So the first group of political activists I'm going to blog about is the revolutionary protesters in Egypt. This was the first group I began looking at, and I also think it is the most interesting one. However, even though the Egyptian activists were the first I decided to research, it took me a while to find some actual good, first-hand observations. Even when I found actual examples, it was difficult for me to analyze them mainly because of the language barrier (I don't speak Arabic). So, it was necessary for me to use other resources, to gain some information about who the activists actually are.
Some call the Egyptian Revolution the "Twitter Revolution," and I actually think this is a pretty good name for it. The majority of my first-hand observations are based on Twitter and Facebook. I've found that on these websites, the activists have very specific language they use to describe their movement. They call the movement #Jan25. The actual term first appeared on Twitter, but it stems from the fact that Facebook events were set up for the first protests to take place on January 25.
Many people also tout the movement as a youth movement, with the majority of initial protesters consisting of young professionals. After my research, I would have to agree with this. I don't know any Egyptians and I haven't been able to find a way to get direct contact with any protesters in Egypt, so most of my observations regarding this are based off of news media I have found online. It seems that the actual people using the Internet to organize are young professionals; once organized they move to the streets and gather other non-users for the protests who may not have heard of them yet. I have seen multiple news articles describing or interviewing a few of the most prominent young activists, especially the 30-year-old imprisoned Google executive Wael Ghonim.
A few cool links that I've found so far:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/17/egypt-twitter-jan25-protests_n_824310.html
This is an article about the person who was supposedly the first to use the #Jan25 hashtag on Twitter.
http://iamjan25.com/
A website dedicated to the various media regarding the Egyptian protests.
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