ABSTRACT
On a bright summer night in July 2011, Egyptian digital activists gathered in Tahrir Square to discuss police abuse and torture, and ongoing failure of the military regime that succeeded Hosni Mubarak to reform the country's corrupt Ministry of Interior. The “Twitterati,” as these elite, Cairo-based activists were derisively known, were not sitting alone in their apartments tweeting, texting and posting on Facebook, but rather engaged in an attempt to include their non-wired citizens in a dialogue about important national issues. Two or three hundred Egyptians sat in solidarity at the far edge of the square, with the burned-out husk of the recently-deposed National Democratic Party headquarters in the background, and communicated not just with the microphone but also with the non-verbal hand-signals that would become famous in the United States when employed later that summer by Occupy Wall Street protestors. These events had become known as “Tweet Nadwas” — hash-tagged, ad-hoc conferences about the significant challenges facing the Egyptian revolution and the dangers of losing the energy and exuberance of Tahrir Square to the forces of what had become known as the “counterrevolution.” Sitting in the crowd were the familiar faces of Egypt's decade-long digital counter-public, but also a cross-section of less privileged Egyptians, who were sharing the square in an attempt to realize justice for the revolution's “martyrs” — those who lost their lives in Cairo, Suez and other parts of Egypt during the 18 days of the uprising in January and February of 2011 against one of the longest-tenured authoritarian regimes in the world.
