Mediated Experience in the Egyptian Revolution

Abstract

Reconciling large scale political and social change with everyday lived experience has always been a fundamental problem for understanding social and political change. This chapter offers a conceptual framework that recognizes the intricacy of interaction between mediation and revolutionary social change by looking at the lived experience of Egyptians during the Egyptian revolution. The experience of collective events is mediated through information and communication technologies; these mediated experiences are both collective, in that people are connected by media uses and practices and by common activities and spaces, and yet they are also deeply personal and individualized, in that specific sets of technologies, interpersonal relationships and embodied practices that comprise one person’s unfolding experience are different from another’s. The chapter argues that these two dimensions could be theorized using the concepts of network and assemblage. On a broader scale, we can understand the relationship between mediated experiences of events and agent-driven uses of media technologies by turning to processual analysis of the sort called field theory, which allows us to see the revolution as a series of struggles over the symbolic meaning of revolutionary activities, in which media practices play a crucial part.