Dramatic events of last night and why this isn't the Twitter Revolution

First a (breathless) account of citizens storming state security offices in a number of cities, fights with the security members themselves, and the army eventually enabling the citizens to enter, only to find piles upon piles of shredded documents. There was also a suspicious fire several days ago in "Central Accounting", destroying a number of documents as well.

http://egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com/2011/03/fall-of-state-security-kingdom-in-egypt.html

Secondly, I was uncomfortable from the start when people would go on and on about the role of facebook and twitter in the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, but for a long time I had a hard time pinpointing why I thought it inappropriate.

First of all, you can understand without being a specialist that these media are a bit incidental, actually. Many peoples have revolted against many regimes in the past, and their successes indicate how social properties of the movements are probably more important than technological ones.

But finally it came together when a friend Alya pointed out that to call these revolutions facebook or twitter revolutions takes agency out of the individuals or the society and puts it into these foreign companies. What is more, it neatly parallels old colonialist narratives: in the old days, the colonial mission was to raise new generations of "the right kind of colonials" - ones with education, liberal values, etc. Even when they overthrew their colonial masters, the colonizers attempted to claim that it was their Western liberalism which freed these people. Similarly, today the claim is made that these Western technologies have some kind of unique liberating power to them, and so Egyptians' perseverance and organization is erased from the narrative.