Everyday a revolution : mobility, technology, and resistance after Egypt's Arab Spring

• Main Author: Allmann, Kira
• Other Authors: Armbrust, Walter
• Published: University of Oxford 2016
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.730077

The 2011 Egyptian revolution was intensely mediated by information and communications technologies (ICTs), leading many to label it a "social media revolution." ICTs did contribute in nuanced ways to the preconditions of revolution and played a complex and integral part in its execution. But the story of Egypt's Arab Spring is not a purely technological one; nor is it easily reduced to political cause-and-effects. This thesis disentangles the relationship between communications technologies, revolution, and resistance by exploring how ICTs enable subversive movement between physical and virtual dimensions. Such transdimensional mobility underpins both revolutionary mobilizations and the rhythm of everyday life. This thesis examines how ICT-mediated mobility can constitute a form of tacit resistance against the physical and virtual immobilities of life under repressive neoliberal rule. But, as the post-revolution period reveals, transdimensional mobility can equally contribute to new regimes of disenfranchisement. By looking at ICT use over several years, the thesis explores how transdimensional mobility contributed to profound spatial, social, and political transformations in Egypt after the revolution, beginning with an examination of how ICT-mediated mobilities created a new spatial awareness for protesters engaging in overt political direct action. It continues by examining how ICT users playfully exercised transdimensional mobility in the face of a curfew imposed to suppress street politics. In the extended aftermath of revolution, transdimensional mobility created an impetus for urban reform and rejuvenation in Cairo that aligned with pre-revolution neoliberal agendas, and the thesis therefore interrogates the dialectic between ICT-mediated mobility both as resistance and as a vehicle for the re-entrenchment of a longstanding politics of exclusivity. Finally, the thesis concludes by addressing the question of how the mobile production and preservation of digital artifacts influences how the Egyptian revolution is remembered. The perceived permanence of digital traces is challenged by the selectivity and vulnerability of the digital archive.