[Air-L] #OccupyFacebook

[Muhammad Abdul-Mageed]

Jose,

My pleasure! 


I believe humor can be seen as part of being playful in this specific context. While people
like Brenda Danet have written about why the Internet is playful, I think playfulness here may have some 

other reasons that have to do with creating and maintaining a common background
culture in the cyberspace. Humor varies across cultures and by cracking these jokes and invoking the shared
background, a sense of 'Egyptianness' is created and maintained.As the activity takes place in an 'alien' territory (i.e., the FB walls of figures from other cultures), it becomes a way of making these walls look as Egyptian as possible (i.e., true occupation). That in turn helps unite and, yes, re-energize the group: We are similar, so we should unite and keep it up. It's sth like let's celebrate our culture here, let's chat and be playful, we've occupied that platform andwe should behave like typical Egyptians and make the environment typically Egyptian. 

The above motivation is also related to a sense of national pride and that's why many of the humorous comments are celebratory in essence. By calling political opponents names, drawing them as weak and helpless, and ridiculing them in every possible way, activists seem to be saying we don't care. It's celebratory because they feel they have achieved considerable successes. Perhaps a third aspect is related to the Egyptian culture itself. Egyptians like to call themselves humorous. In the Tahrir square, there was a lot of humorous slogans raised...

My two cents!

Best,
--
Muhammad Abdul-Mageed,
Indiana University, Bloomington



________________________________
 From: jose marichal <marichal at callutheran.edu>
To: "air-l at listserv.aoir.org" <air-l at listserv.aoir.org> 
Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2011 1:18:45 PM
Subject: Re: [Air-L] #OccupyFacebook
 
Thanks for this.... really interesting... I wonder if this represents a
pattern in on-line mobilization movements..... might humor be a way to
"re-energize" or otherwise open up a new front in a social movement.

Jose

On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 7:01 PM, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
<mumageed at yahoo.com>wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I thought some folks on the list would be interested in this:
>
> http://mumageed.blogspot.com/2011/12/occupyfacebook.html
>
> It's a quick note on Egyptian activists' last iteration of efforts to
> 'guard' their revolution/'revolution'...
>
> Best,
>
> --muhammad abdul-mageed,
> Indiana University, Bloomington
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-- 
_______________________________________________________________________________________

josé marichal, ph.d. | associate professor | political science
<http://about.me/marichal>
department | california lutheran university
60 w. olsen road | #3800 | thousand oaks, ca  91360
805-493-3328
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