 Welcome. It's my honor and pleasure to moderate this panel today. My name's Robert Faris. I'm the research director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. We have a fabulous panel of really smart, experienced, clued in people here. They happen to be friends and colleagues as well, so I'm a little bit biased, but anyway they really know their stuff. To my immediate right is Nagla Riesch. She's a professor at the American University in Cairo, and she is also the founder. I'm not going to get the name of your institution wrong, of the where are you, Nagla? You are the access to knowledge for development center. I know it is A2K for B, and that's why I can't read out the whole thing. To her right is Dalia Othman. Dalia is a fellow at the Berkman Center for the past two years. She's also a visitor scholar at the Center for Civic Media at MIT. To her right is Nadine Waheba. Did I say that right? And I don't even know your title. She works at the American University of Cairo as well, and she's the Grand Puba. What's your title there? I'm a researcher. A researcher, yeah. Fabulous. Lena Natala is a journalist who right now is the chief editor for the Mada Masr in Cairo. It's a web-based newspaper. She's also a researcher at the Center in Cairo, and at the far right is Farris Mabruk. Farris is the director of the Arab Policy Institute. He also leads the UNIS Social Business Global Acceleration Program. The collection of us, along with a few other people here, have been engaged in a project to try to understand how the network public sphere works in the Arab region. We borrow this term, the network public sphere, from Yochai Benkler, who describes the network public sphere as an alternative avenue for media, a place which kind of gets around the traditional gatekeepers, which is less under the control of government, which provides an alternative for setting the agenda and the framing, and for highlighting given topics and articles of public interest. And so the general question on our mind here is how has this worked in the Arab region, and using analytical and research tools at our disposal to do so. So these days we have a lot more data. We have a lot more tools in which to study the network public sphere, which is wonderful. We're still learning as we go. We'll show you some of these tools and techniques today, where we're going to focus more on some of the big picture items today as well. We've gone through, I think, several waves of optimism and pessimism about digital tools in the hands of civil agents. I think before we knew anything about it, there was a lot of optimism about what they would be able to do. Another wave of pessimism came through. In the wake of the uprising in the Arab region several years ago, we saw again another wave of optimism coming through, because this was, I think, much real stronger evidence that in the hands of the right people these could have a real effect on social and political processes. I think that optimism has also been tempered over the last couple of years. So these are some of the things that we're going to talk about today. So what we're going to do is do a couple rounds through the panel, take your questions following that and hopefully have a nice dialogue around these issues. What I'd love to do is start with you, Dahlia. Dahlia has been spending a lot of the past two years looking at the Arab logosphere and Twitter in a few countries as well. I guess we're going to start with the question of what's our general understanding of the network public sphere and how has it evolved over the last couple of years? Yeah, sure. So I wanted to, thank you, I wanted to sort of focus mainly now on the Arab logosphere and what you're seeing right now is a map of the logosphere from 2014. It's a snapshot in time and it's something I guess we built on. Back in 2009 the Berkman Center did a study on the Arab logosphere and there were very interesting findings that came out of that, namely that the logosphere was used for a way to comment, it was a way for people to comment on certain things, be it political, be it social, cultural, or even religious. And so we decided post-revolutions that we would take another sort of snapshot and look at this logosphere again and I'm going to keep it short and sweet and say like one main finding in this was the fact that the Arab logosphere is actually in decline. There aren't a lot of blogs out there anymore and what blogs that you see there are quite a few of them that are online but their people aren't actively blogging. So they're available online, you could see them, but you see that they've stopped blogging. And there are certain, you know, some of the bloggers have chosen to explain why they've stopped blogging, they give, they sort of write up their last blog and others just quit blogging. And what's interesting is that we see that a lot in the political blogs, especially in Egypt, and what we see now is that people have refrained from blogging but sort of reflect their political ideology through the banners that use. So you see a lot of bloggers from the Muslim Brotherhood who would put up banners that would indicate that they're sort of supportive of our bloggers for the Muslim Brotherhood and on the other hand you see Egyptians on the left who have their own separate banners as well. And so we're seeing that inactivity. Saudi Arabia, for example, and I think this is a key issue, in the 2009 blogosphere, Saudi Arabia was the second largest sort of group or cluster of blogs. Right now in the 2014, it's almost disappeared. And, you know, we say this in keeping in mind that a lot of sort of Saudi Arabia is the largest population in the Arab world that is actually active on Twitter. And so we can sort of discern that bloggers are slowly moving and shifting towards social media. Super, thanks, Dali. So a couple of things we need to come back to later. So one is the nature of pan Arabic discussion here and the shifting platforms is clearly a big issue here. So, Lena, you've been an intimate observer of this. You've been reporting on it and living it for several years now. I wonder if you could give us your perspectives as well, please. Okay, so I'm going to start with a quote from one of our interviews in Cairo. And it says, can you hear me? Okay. I feel the microphone is a bit far. So the quote reads, since some time we have been used to a certain level of tolerance and acceptance because we all look alike and we are all from one generation. Yes, there are differences, but not so stark like when we take it to the streets. When we are talking on social media, we are happy. But if we say the same things on the street, we get beaten up. We had this confined place that now turned against us. This is the end of the quote. And this is an excerpt from one of our interviews with and interlocutors as part of our research looking into the developments and the evolutions and the changing functions of Egypt's network public sphere. This person is a veteran blogger. He had a blog, one of those blogs that would probably be a dot in this map. He has been an active social media user. And his words resonated with those of others reflecting on how social media became less of an alternative home throughout the last two years in Egypt. In descriptions of digitally mediated public spheres, the notion of an improved network architecture is brought on with the facilitation of access to expression and reduced hierarchies and more horizontal modes of production, rendering political engagement more possible. While this possibility unfolded in several Arab contexts, it was also quickly connected to the Arab Spring mobilizations. And much of the attention shifted from the depiction of these constructed public spheres to how these public spheres should be conducive to some kind of a mobilization. The last two years, however, gave us an interesting possibility to better examine these publics outside the scope of mobilization without casting the burden of mobilization on them, mainly because there haven't been so much mobilization in terms of state protests and so on in the last two years. Instead, it became a possibility to understand the formations of these publics and the extent of their influence. For many of the conversations we had, parallels could be drawn to Benedict Anderson's imagined communities whereby societies are formed not around face-to-face interactions, but through the imagination of individuals of being part of a community. This imagination is possible thanks to the access to the print industry, says Anderson, which helped