Techies on the Ground: Revisiting Egypt 2011

This article studies social media and popular social movements in the early 21st century in the Middle East and North Africa, with a focus on Egypt. Rather than ethnography or political theory exclusively, I employ a data analytics of analyzing tweets, posts, and blogs to describe the political culture of social media. And then I perform the results under the guise of the Arabic-speaking cyborg VJ Um Amel. The article argues that the Egyptian experience of revolution and counterrevolution reveals the indispensability, the promises, and the limits of digital communication across borders and languages.

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