Africa

The quiet plan to assemble like-minded people to protest against a government that grew apart from its citizens soon became a global event that led to a revolution. This would not have been possible without the enormous reach of the Internet and the social networking sites in particular. In a manner that has virtually reversed the structure of the agenda-setting role of the traditional media, social networking has citizens not just fully controlling the content and production but also, by extension, largely influencing the media’s agenda as well. Even though the precipitating video blog calling for public protests in Egypt triggered the revolution, blog posts on the political situation started a few years earlier. Because of the outcome of the protests, the Egyptian crisis thus became a success story for all bloggers and social networking advocates who now see the empowering role of these mass mobilization channels as having huge transformative powers to shape political and social landscapes across the globe. That President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule was brought to an end was a significant outcome of a plot that was hatched on the Internet and executed on the streets of Egypt.