I give it one season, two if the Hunger Games fans keep watching Katniss-Klone .oops, I mean Charlie’.
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[…] ABOUT ARCHIVES CONTACT SUBSCRIBE TWITTER THE MOST TALKED-ABOUT LINKS ON TWITTER RIGHT NOW: Zunguzungu builds on Rosen ’s argument about Twitter and Egypt […]
Really great post and I agree with most of your analysis. I particularly like:
“Gladwell can’t take part in this conversation, except by dismissing it. Which is why he must dismiss it: to deal with it on its own terms — a topography of knowledge defined by a meridian set in Cairo — would lead him away from his ability to speak about all people all the time. It would prevent Western Authority from having a monopoly on the truth of all people.”
The opening few paragraphs, particularly what you say about ‘people will always’, made me start thinking about Ernesto Laclau and his critique of ideology. The assumption that ‘people will always’, I think Laclau would argue, is an essentialist view that fails to take into account the infinitude of the social.
Basically society is too complex to make general statements about – as Gladwell does – which you neatly point out with regards to Egypt.
I think the whole debate (‘Twitter revolutions’) is fascinating. Most of it tends to centre around the dialectic ‘social media caused/didn’t cause…’. Of course causality has long been discredited as a notion in the human sciences. Laclau would say that what is going on is antagonisms – or “social tensions, anxieties, or contradictions” as you say. It’d be interested to know what you think about Laclau and if you think his arguments are relevant to your analysis.
Actually, sociology does pretty well at making general statements about society. But Malcolm Gladwell isn’t a sociologist.
now there’s conspiracy theories going on, but that’s only if you credit a select group of Egyptians:
http://notinhisname.blogdrive.com/archive/842.html
It occurred to me, apropos of your epigraph, that “people always” is something that a literary genre can say with absolute assurance but a history worth its salt cannot. It’s a way of reading backwards from an endpoint that, in this case, seems settled neither in its form or its significance. I suspect I’m not saying anything you haven’t, but it seems like a stretch to say that the revolution will not be tweeted but is already plotted.
I’m reminded of McLuhan’s definition of a medium as anything that changes the pace or pattern of our lives. In that light, the history of media ought to be good at answering questions like “how fast?” For whatever reason, the prospect of rapid social change does seem to produce a tendency toward Platonism even in otherwise smart people, along with a preference for the voice as a sign of The Human stripped of all apparatus. This isn’t entirely misguided, but then the question has to be which media have assumed the pace and function of speech, blending politics into the rhythms of everyday life. The brevity of Tweets makes them a poor medium for elaborate rationalizations, but a pretty great way to rub antennae on the fly.
Excellent points.
In particular:
“Note, for example, how many Western commentators have demanded guarantees that a democratic election in Egypt will produce a government we like. And the assertion that if democracy leads to Islamist rule (of any type), then obviously Egypt isn’t ready for democracy.” (and the rest of the paragraph)
Exactly – more double standards. No-one (that I’m aware of) called for a military coup in Turkey after relations between Turkey and Israel soured …
Perhaps it’s because I’m more often surrounded by US-centric tech utopian (closet imperialists) that I am still suspicious of the focus on “new media.”
If the question is “why now” why does the answer so obviously have to be blogging and twitter?
Why couldn’t it be any of the other things that have led to popular uprisings in the past? Because popular uprisings HAVE happened before Twitter, so the question could be “why twitter? and not, say, the increasing mobilization of labor, as David McNally suggests?
http://davidmcnally.org/?p=354
I agree that (pace the concern about essentialism/orientalism) it would be better to hear from Egyptians themselves. I have gone a bit beyond the mainstream media and of the Egyptians who wrote much in english I haven’t heard or read any Egyptians talking about Twitter or blogs or Facebook as being such a sea-change as all that. I’ve mostly read people from the West saying this stuff. I’d love to read more, especially from within Egypt that backed this up.
not to get in a “battle of the American experts on Egypt” (vs. essential Egyptians).. And I’m not a fan of Gladwell – but I’m even more suspicious of the way the popular press talks about social change and social movements. Especially because the power of labor is usually ignored or misrepresented.
The ways that social movements gain power have rarely been reported honestly – usually the story gets shifted to reiterate whatever vision of power benefits the powerful – witness the taming of MLK’s legacy. I don’t think that happens because everyone is nefarious, but because people closer to power simply see it differently. So Twitter looks super-relevant from here, but does the reveal more about where here is or where Twitter is?
Labour mobilisation has been going on in Egypt for a number of years. On 6 April 2008, the “April 6” group used Facebook, etc., to call for a general strike, which didn’t happen. Strikes have actually declined since then. Last month, the same “April 6” group called for a national protest on 25 January (again using Facebook, etc.), and this time it worked (although there’s still been no general strike). If a national protest movement could succeed now, why couldn’t it succeed in 2008? All the same conditions were there, and the call came from the same activist group.