disseminate material and content that led to the unfolding of shared values. The internet's imagined community has not only given access to a shared discourse, but it's actually actively engaged in constructing that shared discourse. The similar sense of an imagined community has unfolded online in ways where active users expressed belonging to a certain intangible group that is not a political party or that is not a labor union. In this space, personal identification with surrounding events and the emotional register is key in shaping the community. I'm going to quote also another of our interlocutors, a famous programmer and activist who currently happens to be facing a prison sentence for uncharges of protests. And he says in the description, in describing this community, on Twitter, you are not really using it to talk to a public. You are using it to talk mostly to people who would be directly involved in your popular committee, your work or your refugee work, for instance. They may be your colleagues in the same thing or just from a network that could be sympathetic to the same cause. When you share the personal stuff, you are also talking to that same network or some subset of it. I think there's a lot of value when we start looking at emotional reasons and benefits from doing that. Even when you start sharing this maybe with your family or within your work colleagues or whatever, it wouldn't have the same emotional register. And so we need this thing in order to find the same people who would have the same level of anxiety, depression or happiness around certain events. It shakes, these events shake our world, but at the same time, the rest of the world doesn't actually treat them as such important events. And this is the end of the quote. Now, for Anderson, the nation is one such socially constructed and imagined community. This very nation started joining the digital platforms and shattering the sense of belonging that the early adopters had as well as the sense of imagining it as a special community. Online spaces became less sites of imagining the nations or alternative nations and became more grounds of reasserting tangible realities and the state mediated version of the nation. A growing sense of nationalism engineered by the state through the machinations of populism has been omnipresent online. This has come on the heels of a major regime change in Egypt by the country, whereby the country's military institution came to replace an earlier Islamist regime. And while mass media played a major role in mediating this renewed sense of nationalism, online platforms became a more available space to a wider group of users to express it, share it and defend it. It was also a space where traditional powerhouses, namely the state, but also powerful political groups and individuals and figures consolidated their presence. As such, and to end looking into the changes that occurred over the public sphere in the last three, two years in Egypt and in the digitally mediated one in particular, it is important to separate between two things. On one hand, there is the function of online platforms to the formation of political communities that can speak to the feeling of the traditional political organizations. And this is something that should not be forgotten in the wake of talk about failures and successes and the wake of talking about the failure of online spaces for mobilizing change. While these practices online don't have to be necessarily geared towards major political change or on the ground action, they are important. They have been important spaces for conversation, discourse formation and alternative political imagination. On the other hand, the expansion of digital spaces to become a bigger and larger host for the different publics of the nation lends itself to a different set of realities, while online spaces introduce different languages, ideas as well as modes of expression and conversation to the public sphere. The advent of a more offline presence to online spheres reversed this dynamic and as we see more alignment between the offline world and the online worlds today, a set of questions start rising such as what are the new modes of production of nationalism engineered through a digitally mediated network public sphere. What does online spaces, how does online spaces, how do the online spaces, sorry, mediate the nation to a larger network public sphere and what are the roles of the traditional power houses like the state in there and finally can there be still spaces reserved for communities of descent with some level of audibility as part of a truly network public sphere or are they doomed to be diluted and is this inevitable inevitable because of the growing volume of the network and the weakness of its interconnections. I leave it to my other colleagues to you know try to hit these questions and thank you. Thank you Lena, there's a lot of great stuff there that we have time to pick up on later. Nogla, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thank you Rob. Let me just take it from Lena. Lena spoke to us, gave us the image, the picture of what really happened in the decade of the 2000 to up to the uprisings of 2011 and then afterwards. What we see today is actually summarized by one of our interviewees who said in in very simple language the ground has come online. It's a very different world that the public sphere, the network public sphere right now, is a platform where you have the different groups, they joined the early pioneers are joined by practically everybody. So the idea of this space being sort of democratizing and providing opportunity for everybody has indeed been materialized to the point where not only do we have the pioneers, the activists, but we also have hierarchies that now come in line and side by side by the achieve hierarchies. Examples of the interviewee that Lena talks about are people who achieve their status by their own achievements online, through what they said and spoke and through their blogs. These are people who achieve their status and their own hierarchies. Now we have the state, the media top-down hierarchies that came side by side by these pioneers and actually summarized also by this by the interview telling us a whole new country has joined us. The people we argue with at home, our family and friends are now present to argue with us on social media. We are unable to change the way we speak to these new entrants online just like we have had our failings offline and our disillusionment online offline. So that's the fragmentation that has taken place by everybody joining in. This is a huge space where messages are diluted of the original pioneers, where messages cross, where actually a great deal of polarization takes place and again this is only reflective of the polarization that we see around us on the ground. So at the same what I refer to Yochai Bencler's in describing the network public sphere as expressed in his book, basically we had what he calls the Babel Objection, the Babel, the idea of the fragmentation. We do actually see around us a lot of that. In fact we also see too much chaos and too much centralization. We have the two trends side by side just like I look at it as you know when you have centrifugal forces away from the center giving forces to the small players and at the same time the opposite currents are taking place. You have the centripetal forces, vertical hierarchies being established and very active online as Elina has alluded to. It is the kind of polarization that is at the level of the state. So it is something to to deal with and to start and to realize and to actually start to see what where this can lead us. And the sad part is that the mass media is actually playing a role in the polarization. So you see the circular flow where certain groups are actually quoted in the mass media but of course it's there is a selectivity that feeds into the polarization that is taking place. At the same time I want to emphasize the relationship between these two worlds. When we talk of a network public sphere in the Arab world we really we take a step back and we look at the Arab public sphere. It is a representation of the public sphere that we have with all its uniqueness with all its own path. Perhaps we need to you know step back and think again the public the notion of the public sphere and as presented by Habermas the idea of you know capitalism giving space to democracy and political debates and eventually the role of the media. We've had a different model in the Arab world. We need to study that model and