Notes on 'The Facebook Revolution'

Momentous undertakings continue to occur all around the Mediterranean coast and beyond, and for once it is the morally bankrupt, not the fiscally bankrupt (though the two are often simultaneously at fault - especially among autocratic regimes) that are being protested. Sure, Greece is still serious, but the real action is on the north coast of Africa.

There's lots of perspectives, and the media, as usual, is ignoring all of them in favor of 'reporting' and 'geopolitical daydreaming' and other nonsense. The fact that the Egyptian revolution was singled out and named the 'Facebook Revolution' is a particularly distasteful piece of sloganeering. Let us, this once, be honest: autocracies were toppled before Facebook. Facebook did not produce this revolution, Egyptians did. We do not need to make a mountain out of the fact that these people employed Facebook for the first few days of protests and we have to admit that they would have organized themselves without it, as they did after their internet was killed. Mark Zuckerberg has paid for enough product placements, and his property is neither particularly novel nor all-powerful - the media and every other out-of-touch organization are just romancing social media because it is the new, somewhat powerful, young, hot, and above all confused apparatchik on Journalism Blvd. Plus, Facebook is a western thing that western viewers are comfortable with, so that helps make this uprising half a world away more personable.

Oh you've no doubt seen my fallacy by now: the media sloganeers more than it reports these days. On some levels this is true, but attacking the media for sensationalism is an old approach that never really made an impact. However, that said, the media failed to report the Egyptian revolution properly, and continues to fail with other revolutions. From erroneous remarks that Egypt is part of the Middle East (it is part of North Africa, and people are displaying less geographical consciousness now that Libya is taking off) or even the Fox News map which swapped Egypt into its own geographical narrative, to lazy statements that these uprisings are an Arab thing (ever done ethnographic research into north Africa, or the history of Araby?).

Amid all this exciting happenstance, I am in North America and every day there is just news that uprisings are happening, that regimes are in danger, and what this might mean for America or the rest of the world. These kinds of stories do not help me understand what is happening, why it is happening, or who it is happening to. I already knew about Mohammar Ghaddafi and the million ways his name can be spelled. I have heard enough of Hosni Mubarak, and I realize from his constant about-face maneuvering that he is reluctant to give up the throne. What about the relatives of a dead protester? What are they saying? Why the panicky and slightly hostile talk about the Muslim Brotherhood?

But the death knell of informative, non-sensationalistic reporting came when Anderson Cooper got assaulted. I don't even know the details of this story, but he got attacked or beat up. Not to be outdone, another story surfaced about Lara Logan being sexually harrassed and beaten, and then the circus opened its dumb mouth and the focus shifted from 50/50 (uprising reporting/western news) to all the way western perspective. In a country where women and girls are harrassed, beaten and probably raped at a rate of at least one a month in every town, an invasive species of news reporter is groped, pushed, pulled, slapped into the spotlight. That's not exceptionalism, is it? Now, wait, I have to be outraged? About sexism? Again? In Egypt? Egypt? Aren't there other Egyptian things to learn about? to be outraged about?

People are dying, revolting, and rising up – in the same country, one individual faces the sort of sexism/oppression that happens in elevators and street corners in New York City (aka The Capitol of the West) every other day, and suddenly there is no other story but to shame a repressed society that is trying to undo at least one kind of repression. Bloated reactionary media response – and you can compare the 'mid-east reporting' with reports about, say, the New Zealand earthquake. There are some notable differences.

Thanks a million for the lack of information... I guess I'll have to see what RussiaToday or Al-Jezeera English have to say on the matter, while the media circus strokes its perspective, for all to see, on the television. For all I know, these uprisings are about the price of halal beef.