On July 13th, I attended an event at the New America Foundation: How to Ignite, or Quash, a Revolution in 140 Characters or Less, which looked at the promise and limitations of technology in spreading democracy. July 13th also happened to be my birthday, and one of the most special messages I received that day came in the form of a tweet from Ghada Shahbender (@ghadasha), an Egyptian human rights activist and one of this year’s winners of the James Lawson Award.

The coolness of this moment immediately hit me. As I sat in this event—crammed into a corner of a crowded room, head buried in my laptop, tweeting take-aways on the role of internet and technology in social movements—an activist in Tahrir Square was also following the event’s Twitter hashtag (#140rev), saw that I was participating in the conversation, found out it was my birthday (presumably via Facebook), instantaneously sent me a message directly to my phone, and then followed up with a photo of her view of Tahrir Square at that very moment.

It’s cool not just because an amazing activist like Ghada Shahbender, whom I had recently met for the first time at the Fletcher Summer Institute for the Advanced Study of Nonviolent Conflict, would think to send me a birthday message, but also because this short 140 character or less digital exchange, encapsulated what is, for me, the power of social media—the connections it can help sustain, the conversations it can create across great distances, and the ability it gives people to instantly share and document key moments.

The birthday tweet from Ghada was not the only cool thing about this event, however. I also got to hear from some of leading thinkers, scholars, and activists in this field like, Rebecca McKinnon (@rmack), Senior Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation, Sami Ben Gharbia (@ifikra), co-founder of Nawaat.org and Advocacy Director at Global Voices, Michael Posner (@State_DRL), Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Ahmed Al Omran (@ahmed), blogger and creator of saudijeans.org, and Merlyna Lim (@merlyna), professor at Arizona State University, among others.

You can see my curation of key tweets and resources by checking out this Bundle I put together. But in this post I will just focus on what I consider to be the top five insights from this event.

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2011 has begun as a momentous year in the history and practice of nonviolent civil resistance. Tunisia and Egypt have sparked movements across North Africa and the Middle East as ordinary people rise up to resist the autocracy, corruption, and abuse they have lived under for decades. This method of struggle is by no means new, however. People throughout history have waged nonviolent struggle to gain independence, dissolve oppressive structures, and demand rights. With each new movement we are given an opportunity to learn from those who wage these struggles. Here’s what we can learn from Egypt…so far.

Social media does and can play a significant role in civil resistance. Due to the sexy, catchy narrative that “Twitter” and “Facebook” revolutions provide for the mainstream media – something akin to the old guard kissing up to the very platforms that will eventually dismantle their monopoly on information – the impact of social media is often attacked for being overblown. Has it been? Sure. But in an attempt by some scholars, writers, and pundits to throw a wet blanket on these new modes of communication and information sharing, they have fallen into the trap of stubbornly hanging on to an argument that flies in the face of what’s actually happening.

What Egyptians have demonstrated is that a Facebook group—We Are All Khaled Said—can make people more aware and fed up with the injustice and brutality they face at the hands of their government. Young Google executive, Wael Ghonim, was the creator of said page, which soon became a platform for others to share stories, videos, and images of police brutality. Reporting on Ghonim’s efforts, Newsweek reporter Mike Giglio writes, “the page quickly became a forceful campaign against police brutality in Egypt, with a constant stream of photos, videos, and news. Ghonim’s interactive style, combined with the page’s carefully calibrated posts—emotional, apolitical, and broad in their appeal—quickly turned it into one of Egypt’s largest activist sites.” So it is no surprise that when this Facebook page called for mass demonstrations on January 25, which is also National Police Day in Egypt, that large numbers of Egyptians were sufficiently informed and enraged to a point of heeding the call for direct action.

In 2008, the April 6 Youth Movement blossomed out of a Facebook page that, for the next three years, became the virtual staging ground for a larger coalition of groups working together to demand an end to Mubarak’s reign, envision a new government, and organize protests and demonstrations in that effort.  Two young Egyptians, Ahmed Maher and Esra Abdel-Fatah, started the April 6 Youth Movement Facebook page to organize demonstrations in solidarity with a labor strike set to take place on April 6.  When the page first went live on March 23, 2008, the power of social networking took immediate effect.  David Wolman with Wired magazine writes, “By the end of March, the group was pushing 40,000 members. Participants began changing their profile pictures to the April 6 logo, which meant the logo kept popping up in the News Feed of anyone on Facebook who was connected to someone in the April 6 group. Adding to this barrage, the activists kept loading a link to the group into their Status Update fields, further flooding Egypt’s Facebook universe with connections to the group and its message.”

The organizing utility of Facebook was immediately apparent. The April 6 demonstrations became one of the biggest in Egypt’s history and put the opposition movement and larger Kefaya (Enough) coalition on the map in a big way. The Internet, blogs, and social networks were seen as a new virtual space for people to organize campaigns and discuss social and political issues that were extremely difficult and dangerous to hold offline in physical spaces.

Twitter hashtags – #egypt, #jan25, #tahrir, #mubarak – provided, real-time, citizen perspectives of what was happening on the ground in the middle of Tahrir square and in cities across Egypt.  Twitter was also used to confirm or deny rumors of certain developments being reported by the mainstream and state media outlets.  It stripped the power and concentration of information away from the state and instead Twitters set up their own system of trending certain topics and verifying credible sources.

Videos captured on cell phone cameras and posted on YouTube exposed what government censors didn’t want people to see – be it abuse at the hands of the government or movement successes that would add fuel to the resistance.  These videos were then remixed and mashed up by digital creatives into music videos, which became a source of inspiration to keep the movement strong and inspire other oppressed people to rise up.

SMS helped activists coordinate actions – where and when to meet, sharing protest routes, reminding people to remain nonviolent, sharing methods to protect one’s self from tear gas and rubber bullets. This instant communication could be texted to a small group of direct action takers or tweeted out to millions of followers.

Is it possible to do all these things without the Internet, social platforms, and digital tools? To a certain extent, yes. Do social platforms, digital tools and the Internet as a whole allow for this kind of coordination and information sharing to happen more quickly and be more widely shared – in other words, increase the chance the movement becomes viral? Absolutely.

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