we need to really see the perhaps the achievements and but also the failures that we have in the public sphere are also reflected in the network public sphere. So on a positive note there is a role for looking at this from a different lens and from a different perspective and trying to see how we can use these technologies and devise new tools perhaps novel tools to study and assess what we see around us. I know that two of the points that I want to emphasize may that be the the polarization and the mirroring of the extreme mirroring of the network public sphere to what is good to on the online sphere to what is going on offline. We have seen this in our fieldwork and I know that Nadine will show you will share with you pictures that show that. We have done most of our interview all of our interviews actually focus groups with the different groups with the Islamists with the regime you know the pro-military groups with what we call the non-aligned group and you know third way or non-aligned group. We have interviewed you know different individuals from the Muslim Brotherhood and basically what we see as for example the hierarchies in the Muslim Brotherhood as an institution their approach in dealing with social media was similar to that. So you see the the hierarchies that are on the ground are actually coming to social media with their own values and their own mechanisms with their own dynamics. So may that be the state or mainstream media or institutions like the Muslim Brotherhood. So it's no longer the world where we had the activists you know having space to interact and to impact a mobilization on the ground. I will stop there and then I know that Nadine is going to follow up on that. Good, so I just want to highlight a couple things before I let Nadine take over. So one of the things I hear from you is the prior notion of the network public spirit creating its own new hierarchy is being challenged by prior hierarchies now asserting themselves online. Also filling in of the network public sphere concerns over fragmentation polarization gotta come back to those for sure. Nadine please. So what I wanted to show is a few illustrations of the points that Nagla was talking about and Lina on these the nature of the offline and online dynamics in Egypt and the importance of looking at the context in which all this is taking place. So these are images generated using a software called WebRadar and this basically collects and analyzes data from Facebook, Twitter and different news websites and it's developed by a company called Innova in Tunisia. So yeah, so what we see here this is a timeline of events on the Tamarot campaign. This was the campaign launched around April 2013 against the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. What you see here is mentioned on Facebook of the word Tamarot. So and just to let you know point B is when the campaign was launched on Facebook and we don't really see a surge in the online conversation about the topic as a result of the creation of the Facebook page. What you versus for example there's a very famous Facebook page in Egypt called We Are All Khaled Said and this was created after the the brutal murder of Khaled Said outside an internet cafe in Egypt by the police in 2010 and it's becomes synonymous with the uprising in Egypt. You don't see that effect with the Tamarot page. What you see instead is several peaks that take place after players from mainstream spheres like on TV or political parties or political figures endorsing the campaign. So just to give you an idea for example the first peak is when the April 6th activist youth group announced their support for the campaign. The second peak is after a combination of different political parties endorsing their support for the campaign in mass media and in the press. The third and fourth peak represent endorsements after the effect of endorsements from prominent political figures and presidential candidates and the fifth is obviously the one at during the protests of the June 30 protests at the presidential palace in Egypt. And so what we can say here is that in terms of the relationship between the offline and online spheres we do see that mainstream players are perhaps more powerful in driving the conversation online and do remain to be very influential in the case of Tamarot. And the next image so the next image kind of tries to illustrate when Nagla was talking about about polarization. Let me tell you what this is. This illustrates polarization specifically on Facebook. Facebook is very important in Egypt. There's a six this is a 16 percent penetration rate. We're talking about 14 almost 14 million Facebook users versus Twitter where it's under one percent of the population. The period of time we're looking at here or this is a snap you need from 30th of June 2013 to around the end of August. And this is the time when the military government overthrew the Islamic Islamist regime that was in power of the Muslim Brotherhood. And this was also during the forceful dispersal of the encampments at Rab al-Adawiyah and the Nahda squares which were calling for the reinstatement of the depost president. So what you can see here is posts shared on public Facebook pages. These circles represent the sources of these posts. So the different pages and their size represents the amount of posting on the by the source. The distance between the circles yeah is is reflective of the extent to which they discuss common topics. Yeah. And the circles that are linked are discussing common topics and they have a similar stance towards that topic. So you see clearly on your right yeah I think it's your right a cluster of Islamist affiliated pages. Whereas on your left you see one of regime affiliated pages regime supportive pages. And what we do notice is kind of an absence of pages that represent the views of the non-aligned group. This could either because they be and they did actually say this in our field work that they some of them chose to disengage at certain points especially on Facebook. Yeah. And so yeah it's just so the point here is that this online the online sphere at least at this point was in fact marrying this offline polarization of discourse in Egypt and it is reflective of what Nina was saying of a shift from more of a community of like-minded people to a whole country or a society coming online. Super. Thank you. Thank you Nadine. I think we were going to go to Dalia. So we're going to have one more view hold on we're going to Tunisia next but we're going to have one more view of Egypt before we go there. So I just want to build on everything that was said already and I think when we were comparing notes about our research on the offline versus online and the Facebook versus Twitter we were I guess maybe excited maybe depressed maybe I don't know but we realized that a lot of the results in some sense were validated through our combined research and this is a map of a Twitter map of Egypt from 2014. Again this is just a snapshot in time but what is really significant about this map is that it's there are distinct very distinct groups of clusters and each basically each circle is a handle a Twitter handle and what we saw is that the map itself was divided on based on two themes one was political and one was apolitical social cultural you know more of a personal thing that with basically users avoiding to talk about politics but what was really I think very very interesting is the distinct clusters or grouping of the political clusters and so what you see and I don't know if the colors are very clear but the top there's a green cluster and those are people who align themselves with the military or support the military at the bottom here the yellow are people who align themselves with the Muslim Brotherhood and what's interesting is that in the middle are the people that where we're labeling or calling basically non-aligned who support neither the military or the Muslim Brotherhood and again what's really interesting about this is the fact that they're very distinct groups they're very divided they're not we don't see a lot of interlinking between them and so that sort of emphasizes the whole issue or the whole question of polarization we really see that on Twitter as well even though it's a 1% but we do see that sort of reflection from the offline to the online Super, thank you Thank you, Daya Faris, let's hear about what you've learned in Tunisia Yeah, first of all I'm really I'm glad to be here the subject is is very important especially with the all the transition and the chances that we are