Mubarak overthrown by Twitter. NOT. The Wayne’s World revolution in Egypt

Posted: February 11th, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Last night, as sinister Vice-President Omar Suleiman railed at the influence of foreign journalists, Twitter congratulated itself on a revolution well done. All over the world, left-wingers sent this smug Tweet to each other.

Uninstalling dictator

But this was a revolution that was categorically not born of the Internet – apart from anything else, the Internet was cut off for everyone in Egypt for the entire first week of protests.

This revolution was all about satelite TV.

In every small village and large town in Egypt, some enterprising cafe owner has installed a gigantic dish, so that they can show their patrons Turkish pop music, English football and American movies. And during times of political turmoil, they can tune into Al-Jazeera. And what that means, is that when Egypt TV is pretending that the revolution has petered out, everybody can tell they are lying. When reality and the words of your dictator diverge so extravagantly, he becomes ridiculous. And a dictator who becomes ridiculous is just a mad old man, temporarily occupying a gaudy palace.

Watch People Jump has been talking about the coming of cable, and how Wayne’s World changed youth television forever. Because MTV was a channel for us, because there were a proliferation of ideas, beyond the usual top-down controlled networks, the kids were finally taking over.

For all the backslapping at Facebook and Twitter, for all Google’s laughable publicity stunts (can you imagine how dull it would be to listen to Twitter), the kids have taken over because of satellite TV.

And this is how it feels:

  • http://richardelliot.blogspot.com/ Richard Elliot

    It was interesting to watch the final couple of the days of the revolution on Aussie TV. The TV stations here didn't have any reporters on the ground so were reduced to the odd interview with a BBC journalist and showing quite a lot of Al Jezerra.

    I think someone up high realised that if you are just showing another TV station, people may turn over, so they stopped that and were just reading out twitter feeds for a couple of hours. I don't disagree with your arguments at all, but I think some media outlets had to hype up twitter, because that was the only news that had to report.