Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Egypt

This year in Egypt there has been an uprising of the people there because the people no longer like who was in power, President Hosni Mubarak. In the beginning of the protest Mubarak had told Egypt that he was going to stay on for the rest of his term but not run again. Though that did not sit well with the people of Egypt so the protests continued, until Mubarak finally stepped down on Feb. 11 2011. It took about 18 days of protesting and the loss of support from the military and the U.S. for him to finally take that step in leaving office. I chose Egypt for my report because it's a major event that is taking place right now and the fact that the country can just shut down technologie in order to try and save their bad government and not let the world know what i happening at every moment intriges me. The world was basically on a stand still waiting for info from Egypt and it was crazy, i personally didn't know what was happening when i saw all the messages that said "Pray for #Egypt" on Facebook and other cites and when i asked people most didn't know either, it took me at least a day to find someone who actually knew what that meant and what was going on. The whole time i was just thinking with all the resources and technologie how is it that no one i knew could tell me anything about that message, "Pray for #Egypt". Now that I'm researching it i found that that message was the last tweet from a man named Wael Ghonim, an executive from Google Egypt, before he was imprisoned for 12 days without anyone knowing of his whereabouts. So to me this whole situation is fascinating and that's why i chose Egypt.

3 comments:

  1. I liked what you wrote about Egypt and I think that your paper is going to be very interesting. Personally, I didn't know what was happening in Egypt also and it is very sad. I choose Libya and I didn't know what was happening there until now, I saw the news that a lot of bad things were happening but I didn't know in depth. What's happening in Egypt is similar to Libya, but personally I think that what is happening in Libya is worst than in Egypt. Innocent people are being killed because of Muammar Qaddafi (president since 1969).

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  2. Wow I didn't know the message was from that guy. It's very interesting that now the governments have realized that a good way to stall a revolution or create panic and anxiety is to cut the communications. The importance of today telecommunications and the social platforms is huge and they're playing a major role in the situations going on in the Middle East. I mean, just look at what happened when that message was circulating in throughout the social networks. I personally thought that something radical was about to happen since Egypt had cut the communications and that last message to me meant that the government didn't wanted the world to know of some kind of atrocity. It's just amazing the importance of communication technology nowadays.

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  3. I found it interesting that, while people were aware there was something significant going on in Egypt, many people didn't seem to know what it was. It's very telling, I think, that we all use the internet on a very regular, if not constant, basis yet many people seem unable, or at least unwilling, to use it as a resource for becoming more aware of the world.

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