now living and witnessing in our countries what understanding the Arab network public sphere is also important to understand how the to better understand individual behaviors collective behaviors maybe understand radicalization polarization the good thing with the network our public sphere is that we have data so once we have data we can try to model we can try to analyze so let me share with you some of the ongoing research we are doing to better understand the typical period of time on the NPS network public sphere so typical what would typical week look like so we want this we we had this approach saying that typical week we would have like a production of information so how many information are put in the in in in the system how many publication this is production then you have promotion how many like how many how many share and then you have interaction how many comment people are commenting so that's what this is the the way to describe and a typical week activity and and and then we so in a in a in a typical week in in Tunisia we would have oh it's okay we would have 62,000 new publication this is an average of 62,000 publication and and each publication would have 20 likes 10.7 shares 4.4 comments and it would reach 13,020 users so this is a typical week and this is a normal week let's say and and then from there we we try to see what what what happened in in singular points what is an abnormal week and what explain this abnormality of this singularity interesting so so so you have the the the data we just went through and and so we have a share the comment the like and then you have picks and the interesting part is that the picks we we see on on on the online are exactly the ones which are related to some violent events generally violent events on the street so we went through this picks and tried to explain trying to understand how what is the relation between the online and the offline is there a relation of there is a correlation but but then we'll have to explain is there a certain point certain I mean sort of causality we we introduced a level of violence in the publications okay so we we we have one percent of the publication in in average that contains that contain a term I mean violence blessure aggression assassination and so on and the average number is one percent but what we saw is that one one the the level of violence increase in the publication the the the the level of which will will the level of commands which has so we have we have higher number of share higher number of commands this was just to share with you the way to modelize and to come with a model that would explain the be a collective behavior on on on on the public sphere and this is I'm going with this hopefully we'll come with other other results thank you thank you very much Faris so we've uh had kind of a a few different overview looks at the network public sphere we've started to dig into the data a little bit I want to start picking off a couple topics and start thinking of questions you want to ask if any of these are of particular interest so one of the things that comes through from this is that the network public sphere is now reaching a broader cross-section of society we want to figure out whether that's good or bad good we hope it's certainly a different world than when we looked at the blogosphere five years ago and saw I think what was at that time elite bloggers talking and debating in long form complex political ideas and building coalitions now and what you've shown us here tonight is very very different than that so the the polarization in Facebook that we see the topical selection in Facebook and Tunisia the polarization in the Twitter networks there so we pause on this notion of polarization and ask about this is this an inevitability as the network public sphere becomes a better reflection of society at large is the network public sphere just a reflection really in becoming a better reflection of life underlying it there used to be the sense that we would kind of create this alternative layer that would somehow be better at debate and the liberation and perhaps would help with these very complex collective decision problems and governance there is there a glimmer of hope left for that now or are we just going to go back and say it's business as usual and people are just taking their problems and their biases and their prejudices online and that's all we get please please do I'll give it a shot a little a breath of optimism please yes yes actually yes I will try well I'll keep the optimism till the end okay I mean one of the questions when we asked during the focus groups as the group and you said you you know how do you find you find the internet and the social media is the internet democratizing and somebody said is it democratizing or dogmatizing you know and then so on the one hand it can help to exacerbate you know the differences and polarization and so on but on a positive note you think of it as I mean like democracy when you open the door for every you know equality of opportunity and everybody comes in you are bound to get results that you may not like very much right I mean that's a price you pay by opening the door and bringing everybody in now in a moment of flux like we are living in Egypt and in Tunisia I'm sure what do you see on the ground is this polarization this is and that's I go back to the idea of the public sphere this is the public sphere that we have everywhere you know there is a sense of of there are tensions tremendous tensions sometimes in the same family so like you have the you know the tensions online and the the fights that you have sometimes in the network it's also also reflective of what is happening on the ground so we would like to think that this is a period of transition where you know we are learning just like you know our research as researchers we are learning I think as a people we are learning we are learning hopefully to you know to debate better to to accept the other better I mean a moment of modesty is in order we have to learn to be tolerant and accepting so I mean these are my two cents I don't know they're positive but yeah thank you please yeah I yes I do believe the same in Tunisia I mean the the network public sphere is the mirror of what's happening in on the ground but it's like you know the sort of mirror that exaggerating the default that are when you look to yourself I think it accentuating the polarization all what's happening on the public sphere this is one too the problem we have is the lack of media in the survey we're organizing Tunisia reason number one people go online on Facebook to get the news in the lack and in the situation where there's a lack of credible media Facebook became and has a completely different role I guess from the world it has on in other countries so so this created also new role and the new completely new structure but in Tunisia it's been a positive role from your perspective the addition of alternative media sources I I mean it played a role in in the transition in the beginning I mean in the revolution yes then we are still lacking real media Facebook is killing the the the media I mean journal the the the the traditional media business model because all the the the advertising is going into Facebook going Google or all the traffic is going to Facebook and Google so there is no chance today for for for traditional media to emerge in in I mean very difficult for traditional media to emerge in Tunisia and I do believe that traditional journalists media are very essential for country to to to to to to move forward and I don't see this happening in Tunisia you are in part I mean I don't know what you're thinking about this but it's more I don't know if you had a question about media that can be saved for later but let's stay on media while while we're talking about it so it's the network public sphere working in a sense in the way we hoped it would in highlighting through a meritocratic process better sources of information or people find all finding alternatives and views and is that being highlighted in a way that it would not be were not for these digital tools yeah if I may reflect on this a bit I think as as a few of us have highlighted the you know traditional powerhouses on the ground have also managed to learn so much how to navigate online spaces and to create also spaces of power for themselves in these in these you know spheres and hence they've become you know dominant players in the network public sphere so mainstream media mass media the sense of Egypt you know major television