Since the Egyptian revolution started gaining momentum, an intense battle for reality has engulfed the public sphere. This battle is represented by mediated and non-mediated communication; old and new ways of communicating juxtaposed and combined, and turning in to yet newer ways of communicating: graffiti on walls, political debates in coffees shops, videos being edited and shared digitally, screenings of these videos in streets and squares using simply a white sheet and a projector, signs with Twitter hashtags being held up at sit-ins, giant ads celebrating the army and their proclaimed protection of the revolution, political arguments between strangers passing each other in the street. And most dominantly, perhaps: the strikes, sit-ins and demonstrations, which have become almost as commonplace as Cairo traffic. In the midst of this highly contested space is a revived journalism, which is being supported and contested by the surge of citizen journalism and public debate facilitated by social media, camera phones and other newish technology. Activists and citizen journalists have been using social media and other technology to push at the borders of journalism for almost a decade now, but since the revolution has started, a lot more people have joined and much more attention is being paid to social media and the people who use them.
In this presentation I investigate how social media in revolutionary Egypt is part of a larger mediascape, which is not bound by the internet or any other space or technology. I argue that the online-offline dichotomy is conceptually misleading and suggest that we move past looking at the online as detached from the offline. My presentation is based on four months ethnographic fieldwork with activists and journalists in Egypt.