The New York Times has just posted a rather anemic, but still mildly interesting, interactive timeline page called The Digital Road to Egypt’s Revolution. The piece tracks the unfolding of the January 25 movement in Egypt, and how it swiftly built up steam after the killing by police of youth activist Kaled Said. Two predominant groups of youth published information, calls to action, documentation of policy brutality, and coordinated their planning and activities via Facebook and Twitter. Links are provided to relevant articles that were published by The Times in connection with events on their timeline, and images are included of actual chats between key youth leaders, facebook exchanges, and mocked up actual tweets (I know this one was mocked up, I checked the page code — what you see here is just a screenshot I took, though):
So, why “anemic”? Maybe it’s just the piecemeal, cold timeline format, or the good measure of white space on the page, but as a visual piece the page has a very bare-bones feeling that does not communicate — especially when covering the days leading up to January 25 and the events following — how a steady trickle of digital interactions turned into a stream of communications, then quickly became a firehose and then a tsunami of protest.
More importantly, the piece also ignores the important fact that not only were protest leaders and citizens publicizing the actions of the police and military to each other, but because they were using open social networking tools the whole world was also watching and “talking.” The buzz among people of all nations, if a social network buzz were to have an actual sound, was deafening. The internet lit up worldwide. Leaders of other nations were forced to take note, and because their own citizens were aware of the brutality and were rooting for the Egyptians to succeed in gaining a more just society, heads of state around the world were pressured to take a stand.
At the February 11 mark, The Times writes only: “President Mubarak resigns.” The failure to mention effect of the entire world having detailed and irrefutable knowledge of what was going on, because of citizens reporting from “the trenches” via digital media, is a gross oversight in this piece. Mubarak didn’t simply resign. He had no choice because he had lost support from the rest of the world, not only because of realities internal to Egypt.