channels major corporate media have become the most widely followed sources of information online as well as they are offline so in a sense this is a shift from you know from the you know infancy stage of online spaces where you know the volume of presence there was much smaller but at the same time there was much more influence by smaller players so definitely there is an issue I share also Ferris's concerns of of you know online media and not online media but social media in particular Facebook in particular also not always playing a very positive role for the highlighting of smaller media practices mainly due to you know it's the advertisement model mainly due to you know the selectivity in which posts are are streamlined in paper in people's team so so there is definitely a growing bias against alternative sources of media nowadays can I add a note to that I think that's I think what you said is very important in the sense of navigating these platforms and it seems like a lot of the sort of governments or people like the hierarchy has been established because they've been able to navigate those platforms and I think we need to take a step back and look at how these platforms were built what algorithms they use how these sort of feeds were promoted or certain posts are promoted I think that's very that goes looks back into the sort of reflection the offline and the online I think for activists there needs to be some certain form of awareness of what these platforms can do and cannot do and how to navigate them and maybe possibly part of that reason is because we are using platforms that were not built for social mobilization they were they were built as social networks and there are certain specific algorithms that are tied to that and so that's I mean that could drive the question of of are we going to stick to Facebook and Twitter or what's next you want to stay on this I love this topic please do yeah if I may I just have a quick follow up on this I think one of the questions that I was telling my colleagues that I went back to reading Yochai Benkler and one of the questions that he raises in his book is the internet too chaotic too centralized or neither to promote democracy and his answer is that it's neither it's not too chaotic it's not too centralized to promote a democratic discourse now looking at Egypt around me I'm just wondering I think there it is too chaotic and it is too centralized and I'm not sure that combination as it exists in Egypt is enough or is good enough to promote a democratic discourse precisely because of what you said because of the high media concentration because the content that is included by virtue of the ownership of this of these media platforms by their allegiance to the state by the selectivity of how they use the content on the internet that it can become a very dangerous tool and also emphasize and distort it and exaggerate it because of that mirror so this is a time perhaps again to re you know to rethink these questions and as does does that answer all today I think we need to think a bit more to answer that question in view of what we look around I want to hear more about this is this is fascinating and I kind of want to merge the two of these things which is how much of that is a function and is it related to the choice of platforms so we've seen the shift from more open media in the blogosphere to a lot of the network public sphere residing on Twitter and on Facebook which have their own architectures which tend to nudge behaviors in a given way and that's kind of colliding with the underlying kind of perceptions and the opinions and the ideals do we blame this on Twitter and Facebook is there a better approach to this how do we look at this what are the kind of the affordances of these platforms that are helpful for debate and deliberation and which aspects of these are detrimental are these just engines of chaos and centralization as you call them I'm not sure we know the answer to them but they feel to me like very very important questions to be asking yeah that's a difficult question I can if I might start reflecting on it with you guys I think I think there was always a merit to the long post which is the you know the main content of the blogs you know in the space of a long post chances are you managed to make a fuller argument and chances are you force the you know person who's reading to reflect more deeply in the space of this longer piece of content as opposed to you know having to hastily react to a shorter post be it on Facebook or Twitter so definitely the you know the form of the platform affects the types of ensuing conversations and you know the fact that you know there has been a migration from you know the blog sphere to spaces of Twitter and Facebook whereby you know we find much more like shorter pieces of content here and there is affecting the quality of the debate that's sad and I think this is something we referred to earlier today in our conversation it's interesting how many people from the blog sphere world have brought the blogging tradition to Facebook by only engaging through you know the writing of longer posts and these tend to be again sites of more interesting conversations than the you know shorter pieces of content in fact in my newspaper we tend to look around for these and when we find an interesting conversation happening in the aftermath of a long post we actually contact the author and you know ask them to develop a piece of an op-ed based on this Facebook post so that's yeah one one major chance I see happening now in especially in Facebook and Twitter in the art board security of I mean during certain period of time in 2010 during the evolution Facebook where where the more secure I mean safe place to to take risk and publish why because of the community because of the impact you had and because the governments were not you know comfortable with attacking someone for posting on Facebook but today even in Tunisia where we supposed to have I mean democracy people are are also you know arrested and there is a lack of you know clear recommendation I mean how do we manage I mean is it the public is it public sphere is it private sphere can you what is the other limit you can you can you can you can post on Facebook so there is also chance of this and maybe the way because it's no more the safe way to to publish it will probably chance the the type of you know content we have and definitely the world of it I want to see if there's any questions from the audience I have 20 more myself we'll start here and then go to the back again I have a really simple question and it's an untutored one I work a lot on crisis mapping and I think it's such a different but designed to be thin data right so I'm curious whether if you looked at that those kinds of platforms you believe the ones that are free and I mean I've I work on Syria and I've seen some of the maps that are generated through them and I think there's real methodological problems but I can imagine that there might be interesting conversations that come out of using those platforms are I mean if in fact you're going for the ultra short post or the crowd sourcing or this kind of I just I'm wondering as people who thought more deeply about what you guys think like I'm curious if you've if you've thrown that into the mix or if that's just sort of it analytically a different I'll take a whack at that while you guys are thinking so that's a really good question I'm sure there's a lot of valuable stuff to learn there there's of course a profusion of platforms to look at and we haven't gotten there yet it's a very interesting question which is if you want to understand what's going on online and civil discourse what do you study and in the Middle East the answer right now is Twitter and Facebook that's where you go that's where a large majority of the ideas are and the question that we don't fully know the answer to is that really a good reflection of the totality of views that are taking place under my guess is it's pretty close but I'm not sure I'm not sure are you following up on that or are you going to a new question so I'll come back to you on that I promise to gentlemen in the back I'm following up on it thank you okay thank you I'm following up on your point and directly to your point as well on my way over here today I had the benefit of spending some time with a retired marine who now works for fidelity investments in the enterprise enterprise architecture department and he does nothing but platforms and you made the assertion that people are being arrested