“The Arab Spring| Social Media in the Egyptian Revolution: Reconsidering Resource Mobilization Theory”
Nahed Eltantawy, Julie B. Wiest
“Spring Awakening: How an Egyptian Revolution Began on Facebook”
JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS
These two articles are great to start my project with because they both pertain to my exact topic I would like to do my project on. I’ve set out to research about how social media influence the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. The first article listed goes into great detail about how scholar find media-based social movements fascinating and strongly dissects the growing trend. This will be part of the introduction in my reflection paper for the semester. I believe it would be a strong start to explain how raw these methods of communication and persuasion really are. This article explains how scholars have a hard time finding ways to study these types of movement due to the fact that they are unable to effectively find exact origins and conclusions for information.
The second article is about Wael Ghonim, a 29-year-old Google marketing executive, and his experience with finding an image sent out via Facebook of Khaled Said. Khaled Said is someone we have talked about in class before and read about for homework. He was beaten by Egyptian police and inspired many, and in this case Ghonim, to take action and help out Egyptian revolutionaries from the outside, in Dubai. Ghonim is Egyptian born and was angered by this photo so he decided to create a Facebook page entitled “We Are All Khaled Said”. His page got a lot of traction and he began setting up rallying information. He was eventually arrested by secret police, but his mark was already made. This reminds me of a story about a Facebook page we read in class by Esra Abdel Fattah who set up an organized strike for better pay in Egypt. (BAS 52)