Endless Knots

Egyptian revolution on Twitter

Thanks to Susan Scrupski:

Andre Pannison, a network scientist at the University of Turin, hauled out some network tools (and some clever thinking) to map one hour of Twitter activity at the time of Mubarak's resignation on Feb 11. It's worth reading Andre's post describing what he did. And it's really required viewing for those interested in how networks evolve. Such beautiful patterns emerge from the simple act of messaging.

 

 

And here are a few paragraphs of his explanation:

This is a preliminary result of the network of retweets with the hashtag #jan25 at February 11 2011, at the time of the announcement of Mubarak’s resignation. If you retweeted someone, or has been retweeted, it is possible that your username is one of these tinny points (or maybe a bigger one?).

To collect the network data, I used the Gephi Graph Streaming plugin, connected it to a Python web server I made myself. This web server works like a bridge, it connects to the Twitter Streaming API using the statuses/filter service and converts the users and retweets to nodes and edges in a network format that can be read by the Gephi Graph Streaming plugin. Nodes are twitter users, and links appear between the nodes A and B when B retweeted a message of A containing the hashtag #jan25.

Take that, Gladwell: Vinegar, onions, social networks, and soccer nuts a revolution do make

For anyone who still doubts (Malcolm Gladwell) the role of informal communication, aka social media, in bringing about monumental change before the whole world's very eyes in Egypt, see today's lead story (headlined in print version) of NY Times, "A Tunisian-Egyptian Link That Shook Arab History."

Excellent, detailed, and insightful reporting lays out the sequence by which, the online subhead reads*: "Two-year collaboration of dissidents gave birth to a new force — a pan-Arab youth movement dedicated to spreading democracy in a region without it."

I've been pondering this post for nearly two hours, trying to figure out a way to summarize the low-tech/high-tech amalgam that so fundamentally reshapes the chemistry of the future. I can't do better than to quote the first few paragraphs, though the whole thing is definitely click-worthy. In fact, I just read a bundle of grafs from one of the jump pages (there are two) to a traveling family member. It's remarkable, friends, right down to the people in Cairo (perhaps elsewhere) protecting themselves with "body armor," if you can call it that, made of "cardboard or plastic bottles...worn under their clothes to protect against riot police bullets."

Here's the beginning of David Kirpatrick and David Sanger's remarkable journalism:

"CAIRO — As protesters in Tahrir Square faced off against pro-government forces, they drew a lesson from their counterparts in Tunisia: 'Advice to the youth of Egypt: Put vinegar or onion under your scarf for tear gas.'

"The exchange on Facebook was part of a remarkable two-year collaboration that has given birth to a new force in the Arab world — a pan-Arab youth movement dedicated to spreading democracy in a region without it. Young Egyptian and Tunisian activists brainstormed on the use of technology to evade surveillance, commiserated about torture and traded practical tips on how to stand up to rubber bullets and organize barricades.

"They fused their secular expertise in social networks with a discipline culled from religious movements and combined the energy of soccer fans with the sophistication of surgeons. Breaking free from older veterans of the Arab political opposition, they relied on tactics of nonviolent resistance channeled from an American scholar through a Serbian youth brigade — but also on marketing tactics borrowed from Silicon Valley."

These are big claims for a lede article in the paper of record. The reporters go on to substantiate the assertions in the next section, headlined "Bloggers Lead the Way:"

"The Egyptian revolt was years in the making. Ahmed Maher, a 30-year-old civil engineer and a leading organizer of the April 6 Youth Movement, first became engaged in a political movement known as Kefaya, or Enough, in about 2005. Mr. Maher and others organized their own brigade, Youth for Change. But they could not muster enough followers; arrests decimated their leadership ranks, and many of those left became mired in the timid, legally recognized opposition parties. “What destroyed the movement was the old parties,” said Mr. Maher, who has since been arrested four times.

"By 2008, many of the young organizers had retreated to their computer keyboards and turned into bloggers, attempting to raise support for a wave of isolated labor strikes set off by government privatizations and runaway inflation.

"After a strike that March in the city of Malhalla, Egypt, Mr. Maher and his friends called for a nationwide general strike for April 6. To promote it, they set up a Facebook group that became the nexus of their movement, which they were determined to keep independent from any of the established political groups...

"Just a few months later, after a strike in the Tunisian city of Hawd el-Mongamy, a group of young online organizers followed the same model, setting up what became the Progressive Youth of Tunisia. The organizers in both countries began exchanging their experiences over Facebook. The Tunisians faced a more pervasive police state than the Egyptians, with less latitude for blogging or press freedom, but their trade unions were stronger and more independent. 'We shared our experience with strikes and blogging,' Mr. Maher recalled."

And on it goes. I could continue excerpting but it's better for you to read it yourself. It is more than evident that those responsible for this miraculous transformation in the geopolitical scene simply used the tools of their time, just as the Committees of Correspondence used a nascent postal service to refine their strategy and tactics among a million or so people in a troublesome land that became the US of A.