for making posts on Facebook so I'm wondering you know we had some measure of success with Voice of America radio and it's heyday and I'm wondering is there not some platform or group or organization that can develop a totally encrypted nameless faceless traceless voice of freedom for all members on the planet to be able to to feel free to speak the truth great question who wants to field that me again no I'm not answering all that I'm the moderator I think there are platforms that do offer that where you're completely anonymous in uh or your data is I would say maybe 90% anonymous I'm blanking on names I know we've like talked about them in the Berkman community and and there are platforms the question is I think sort of to build on what you're saying is if you have a completely there's you have to consider security is as one aspect of a platform but then you have to think about the community element or or having the ability to communicate ideas and information having some form a trusted source and and being able to organize and I think being completely anonymous might create an obstacle for that so it's better than being arrested and tortured yes but but there's sort of you you get to do a cost benefit or sort of balance like wait out basically and see you know security versus versus complete yeah impact and I mean I don't know what the answer to to that would be maybe there is a platform that would combine both or or doing some more offline social mobilization I mean I'm also marine to um people get to and and you know I don't I don't I'm I'm going to add on this I I have to jump in so there are ways to maintain anonymity online none of them are 100% but some of them are 99% and if you really want to speak anonymously online and have the knowledge and the technical chops you can do it it's hard to do that and also join a community of people and have a real impact in the world and most people interested in civil rights know that and for that reason you see people taking a lot of calculated risks by speaking out in their own voice with their own face and that's the decisions that they make it's a hard decision I'm not sure I would make the same decision but it's a decision that people make if you want to be on Twitter and be anonymous and you live in Tunisia you can do it if you want to be on Facebook and be anonymous and you live in Tunisia you can get away with it as long as no one flags your account as being under someone else's name and take you down but there are avenues in which to do that the my last thought on that is that getting ideas out there is actually pretty easy and very hard to block ideas the things that have a real impact on the world is the creation of networks and communities and doing that anonymously is really really hard and there aren't many examples of it the group anonymous I think is is the one exception out there can you block the geo position tracking tool? I don't know that's beyond my technical know-how somebody might be able to flag that one yeah could be inferred from oh so on Twitter and that kind of thing you can you can opt out of that certainly so if you're if you're on a Western platform if you're on Facebook and Twitter and are diligent about maintaining security the only way that a government could get access to your information is if Twitter or Facebook turn it over and they don't do that routinely but nonetheless people still use well depends on the I shouldn't speak to that it depends on on the rationale for it they put up a fight often if there's a good legal rationale for turning the data over they do it and that's the standard by that some people disagree on whether they should be pushing back more than they do but they have pushed back in many cases more than they have to you had a question yeah well I was just so there's some research just coming out recently about how few people understand the algorithm or that there is an algorithm curating their Facebook feed and I think there is Twitter has been experimenting with a little bit with what they do but mostly Twitter has been a platform where you just get this continuous stream and there isn't kind of just however many people you subscribe to however many time they post you're going to see that so it's a fundamentally different model for distributing content and I'm wondering if any of you who've spanned both networks rather than looking at them in isolation if at all you've tried to compare you know how well the content reflects the what you believe to be the ground truth as a result so you're you're asking whether they believe that the algorithm is filtering what you see in these places in a meaningful way well it's it's certainly filtering it right and I'm just wondering if you've actually observed meaningful differences as a result of one platform doing heavy duty filtering that people aren't even necessarily aware of whereas the other isn't I'm trying to think I mean I don't know if that answers your question but there have has been a there have been a number of cases where activists have have maybe used Twitter instead of Facebook to get their message across because of this issue so they were able to fully understand or I don't want to say fully understand to to have some form of understanding of how the hashtag sort of how to create a trending hashtag works and so they were able to sort of work within that algorithm to highlight certain trending hashtags I know this definitely happened with the the Palestinian prisoners hunger strike they were they had a very specific set of sort of steps that they would take so that the hashtag we would become a trending one and so I think there is some awareness but with a maybe I'm not entirely sure about Facebook and I think because but you did say something about public posting public versus private and I'm so there is some understanding and I'm going to let you talk more about that so there was an example out of the United States and maybe this is the base of your question and after the the Ferguson protests there were people noticing that their Twitter feed was full of information about the protests in Ferguson and that on Facebook there wasn't next to nothing about it it's if you are do you see similar things in in the Arab world I think I think the fact that even though Twitter has very little penetration in the Arab world and Nadine had the numbers I think or Nagla I don't remember yeah so even though Twitter had has like far less penetration than Facebook it has always been treated by people who feel like they are here to broadcast a message it has been used more often than Facebook because there is this this feel that nothing would be censored it will just everything would flow everything and there is a better sense of archive there is a better sense of traceability in Twitter in people's mind than in Facebook and that's not judging from any data that's judging from you know observation and personal practice personal practice as you know as an activist but also as someone who's running a newspaper and who has to navigate you know the posting of content between both these media again with you know this very small percentage of Twitter penetration in Egypt you know it might not make sense to invest in it but again the fact that there is a better sense of traceability of this content on Twitter makes us still want to stay active on Twitter and not just you know restrain ourselves to Facebook yeah I also see this happening for the for the media for the traditional media I know that Facebook has a function when you create a page Facebook page as a media as a traditional media if you have this page validated validated by Facebook then it will appear I mean it will increase the number of of time it will it will appear in timeline so it will increase the number of for likers and followers and so on so this is maybe a way for Facebook to give more credibility to the to the content you have at least I saw it in Tunisia I know that the two or three media that has increased the number of followers had had their pages validated and this validation is is proof of credibility or just it is a very positive way to criminalize no I just had a quick follow-up for actually anecdotal evidence on the use of Twitter versus Facebook building on on what Tina says it was very prominent even despite the low percentage of users it was very prominent in delivering a message during for mobilization during the appraisings but one of the things that we found also from fieldwork on the ground are quotes by non-aligned group or activists who said in the beginning we used to