ABSTRACT
The 2011 Egypt uprising—widely touted as a Twitter and Facebook revolution, particularly by Western media—saw disenchanted youth using social media to express themselves, ultimately contributing to a master narrative of the Egyptian revolution on the “digital Arab street” (Ray, 2011, p. 191), which in more dichotomizing terms laid out the story of the struggling revolutionaries versus the repressive anti-revolutionaries. Social media became a fluid landscape against which different discourse clans (Bhatia, 2015a) participated in a collective discussion about the Other and, subsequently, partook in action against it. Drawing on Bhatia’s (2015a) framework of the Discourse of Illusion (comprising three interrelated components: historicity; linguistic and semiotic action; and the degree of social impact), this chapter will analyze a corpus of voices retrieved from the virtual streets of Egypt in order to explore how dissidents created a powerful hegemonic discourse that legitimized their version of Egypt’s reality to recruit the support of millions in pursuit of their cause.
