Visualising the Egyptian Revolution (Or, Questioning the Linkbaiters and Cynics)
There’s been lots of links and discussion about whether the internet really played a defining part in the Egyptian revolution. First, the link-baiting social media blogs assumed twitter made the protest happen, then there were the reactionary “…or maybe it didn’t” posts from writers wishing to emphasise the tangible people power that ultimately caused Murabeck to stand down.
But to under-estimate the influence the internet had on enabling the first protestors to organise themselves, and then to globally disseminate the first-hand accounts from protesters themselves, would be a mistake. On the evening Murabeck stood down, I recall a quote from one young Egyptian in celebration crying “I am a free man in a free world. Thank facebook.”
The above infographic by Kovas Boguta demonstrates the twitter activity across languages and influence, where blue is english and red is arabic and the size of the node is that user’s influence on the entire network. Kovas describes more:
Many fascinating structures can be seen. Wael Ghonim, a pivotal figure in this self-organzing system who instigated the initial protests on January 25th, is prominently located near the bottom of the network, straddling two factions as well as two languages. The lump on the left is dominated by journalists, NGO and foreign policy types; it seems nearly gafted on, and goes through an intermediary buffer layer before making contact with the true Egyptian activists on the ground. However, this process of translation and aggregation is key; it is how those in Egypt are finally getting a voice in Western society, and an insurance policy against regime violence. Many of the prominent nodes in this network were at some point arrested, but their deep connectivity help ensure they were not “dissapeared”.
I particularly like this observation:
In a case of ironic symbolism, the far left-most satellites are the Whitehouse, State Department, and Wael Ghonim’s employeer, Eric Schmidt, who is merely a speck on the map. And that’s probably how everyone in the rest of the network would like this future to look.
Facinating stuff - but then, one comment on the post highlights a potentially chilling issue with this kind of well-organised data:
The primary use of this chart, should evil men choose to find and record it, would be to be able to target people too likely to tweet for freedom for early elimination.
-->
Recent comments