put out a tweet and it would mobilize people to go out on the streets in large numbers now with the public sphere with the internet being so populated and so busy with everyone being online that message is diluted and that impact is not felt by the activists anymore in fact one of the activists put his status on Facebook which was very interesting because he said Twitter now feels like you've gone to your you entered your own home and you find other people living in it and pretend that they know you and then you know they're using your stuff and it was very funny and he says if you agree retweet I mean like you know he's on Facebook so so just these things give you a sense of I go back to my earlier point about you know and also what Lena mentioned about this you know the pioneers who played the role in sending out messages through the platforms are sort of ticking a different stance taking stance that is slower and more calmer stance than being out there believing that their message will be delivered for towards mobilization can I stay in this area for a while so one of the aspirations of this research was to try to better understand kind of the reflection and connectivity between the online and offline world we used to a long time ago have debates about blogs versus journalists and that's long gone finally we still talk in terms of online and offline and I think that distinction is softening over time particularly as more people get online and just people's lives are both and to make that distinction for most of us really isn't that relevant anymore but penetration in Egypt is now almost 60% internet penetration Facebook much less Twitter 1% is that what you said yeah so there is perhaps a meaningful distinction there I don't know if you know the numbers for Tunisia they're probably a little bit higher but not that different yeah what did you learn from your interviews with people about kind of this inner section the connection between online and offline worlds certainly there's it's not a binary anymore because the two worlds intersect it's about the dynamics between the two worlds and they feed into each other there was actually a tweet early on during the uprisings and says that usually we learn that if you tweet piece of news you have to put a link to a media source a mainstream media source but now mainstream media are quoting us because we are taking pictures on the ground so it's become full circle you know so so I mean the word that's happened on mainstream media or online or just in people's on the ground with families they're so intersected and again the polarization just like it's happening online it's happening with disagreements within you know one's own family these things are happening there is no it's a blur it is just one word and coming I mean the statement the the ground has come online is actually very indicative we have anecdotal examples from you know and I know that we have from the for example Tamarod interview interviewed one of the you know few members of the Tamarod campaign that Nadine has shown and we have found several pieces of evidence that you know activities on the ground were actually what triggered action so it's hard to to divine and the binary is no I don't think the binary is valid anymore the question is how can we work with the dynamics between these worlds and how can we study what's happening in the network public sphere in a meaningful way to promote you know positive optimistic results any other thoughts on that she said it very very well yeah other questions from between you guys yeah please over here and then we'll come back there is it feasible given the political context in the countries to make use of social media social media platforms to have a kind of mediated conversation facilitate conversation between the different points of view that are now populating the various platforms in countries I know that Twitter does town halls and things like that but has any consideration given to that possibilities I think you've stumped the panel that's a very good question Joana Chippen we have an answer from the now like if you start a debate or if someone is it usually ends up being rude or crosses the line and you end up blocking that person or it's a leading that person it's not really a room for communication you just you people want to say what they say and if and a lot of people post like comments or like statuses and they say if you disagree or if you have something rude to say just refrain from commenting at all so I think that's that has been my experience or what I've seen personally on the channel I wonder who would be moderating I can I can maybe give a short following up on on Nagam I think I mean we have to think that in this part of the world we're still we've had authoritarian regimes for a very long time and before that we had colonialism so we really have you know we're learning we have a lot to adjust and a lot to develop so to say this positively and that goes to perhaps the earlier point of the uniqueness of the Arab public sphere not I mean the network as a reflection of what we have online so we have a lot to learn we are you know we are young I'd like to think of us as young democracies you know or on the way to being a young democracy so we are learning as we go across and I think that's that's part of the perhaps the the frustration and the failures I mean the frustration is for everyone the frustration is for the non-aligned activist group but this is I mean we have to again to it's a moment where we have to be modest and we have to admit to our own failures the ability to engage the ability to build you know a dialogue on the ground on offline online we're still working on that so I agree with that it's an unsolved problem and it's not only a technical problem it's a human problem we're just not as good at open-minded debate and the liberation as we would like to be and technology tools perhaps still help in some sense I think strong moderation is a really good thing it helps in any context online offline even with mediocre moderation you can get by sometimes but anyway lots of work to be done there yeah yeah please hi so you've made this point a couple of times that the Arab public sphere is different from the the traditional Audra Massey and Western public sphere I'm wondering if you can sort of detail what that means to you and if the other panelists agree with that notion sorry there's a part B Dalya I think you mentioned that that the Arab world uses sort of Western-centric platforms or platforms that are developed primarily originally for Western audiences Facebook, Twitter and I'm wondering sort of 10-15 years down the road if you think the public sphere is going to still be concentrated on those platforms okay yes no no I'm just I'm like okay or if there are going to be or globally if there is going to be sort of more local nations-based or community local-based platform well this is a very sensitive topic and I I certainly have to try this very carefully because I don't want to be understood the wrong way I don't want to be in any way saying that you know we are not fit for democracy I think the the idea of what the Arab world experienced was at moments of openness and of if you will intellectual earlier in the 20th century it was a moment where people who were you know revolution it's not revolution it's the sense of going out on the street and protesting but revolutionary thinkers had a common goal you know to to get rid of colonization so it was a way there was a consensus towards this but I don't think we have had as a long pattern as a catalog if you will the Habermasian catalog is is a certain you know this this this this happened and then you reached the case where you have democracy and then the you know with the internet there's a natural public sphere and this is a natural growth of of a democracy that developed throughout a certain period of history we had a different path in the Arab world we had colonization and then when there were debates and spaces may that be the mosques or the cafes or you know the intellectuals the goal was more or less common to get rid of the colonizer but the sad news is that when we got rid of the colonizer we had authoritarian regimes and then we sort of a setback so we do not have long stretch of a natural birth if you will of of democracy we're struggling to get there so we had you know some hurdles and hindrances and we are getting there but it's going to take some time so in a way we had I mean when the internet came and with you know the 2000 there was a big there was