Last year's "Facebook strike" in Egypt caused a good deal of excitement about the potential of online activism, though the strike itself was generally acknowledged as a failure.

In the latest issue of Arab Media and Society, David Faris takes along and detailed look at this attempt to mobilise the nation through social media, and why it went wrong.

He suggests that multiple factors were to blame but sees no reason to abandon social media as a political tool:

If a viable opposition is to take shape with the assistance of electronic media like Twitter and Facebook, that opposition will have to pay much more careful attention to the kinds of small-scale struggles over freedom taking place every day in the courts, the press, the labour sector, and the professional associations ...

Future actions should probably be tied either to on-the-ground labour activism or to those areas in which activists and professionals have had the most success contesting the regime’s hegemony: human rights and issues of constitutional and economic justice. These issues are the subject of widespread political agreement among Egypt’s divergent opposition forces, and if they can successfully pool their resources, social media are likely to play a critical role in building political consensus, coordinating and executing concrete actions, and in putting together international human rights coalitions that can put pressure on the regime ...

It is up to individual activists to turn the possibilities of social media into reality, and even the most tech-and-politically savvy individuals will continue to face determined resistance from a regime that has so far confounded any and all attempts to challenge its hegemony.

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 26 October 2009.