It’s going to take some time for social scientists to study this properly, but so far, the only major difference I see, between 6 April 2008 and 25 January 2011, is that in the meantime, the Tunisian revolution had happened. Tunisia convinced Egyptians that it was possible.
prime writing, essential thinking.
this article touches the essence of the egypt experience for the world, a pity some arguments in waiting have not been played out. for one: the limits of nationalism, international grass-root support, (Americans and Europeans and others on the ground in egypt out of mere solidarity (they are in confortable twitter and facebook reach)) have only secondarily, and after the facts been played out. (el baradey returning, tunesian surge of emigrants to italian shores).
a sustainable future requires an emotional connectivity of a global population of de-inherited groups of humans, backed by ethical and engaged individuals from ditto.
in short: the next (as this one) ´revolution´ will also sink (my personal opinion) if it is not shored up by a ´physical´ manifestation, the en mass flying in, cross border entering activism, of above world citizens.
in this, text, images, video and sound (that is what basically can be transported and arranged on the internet, and if open standards again will be respected, at little cost) carried over the internet in redundant organizational patterns. …alias, each to a certain degree, twitter, facebook, independent blogs, basic cell phone video recording (you tube), organic socializing, are of help.
sorry to restate in the purpose of clarifying: not obama or hillary should opinate, but the real subjects of interest: humans, by virtual, not physical engagements of consequence.
the advice to not travel to egypt, and leave ´the country´, could they point to innate fear of a revolution ´anywhere´, not at least the cloud where-in resides the us and western europe, with their dogmatic religion of consumerism, an unsustainable proposition to which is lured the human mind and desire of the ones depleted.
again, as is today, egypt is an entity, still confined where the few will capitalize on the many, and the poor will compare to the poor of the united states as more deprived in the eyes of economically drained us citizens. a reason simple: a fraction of the gain is redistributed to them, what makes them less incapacitated to their feel as these poor egyptians, relatively, compared to the ´elites of the us, the us deprived are are way further dehumanized, contained and sterilized.
is it not of consequence that the whole egypt burst of energy was driven by a longing for what is driving the planet to depletion. westerns on prozac and stressed envied by the young and energetic egyptians? a desire for a way of life that collides with human long-term interests?
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[…] “There is a Pre-History to this Revolt”: As Egypt’s Military Bans Labor Strikes, Mona El-Ghobashy Examines How Egyptian Labor and Social Movements Laid the Foundation for Revolution Army urges Egyptians to end strikes Egypt’s military dissolves parliament, suspends constitution Industrial Action Updates Mubarak’s Folly: The Rising of Egypt’s Workers Egypt’s military to warn against labor strikes Biting the hand that fed you : Mubarak slammed U.S. in phone call with Israeli MK before resignation Jordan Muslim Brotherhood: Israel, U.S. main losers in Mubarak ouster Mubarak’s final hours: Desperate bids to stay Revolutionary Socialism #Egypt #Jan25 #EgyWorkers [arabic] Israel and new Egyptian leadership make contact #Jan25 Opera #egyworkers on strike Egypt’s military rejects swift transfer of power and suspends constitution Wael Ghonim and Egypt’s New Age Revolution Was the Revolution Facebooked? 1 of 2 Where in the world are the Mubaraks ? Did Facebook bring down Mubarak? Egypt’s thirst for freedom has intensified, even after Mubarak’s exit Egypt: It’s Not Over Yet! Egypt being governed same way as before, PM says The rumor trail: Where is Mubarak? Paul Barry: where’s Mubarak’s loot? Egyptian military tortured, “disappeared” thousands of demonstrators Mubarak in life/death state in Germany hospital Visualizing The New Arab Mind West has ugly history of blocking Arab freedom Rendition For Mubarak: Hand Him Over To The Iraqi Resistance Public transport #egyworkers strike Egyptian activist Mona Seif: It’s a revolution, and it’s not over OK. It is official. Wael Ghonim is starting to annoy me Military urges halt to strikes gripping Egypt Knowing and Unknowing the Egyptian Public […]
[…] Knowing and Unknowing the Egyptian Public […]
[…] Bady (@zunguzungu) wrote an excellent followup to Rosen’s article in Knowing and Unknowing the Egyptian Public: Before the recent past — goes this interpretation — state terror in Egypt was ubiquitous, […]
[…] is another refutation, by ‘Zunguzungu’, of the Malcolm Gladwell argument that social media use is […]
Aaron: I wonder if you’ve seen this socialist instantiation http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2011/02/uprisings-media-internet of the genre Rosen has defined.
Personally I just dislike the free advertising being given to the odious owner of Facebook. The underlying subversiveness of the internet is built into its design – Facebook and Twitter are just apps biult on top of it.
[…] complex issues involved in social change. Several others built on Rosen’s point: Aaron Bady delved deeper into the social media-debunking article’s function; CUNY j-profs Jeff Jarvis and C.W. […]
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[…] of these events) that we find curious. It has been hard to escape the flood of commentary (for example) that attributes the catalysis and successful organization of the revolution to Twitter and […]
At this time it seems like Movable Type is the preferred blogging platform out there right now.
(from what I’ve read) Is that what you’re using on your blog?
[…] Bady has a much more nuanced set of thoughts. TechPresident’s Nancy Scola has some additional words of wisdom on how to evaluate social […]