big hope and there was big space that was open for the young youth you know using the technologies but then things did not develop as we would have liked and what happens is that you have a populist really what you have we have populist politics and we have activists facing you know being threatened even in the psychological sense not just from the regimes but also from society we have we're still developing that culture of debate we will get there I'm not I don't want to put the the Arab public sphere in any negative light that's not the intention the intention is to just take a moment and really realize what are the strengths where are we heading and how can we get there in and using our own model it may not it will not be the you know following a catalog of what happened in the west and that's no different than actually this course in in development for example you know if you look at the development of how the path for developing countries it's they will not follow the same path that took place in in the west or in developed countries but they will develop then all paths and we look at you know the emerging economies and we look at new models of development that are unique to their own spaces so that's really what I hope that clarifies you know what I mentioned thanks to talk about that I think it's also worth noting that sort of the adoption of technology and the evolution of that adoption has changed has been different for the Arab world and so looking at sort of pre revolutions and who is actually using these platforms the elites and then sort of this sudden surge of people who started using all these different platforms and I know that we're we've also been looking at sort of media as well and how media is covering certain topics through a different tool we use at Berkman which is media cloud and what we one of the techniques that we use is sort of looking at the link economy of how sort of media sources link to each other and what we're realizing slowly is or what we're starting to realize it's not a final sort of conclusion but is that in the Arab world there's not much of a link economy so you don't see that sort of influence through through and attention through the link economy and that's a very very different usage then then the Arab then the Western world and so that's that's something worth digging into and trying to understand why that is the case and to answer your question or at least attempt to answer it I wish I could really predict what's going to happen in the long term and and if anyone else has an answer please jump in I think there's an interesting rise of tech startups that are happening in the Middle East and there are some platforms that are emerging from those startups I think there is a future in that but the question is whether those platforms are modeled after Western platforms or are more of a sort of original coming out of the culture coming out of society platforms I really can't predict what's going to happen in 10-15 years there might be a shift to those platforms there might be sort of a burnout in the use of Facebook and Twitter and we're certainly seeing more of that with a non-aligned activists sort of taking a step back and not being active on these platforms anymore so I don't know if there is this one platform that will emerge from the Middle East or it might emerge from the West and people will start adopting that technology as a whole is changing we're seeing more wearable technology we're seeing you know I I can't predict I wish I could I'd make a lot of money you would tell us you could yeah I know I'd make a lot of money you know you want to jump in if I might just have also a quick thought on this I I mean I don't know what are like cultural intentionalities associated with the building of these platforms but what I know is that you know again the early adopters when they got online they managed to adapt these spaces to their needs and you know the way they use it they the way they domesticated these these platforms made their you know space of origins quite you know irrelevant agnostic right it's it's really about and you know an example is for example this interview we who was talking about how you know Twitter became the alternative space to the traditional leftist political organization on the ground in a typical Arab city whereby you know there is much more attention to the individualities involved in the in the collective there is much more attention to the emotional register and these are things you don't find much in the traditional organization political organization organization type so in in a sense there was this process of adaptation that basically centers the agency on the users on the way the users have socialized and you know adapted these platforms and I think that's very important and to also add that there have been a few actually attempts to build platforms in the Arab world that would mimic what Twitter does and would they would originate from the Arab world such as Dachowak and a couple of other examples but they failed tremendously you know they maybe try to address certain things such as language issues semantics all these different things but they didn't work people remained on Twitter and you know continued to be very happy on Twitter for a long time up until the crowdedness happened and you know we're having a different situation there so I think it's important to like remember and this is what I've been trying to get at it's important to remember even even though there is a disillusionment from you know a network public sphere in the Arab world and in Egypt we have to go back and remember that there was a successful production of discourse on these spaces by these early adopters that shouldn't be trashed completely and their success lied in their ability to imagine something alternative or something different as opposed to just representing what's happening on the ground as is and I think that this is the missing link that you know in fact the online and the offline are too aligned are too much mirroring each other that there isn't like a space an alternative space of imagination online somehow that's really interesting I'm so tempted to end on that but I will see if there's a final question if anyone has one to add to that Sarah please so I have been following the western media especially in Europe about the Arab revolutions and my observation was that the Arab world was sort of presented as this entity like they didn't really make a difference between Egyptian Egyptian Twitter sphere the Syrian blogosphere the Tunisian online spaces and there were headlines like Twitter revolution Facebook revolution all the time and my impression was that there was too much of this oh the Arab world is all the same and all the revolutions are all the same and I also felt that the impact of social media was probably a little overrated and I was wondering how you feel about that thank you well I mean yes I agree I agree totally and I think it is I mean we have to strike a balance and look at at the positive impact that took place there was a critical mass for sure that took place it was a moment of change but at the end of the day there was a critical mass but it's the masses that made the difference and they made the movement so on the one hand we don't want to I mean on the one hand we need to emphasize the role that was made for sure there was a role especially in the context that we talked about historical context in the space that was open and actually all the more reason to give credit to the early adopters because these are the ones through the online forums through the blogs these are the ones who built the platform for that sort of thing and then Facebook and Twitter followed but I totally agree I think it's I think it was exaggerated I think there was a hype around Facebook I certainly you know the Facebook revolution Twitter revolution and all of that I think it's overrated still we need to make sure that we acknowledge the role and study it and look at how this role was played alongside with the dynamics of what was happening on the ground as well so these are my two cents I see nodding heads across the board it's it's it's 6 30 so I think we're going to end here the conversation will definitely continue there's a myriad of very very interesting questions that have been put on the table here so you folks we're going to be very very busy for a while and there's a lot of data to dig in as well last piece is to thank you all for joining us here today and sharing sharing your insights thank you thank you thank you thank you