> The infatuation with social media seems, to me, simply that - infatuation,
> navel-gazing. All the facebooking and tweeting was useful, but
> inconsequential in comparison to the working class mobilizations both in
> last April's and this months' uprisings. They pale in comparison to the
> thousands of labor actions, strikes, politicization of the Egyptian working
> class in the last few years. Have we forgotten that the internet was shut
> down in Egypt for a week with almost no apparent effect on the uprising?
> Or forgotten the myriad ways the proletariat has held sway in all uprisings
> by its position in the production of capital? Why would we suddenly expect
> Egypt to defy the laws of political economy in force for 400 years?
If Internet technologies were so unimportant to the development of the movement, then why in heck did Hosni Mubarak felt he had to order its costly shut down? Again, no need to pit one type of media against another. But the shift is evident. From a distance, I am pretty sure that the organizers and leaders in Egypt relied on Internet technology, increasingly so, to coordinate their actions. And sure, they had their plans B, C, etc.
I infer this by analogy with another country -- not entirely different from Egypt, Mexico. In Mexico, I know for a fact (because I followed them routinely) that leftist political organizations (some with serious roots in rural and urban working communities, where people have a harder time accessing a computer) are increasingly dependent on Internet technology (e.g. lots of emailing, twitting, youtubing, etc. going on) to coordinate their activities. It just comes natural for them to mix and match different type of media as needs arise.
Yes, below the surface of the media chatter, there's some navel gazing, self congratulation, etc. But it's not completely baseless. And, something a colleague was just pointing out to me, the insistence of the mass media on the role social media played in Egypt may actually play out on favor of our causes, since it makes people here more comfortable viewing those movements as legit. It humanizes peoples in North Africa and the Middle East that have often been victims of racist stereotyping.
Let's hate our awful bourgeois culture, but let's not close our eyes to the upside potential in these technologies, even if in most cases that potential is not realized.