Extra-National Information Flows, Social Media, and the 2011 Egyptian Uprising

This article examines two emerging and related characteristics of digital networked-era journalism highlighted during the Egyptian revolution. First, the ability to retain centralized control of communication eroded both because contemporary networked communication thrives on increasing grassroots pervasiveness and because it retains a malleable or hackable quality, where users can rework the technology to their advantage with relative ease. Second, the influence of the networked decentralized reporting of the revolution on mainstream news outlets altered both the nature of the news products and the professional norms and practices of journalists. More precisely, the purpose or main task of the traditional news outlets shifted. In covering the story of the revolution, they turned— unabashedly, and to a significant degree—not to their own reporters to relay events on the ground, but to what networked participants in the drama were reporting and saying about what was happening. The mainstream outlets, in effect, were delivering a meta story about the story being reported by people hooked into digital social networks. Even as it was happening, it was clear that the revolution which toppled the government of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt would be a key chapter in the story of the shifting media landscape during the networked digital transition. The distinctly contemporary communication developments rising around the clash were part of the story from the beginning. For example, as protests gained traction in the country and around the world, Egyptian authorities sought to limit grassroots communication and control the narrative of events by "turning off the Internet." Digital-technology hackers responded to severely degraded domestic access by creating work-arounds that, to varying degrees, tapped into extra-national Internet flows and protected Egyptian Internet users from government surveillance. Twitter feeds and Facebook updates from non-journalists in Egypt and all over the world mixed at a new level with mainstream media material to tell the story. Throughout the clash, professional journalists treated the Egyptian state news channel as a beat to cover. Frustrated U.S. audiences turned quickly away from domestic news outlets to follow the story through social networks and at the Al Jazeera English-language website, where U.S. government figures, media moguls, and established news culture and news personalities held little power to shape the narrative.