Page 19 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

xviii Foreword

actually speak and read the language of the country that he is writing about. He
makes do by relying on the news reports of Western media, and the English
language service of Al Jazeera and an Arab/Anglo website, supplemented by
translations from occasional Arab sources. This is really quite scientific, he assures
us, because Western journalists are like ‘lay ethnographers’ who are ‘disciplined
by professional ethics’ and, ‘in their exercise of interpretive judgement … were
detached and impersonal’ (Alexander 2011: xi–xii). So what we are actually
being offered is an interpretation filtered primarily though Western observers, whose
attributes, according to a good anthropological study of foreign correspondents
(Hannerz 2004), are nothing like as awe-inspiring as Alexander imagines. The
book’s underlying assumption that the Egyptian revolution was ultimately the
consequence of Western ideas and communications technology also sounds
suspiciously simple.
A brief examination of relevant area studies offers a more complex picture in
which political and economic influences, largely ignored by Alexander, also
played a part (Dawisha 2013; Hamzawy 2009; Joshi 2011; Ottaway and Hamzawy
2011; Campante and Chor 2011, among others). The 2011 Egyptian revolution
was in fact the culmination of protests and opposition that had grown over
decades. Rapid educational advance had not been matched by economic
growth, creating large numbers of educated young people who were unem-
ployed or underemployed. Their raised expectations had, in some cases, turned
to disenchantment, and they were to play a crucial role in the revolution. A well-
organised trade union movement also existed in Egypt, and it had become
increasingly resentful of the growing gulf between rich and poor generated by
crony capitalism organised through a corrupt regime. A religious bloc was also
opposed to the secular regime, and its principal agency, the Muslim Brother-
hood, remained highly organised and retained a strong base despite being
repressed. And there was growing popular resentment against an arbitrary and
oppressive government at a time of rising food prices and unemployment, partly
exacerbated by the removal of some government subsidies. In short, Egypt was a
powder keg waiting to blow for a variety of reasons, only partly to do with the
influence of Western ideas.
Alexander’s thesis about the importance of the Internet and social media in
mobilising opposition also needs to be contextualised. The ‘wiring of the nation’,
he writes, was the ‘Achilles heel’ of the Muburak regime (Alexander 2011: 37).
In fact, in 2011, Twitter user penetration in Egypt was just 0.15 per cent, much
lower than in more prosperous neighbouring countries; and Facebook user
penetration in Egypt was 8 per cent, compared with, for example, 15 per cent in
Saudi Arabia and 21 per cent in Jordan (Dubai School of Government 2011: 5).
Internet penetration in Egypt, in 2011, was also relatively low: 24 per cent
compared with 41 per cent in Morocco, 44 per cent in Saudi Arabia and 69 per
cent in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) (Internet World Stats 2011). New
media, with higher penetration rates, had not destabilised authoritarian regimes
like Morocco, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. It was the underlying