This is a very good, first person account of how Google employee Wael Ghonim accidentally became a revolutionary. Ghonim was a family man with more knowledge than most about technology, who lived in Cairo and worked for Google. Like many other citizens of Egypt, Ghonim was proud of his heritage and his country, but not so proud of its government under Hosni Mubarak.
The main problem cited by Ghonim and others seems to have been that the secret police had run truly amok. Although the citizenry tolerated Mubarak’s 30-year dictatorship for a very long time, eventually people ran out of patience as the secret police became increasingly corrupt and disruptive to the lives of average Egyptians who were no threat to the state. (Congress and Homeland Security, take notice.)
The trigger event was the murder of a young man named Kullena Khaled Said, who was beaten to death in Alexandria by two secret police agents. Ghonim saw news of the death online and, in spite of fears for the safety of himself and his family, created a Facebook page to protest what he calls “a grave injustice.” The popularity of the page snowballed and eventually Ghonim and a handful of others succeeded in taking the popular outrage off line and into the streets.
I do not think it is incidental that one can draw comparisons between Ghonim’s story and the recent story of Trayvon Martin, whose alleged killer was not arrested until there was an overwhelming groundswell of popular demand for it via social media. It is true that the Martin case was aided and abetted by traditional, corporate media, which did not happen in Egypt. And it is also true that the US is not Egypt. I am not saying that I believe the Martin case will spark a revolution in the US. But there is no escaping that the Martin case would have played out differently if average people did not have an avenue of protest such as that provided by Twitter and Facebook. I wonder if these social networks are today’s equivalent of pamphlets such as Common Sense, which played a major role in the American Revolution.
Revolution 2.0 is an easy read about a difficult question and that is, “How exactly did a few men start a revolution using social media?” I think the answer is that the Egyptian people were at the breaking point and had already been energized by the revolution, of sorts, in Tunisia. Facebook was a tool, smartly used, to mobilize a population that was ready to roll.
Ghonim’s telling of the tale sheds some light on why and how it all happened, but there is much more to be studied and learned about how social media and political action are entwined. This book will, I believe, motivate inquiry and research that promises fascinating and sobering results.
--Bonnie McEwan