fftx,
I think that IM capability has been a good thing. That said, the quality of such communication depends on one's ability to write good haiku, a primary constraint of the medium.
In Egypt, IM gives people a way to communicate with one another, to plan and to strategize that does not require physical assembly. Meeting f2f would likely have gotten them thrown in jail; possibly tortured. With the caveat that I am not there and can only infer, my hunch is that the aggressive response on the part of the police is a sign of rulers' awareness that they are losing their grip on the country.
From all reports, Egyptian protesters had not committed any acts of violence until they were put in the position of needing to defend themselves from attack by the notoriously brutal Egyptian police (especially the plain clothes ones, who are known in local parlance as "thugs"). They only started to arm themselves - with low-tech items like sticks and rocks - when the police began to kill and seriously injure them. Protesters have been shot, bludgeoned, tear gassed, water cannoned (not a real verb, I know) and incarcerated under subhuman conditions. Until the point when they were aggressed upon, they had merely been assembling, chanting, and typing fervidly into their mobile phones.*
Sara
* I suppose there could be ancillary damage from doing that--such as walking into trees or tripping into fountains, but these would be self-inflicted injuries. |
