Naturally, corporate foreign news organisations are confined to major urban centers, in the case of Al Jazeera (resp. Al Jazeera English) Cairo, Alexandria and Suez. And following numerous attacks on their reporters, they are even restricted to their own offices. The revolution is being televised – but which revolution does the television show? #

Since the Internet and mobile network shutdown, news from rural areas have all but vanished from international reports. Commentators have repeatedly stressed that the uprise in Egypt is exceptional for happening all over the country, but whatever is happening outside the urban centers right now – it goes unnoticed. I.e., for the international audience it effectively does not take place.¹ #

In a short digression, it’s also noteworthy that there are now news that Al Jazeera Arabic was taken off air a couple of minutes ago. The most important news source for Egyptians first on the revolution in Tunesia and then on the developments in their own country is thus no longer available. Alaa Abdel Fattah, Egyptian superblogger and longtime opposition activist, has pointed out the impact of supranational media in the Guardian: “From the internet and satellite TV a new pan-Arabism is born.” #

It’s a close call to compare this situation to the much talked-about role of social media during the “green revolution” in Iran one and a half years ago. What is noteworthy is that Blogs, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter diversified the range of news sources – I might just point to the videos of the death Neda Agha-Soltan, which were spread over the Internet. While apparently not relevant to the organisation of protest, Twitter and other social media certainly changed the portrayal and perception of the “green revolution” in the West. #

However, in Iran the protests never spread nationwide in the way they are now in Egypt. There were demonstrations in other major cities apart from Tehran, yet they stayed minor events in comparison to the mass rallies in the capital. Most notably, I barely found (English-language) sources on the ongoings in these smaller cities. Should one conclude that the Internet doesn’t make reporting on uprisings (spatially) more diverse? #

The recent developments in Tunesia seem to go counter such an analysis. Sure, the situation there went unnoticed by a broader (Western – it was amplified powerfully by Al Jazeera in the Arab world) audience; but social media such as movie-sharing platforms were used from the beginning to spread news about the uprising from the beginning. #

The Internet enables us to get informed on the ongoings in any place connected to the network, however remote it might otherwise be. Egypt’s Internet shutdown has effectively narrowed down our perspective to the angles of Al Jazeera’s television cameras. Does that change civil resistance? Being skeptical about media’s role in these in general, I am not sure. But it is certainly an issue to watch as events unfold. #

1. Just as I am writing this, Al Jazeera English is interviewing somebody from Bani Suwaif. So it seems they are, after all, able to create connections to more remote places.

gulli:news: Can you tell us a bit about your projects, what you are doing and what is your motivation behind it? #

Esra’a Al Shafei: I founded MideastYouth.com and its network of projects. We are a group of young digital natives reaching out across seemingly impenetrable national social, political, ethnic, and sectarian barriers, employing the freedom and responsibility created by multiple media platforms to demand and create our own civil discourse across multiple divisions in a region where ideals of free expression, political dissent and activism, universal human rights, and civil dialogue are tightly oppressed and forcefully punished. We campaign for the rights of ethnic, religious and intellectual minorities by grasping the revolutionary power of information technology in a region where information is controlled and censored by our leaders to manipulate public sentiment by illustrating the “otherness” of our neighbors and our “enemies”. A growing list of our ongoing projects can be found here. #

As a child I was shocked by the inhumane treatment of immigrant workers that I witnessed, and a sense of outrage and injustice grew in my heart. Increasingly frustrated in my early college years by the prejudicial stereotypes throughout media of Middle Eastern youth – a portrayal unanswered because of censorship and state control of media in the region – I turned to my keyboard to respond with my own voice, to show not only the diversity of ethnicities, religions, and cultures in the region, but also the diversity of opinion, fervor, ideals, hopes, and politics; to portray for the first time in the global discourse Middle Eastern youth in all our depth, our feelings, and our complexity. I was joined over time by a growing number of similar voices, declaring in unison that we are Muslim and moderate, idealistic and hopeful, Jewish and peaceful; we are Christians, Baha’i, Sunni and Shia; Persians and Arabs; Turks, Berbers and Kurds, and we are all here at MideastYouth.com so that the world hears us in our own voices, and sees that we are capable of thoughtful and reasoned discussions of our differences. We want our humanity and our futures in our own hands and we use the internet and other forms of technology to fight for those rights. #