Growing Global Movements

21 Mar 2011 by celine

This year at sxsw I was part of a Core Conversation that I help organized with my peers and friends @rejon and @ayahbdeir

Our Goal was to start a conversation with people about Technology and the new arab identity. As we have seen the movement shape itself on news channels, twitter and many blogs, we wanted to mature the metaphor “Twitter Revolution”. To us it was the Arab revolution! Us three lived in the Middle-East, Ayah and I are both Lebanese, and we followed the Tunisian and Egyptian revolution with all our heart and soul. Now that the movement has reach North Africa, Lybia and Bahrein and more close to home with Syria and even Lebanon marching peacefully for freedom, democracy, dignity and justice, we had to bring this topic to sxsw and hear how people perceived it.

I wish I had recorded the conversation… Hopefully this only means that I didn’t need to because many more conversations will happen and we will get a chance to speak up, and be heard.

Mainly we discussed how technology facilitated the revolutions, both by spreading the words, documenting and creating live maps of where to hide from thugs and where to meet up next. All the peaceful walks for democracy have been planned using either facebook or twitter or both, and none of them have been advertised on TV, but only when they found out about them.

Young people, and now older generations are adopting these mobile technologies to update and stay connected. A sense of unity, a sense of belonging was enforced. As Ahmad from AL-Jazeera English, puts it : “Older Generations are now on Twitter… I mean my aunt is now on twitter and I think its because they are jealous. They too want to be part of the movement”

Speaking of older generations, I added that we witnessed a revolution from within, within the microcosm of society : inside the arab family. The younger generation is uprising agains’t the oppressive parents, agains’t the oppressive culture of being submissive, agains’t the oppressors : the dictators. All together it was like a wave of change.

So then someone who came to listen said : ” I am an American citizen, and I wonder how is that different from the West, where teenagers are rebelling agains’t their parents?”

Of course it is a universal observation, and we will soon face the revolution of our kids. But in this case, in Egypt’s case in particular, Tahrir was the bed of the revolution and also where young boys and young girls were camping and sleeping one next to another. This is HUGE for the arab culture. I mean young girls are not allowed… not even conceivable to have them sleep on the streets for one thing, let alone when boys are around!!??!! Yet they did! They broke the “law” and they were together as equal protesting for democracy.

Habib creator of Yamli, a tool that helped revolutionize the arab culture online, added that “this is the best time ever to have an arab accent” hahah During the revolutions and still now, Habib helped get the voices of Egypt heard in the West specially when Mubarak shut down the internet and the cell phone lines. He helped create Alive in/ Egypt
By encouraging people to translate the conversations recorded then tweeted, he managed to bring together a group of Egyptian expats living on different timezones translating non-stop and spreading the voices of their brothers and sisters. He said : “We were getting a lot of very emotional messages… ”

We tried to bring the conversation back to technology, and the use of the technology which helped shape this new arab identity. We know that the region now called MENA (Middle East North Africa) is 22 countries, speaking with different dialects or accents for some, can all relate online because we mainly all share the same arabic language. The barriers are gone. And all our cultures have mainly one big emotion in common : Dubbed Turkish Soap Operas. A Turkish fellow spoke about this specific type of culture.

The arab culture is under construction, as always. Our culture is old and has lots of strong traditions, but our skills and ability to adapt are greater.

Art in many forms help shape our identity, but video art happens to be very effective. Call it eye witness, or video art, or citizen journalism, it is the videos that the arab people post online that speak the loudest. Some even say it was a video, an image that triggered the movement.

I think it was a combination of things, at the right time, at the right place.

Let’s continue this conversation #ArabID on twitter, or hopefully live inchallah as part of another conference!