Which brings me back to the title of this post: The naysayers around the importance of new media also disparage those who have had the courage to keep at it. Again, it's people who made the difference here. Thank heavens they had such powerful tools with which to communicate.

Last thing: the Times article says the protestors have been strongly influenced by "an American political thinker, Gene Sharp." I've never heard of him. Start following the links from here, which include the Serbian youth movement, Optor!'s, which helped bring down Milosevic.

And when you lose faith again that dictators can be deposed and retreat to thinking that the future looks terribly bleak even in places where there are no dictators, only zealots, turn your attention to the next generation. Perhaps one day "they" could become ideologues too but the best part of this story is that there is no monolithic "they" this time. Just a loosely structured network of energized activists whose architecture of revolution--and tools--are barely understood.

Also, see Nicholas Kristof's "What Egypt Can Teach America" in yesterday's NY Times.

* I never realized before how different the print and online heads are in NYT articles - subtle but different.

Does The New Yorker Need Gladwell?

If reaction to Malcolm Gladwell's latest dump of cold water on the flaming arc between social media and social change is any measure, The New Yorker very much needs this able writer to keep the links flying. He's got the neterati all up in their (our) nodes starting with the headline of his short Februrary 2, 2011, post, "Does Egypt Need Twitter?" Gladwell's two-letter answer: No.

My favorite headline so far comes from Business Insider's Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: "Sorry Malcolm Gladwell, But You're Making Zero Sense On Twitter And Egypt."

For comprehensive deconstruction of Gladwell's 370 words, see David Weinberger's "Gladwell proves too much," where he takes down every syllable of Gladwell's argument. Argument, Gladwell's is, as he throws in provocation after poke ("Whoa. Did you see what Mao just tweeted?" or "Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented.)

Gladwell tries to refute the impact of social media on the Egyptian revolution to prove the central thesis of his New Yorker article from last fall: “'High risk' social activism requires deep roots and strong ties." Its subtitle encapsulates his surrounding hypothesis, "Why the revolution will not be tweeted." (My view/refutation of that article here.)

OK. In 2011, it's hard to resist saying things like "that's just dumb."

But more to the point, as a reporter, Gladwell badly needs a fact-checker. He clearly has not put together any kind of timeline, spoken with anyone in Egypt, or, frankly, observed a primary tenet of journalism: accuracy. Granted his post, which suffers from the blogger-weakness of "off-the-top-of-the-headism," is Gladwell's opinion but he is ignoring the well-documented way things have unfolded, beginning with the Facebook page with its background, We are all Khaled Said.

Even the demonstrators in Tahrir Square have been astonished at what "the youth" have wrought. I'm not going to run this all down--that's a long piece that someone (probably many someones) are working on right now--but a spark was lit and then social media made it very easy for word to spread. And to make plans. And to meetup, as it were.

Second OK: Gladwell's other huge factual error is his view of social activism (as per above, "[it] requires deep roots and strong ties"). True but incomplete. Scores of studies, books, re-studies, and more books have proved that social activism depends both on strong ties AND weak ones.

Mark Granovetter's elegant title to his 1973 groundbreaker, "The Strength of Weak Ties," whom, by the by, Gladwell misinterprets in his original screed, lays the early network science foundation for why social activism depends on both kinds of ties.

The hundreds of thousands, if not millions when you count up all the cities, of people in Egypt don't all have strong ties, Malcolm. Smaller pods of them have very strong links; between/among the pods are weak ties--and the occasional strong ones. The whole thing hangs together--and people keep turning out--because of these loose and strong connections. That's a movement. And it spreads at lightning speed thanks to social media networks, where again the ties are both iron and gossamer.

Eyewitness report from a colleague in Egypt

We have a dear colleague, whom we worked closely with for several years on some innovative ideas, who's stationed in Egypt. Last Tuesday, on the day that things erupted there, we received, somewhat out of the blue, a warm and connected email about how his work was going, how his family was doing, and about what he was learning. His family was safer, he said, than they had been in some of the other countries they'd lived in over the years, for which he was grateful.

I responded quickly, telling him our latest news, which he didn't know. Within a few hours came the news from Egypt and I've, of course, been worried about them since. This morning, I received another email, which I guess means that some Internet access is available again:

Dear J & J,
 
As I read your email, tears filled my eyes, and sorrow filled my heart...[redacted as too personal for the blog...]
 
A couple of days ago, I drafted the above reply and pushed the "send" button. Nothing happened. That's how I found out that we were cut-off from the internet. It has been a roller-coaster ever since. There were some tense moments as we relocated [people], and we secured food and water for [our] workers... With good progress on all fronts, I'm pleased to tell you that all are safe and unharmed...

I'll save the rest for another post as it involves the work we've done together and how he was able to use it in a real-time emergency. Just wanted you to see the words of someone on the ground in the midst of a revolution.