• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, July 10, 2013

Over the last few years Egypt has become something of a laboratory and proving grounds for social media applied to political activism. Social media clearly played a big role in enabling ordinary Egyptians to organize protests that eventually brought down the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak in February 2012. But social media has been much less effective in achieving what is arguably the most important goal of any revolution: reestablishing order through effective government with broad popular support.

The key measure of success for any revolutionary movement is the durability of the new system it creates after overthrowing the old one, and political systems are obviously more durable the more popular support they have. By the same logic, revolutions which empower only one faction at the expense of others, or allow radical factions to “hijack” the movement and steer it to their own ends, are much less likely to be successful in the long run (this analysis counts any revolution which ends in dictatorship as a failure).

In Egypt, social media has proved to be a very effective tool for bringing about the first stage of a revolution -- the period of chaos and violent disorder, when masses of people filled the streets to show their opposition to the current regime. But following the February 2011 revolution, the political momentum shifted from social media and the streets to institutions like parliament and political parties; it was at this stage that the Muslim Brotherhood was able to usurp control through constitutional slight of hand, despite winning just 47% of the popular vote.

What went wrong? Part of the problem was that the social media users weren’t representative of the Egyptian population overall: unsurprisingly, they tended to skew young, urban, and tech-savvy, all of which sets them apart in a country where 28% of the adult population is illiterate and 57% is rural. That doesn’t mean that social media users couldn’t be effective spokespeople for the broader Egyptian society: they clearly tapped into a huge reservoir of anger and frustration at the old regime in February 2011. But it does mean that once the revolution moved out of the streets and into the halls of power, they had a hard time maintaining lines of communication with other sectors of Egyptian society, whose support would be crucial to keeping Egypt’s new government within bounds. In short, how could young urbanites canvas poor peasants on their political opinions, when the latter don’t even have electricity?

Well, it actually turns out to be pretty simple, if not easy: they had to go there in person. It’s worth noting that this time around the secularists have taken a very different tack: the “Tamarod” (“Rebel”) movement which organized the protests in June 2013 claimed to have gathered 22 million signatures -- most of them (the really amazing part) with old-fashioned pen and paper. They also launched a full-court press on traditional media, including broadcast and satellite TV, radio, as well as outdoor messages, leaflets, and graffiti, in order to reach working-class Egyptians in urban areas. The social media component, by contrast, was relatively modest.

Of course the future is still unclear. It remains to be seen if the second revolution leads to a more equitable distribution of power in the new government. But it has a much better chance as long as activists keep channels of communication -- all of them -- open to other parts of Egyptian society.