Anger Day

What is happening in Egypt is big. Though it was expected, no one knew when or how it was going to happen. A few days after what happened in Tunisia, I found an invitation on Facebook sent to me by one of my Egyptian friends and named “Anger Friday.” I ignored it and didn’t even bother to see what the event was. I thought it was one of the silly, pointless invitations that people send on Facebook to invite you to attend a meaningless reunion. It wasn’t until I knew that the internet was cut-off from Egypt, that I decided to go into the event’s page and find out what this “Anger Day" was. 

This Facebook page was the start of the Egyptian conflict. I never imagined that through a social networking site people could organize and commit to a real, important event. Such a social network consisting of individuals connected through a variety of relationships was ironically the reason for this protesting movement to have thousands at the beginning and could’ve been millions, if it wasn’t for the cut of the internet. 

Moreover, the facebook was not the only engine for this revolution;  Ghonim's twitter page was another way for people to instantaneously follow what is happening in Egypt.

 



source: CNN





As Grazian mentioned, “Social networks and their connectors provide the structure machinery for the spread of popular fads, fashion," and in this case revolution. The inspiration of this revolution and the creator of the Facebook page was a person named Wael Ghonim who was "well-connected" i.e., enjoys a large number of network ties. These social networking ties enabled him to gather tens of thousands of people in Egypt united by one demand.



source: Al-Jazeera

 

Source: CNN



However, the invitation did not target a specific gender, age or social class otherwise, no one would've showed up because according to the interactional approach of popular culture,  the people that have the strongest personal ties are very similar to each other and therefore have access to the same information. Ghonim's power as a connector didn't depend on how many people he knew; it was how many different kinds of people he knew. Those weak social ties are more effective than the strong ones because they serve as a bridge spanning to separate social worlds.

The revolution's effectiveness came from the verity of people who were protesting. From every class, age group and different cities in the Egyptian society and who had different reasons to protest.