A tale of two Mediabattles

By Rogier Brussee on 10 February 2011

This week the Media battle between students from the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht and Saxion in Enschede is taking place. It’s the third time we use this format, and this time the theme is inner city entrepreneurship. Students will work out a crossmedial strategy to attract more people to shops in the inner cities of Utrecht and Enschede, balancing physical with an on-line presence. Meanwhile a completely different media battle is going on: the struggle for freedom of the Egyptian people and people in other Arab states. While our media battles are in an atmosphere of friendly competition, in Cairo the media battle is rather more grim and,  no offence to our commissioners, students, and colleagues, has higher stakes.  What, if any, is their relationship ? In both cases there is a highly visible and important role for social media, mobile communication and internet usage.

That there is a role for the new media in both battles is rather clear.  Inner-city entrepreneurs want to influence their customers with their online presence because, as many of our customers and Theo Huibers from Saxion indicated by showing the figures, their customers are spending an increasing part of their time and money online.  Being online gives people the chance to compare and choose from a wider variety of offerings.  Economies of scale and net specific characteristics like search engine algorithms like Google Pagerank, which favor already popular sites, then ensure that there tends to be a “winner takes all” effect: the big players get bigger and the small players must find a niche to survive in the market. Indeed this is exactly what our commissioners are trying to do.  Moreover, they can be online because it is cheap, it is a highly accessible medium. Erik Hekman and I have been claiming for some time, that easy access to the medium for large groups is the key characteristic of social media. What is highly accessible depends on the group you are in however: for a company, a website is actually more accessible than a social media site because it is easier to be in control, and almost all companies can afford the cost of setting up a website. On the other hand social media create the opportunity to get to know more of your custoqmers, and last not least are set up to make it easy for your customers your best ambassadors. Despite that, now that we are three days in the battle, it turns out not to be so easy to actually use social media in a meaningful way!

In Egypt social media are probably above all a medium to spread the message that revolution is going on and will continue. I don’t know exactly what the Egyptian youth is actually twittering and putting on its Facebook pages (I can’t read Arab), but it is pretty clear that social media and cellular phones are an effective way to amplify word of mouth, coordinate actions and leak out news to the rest of the world affecting world public opinion. Again high accessibility is the crucial characteristic. Technology has just progressed beyond the stencil machine that was the media weapon of choice in the sixties. Anyone with access to an internet connection can use social media, quite a few people even in a poor country like Egypt, can distribute news and rally for support, boost morale and plan to demonstrate with a group of people. Anyone with a mobile phone can quickly tell what is happening, on for example the Tahrir square. Just think of the difference that makes for the people on the square: news and images of a crackdown would be spread to the rest of Egypt and rest of the world in seconds.  Even the most cynical of Egyptian generals, heavily dependent on American aid and arms, and unsure of the outcome of this standoff, will think twice about shooting in the crowd. That the Mubarak government takes this “problem” serious is clear because the government simply cut off all access to the internet and shut down the cellular phone network http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/29/technology/internet/29cutoff.html. One can only speculate as to what extend this has contributed to the collapse of the Egyptian economy but clearly this move costs serious money and goodwill. There have also been attempts to intimidate journalists to shut down the mass media. International news agencies have the resources to use harder to shut down communication channels like satellite phones and links, so the government tries to make sure that no or only controlled news is available by pressing journalists away from the protestors and into an easy to control international hotel.

 
One has to wonder what will happen to all the people that used social media to fuel the revolution if it sizzles out and there is a crackdown.  Marketeering by monitoring social media is all the rage because it tells you something about what people really think and you can use automated processes to process massive amounts of information. The secret service can monitor the internet too, and it is a completely unclear how much of the information posted on, say, Facebook ends up in their hands. Governments and their agencies are also in an excellent position to simply listen in on internet traffic and keeping track of communication patterns between IP addresses. Government agencies are also in a better position than most, to relate to IP address to names and physical addresses because they can just press internet providers to hand over that information. Listening in on internet traffic is called a man in the middle attack in the wrongly named security literature (especially when that traffic is encrypted), and is usually ridiculously overemphasized as a security threat (used shamelessly in the sense of threat to our well-being and privacy) from evil hackers which don’t use enough deodorant. It is one of the reason governments give to keep track of all internet traffic. Of course companies like Google and Facebook don’t even have to listen in: they get the information directly from you, even if you use a “secure“ encrypted communication channel because that only means that you are using their public key for encryption. They eagerly store all they get to know about you and sell it to the highest bidder. I have also for a long time only half jokingly proposed the theory that the National Security Agency NSA (larger than the CIA) actually started Google and is running it behind the scenes, using adsense keyword processing as the perfect cover up for all the processing you have to do.  But it does not really matter: if you think that the NSA is not actually analyzing the pages on Facebook and mails on google mail that fuelled a revolution in a key ally like Egypt you are naïve in my humble opinion. If you think that the Egyptian secret service does not do the same or would like to get that information from the NSA, you are also naïve I think. Same with mobile combination, it is a technical characteristic of mobile communication that the network tracks which cell a phone is in every few seconds twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. It also tracks when you are making phone calls and with who. In the Netherlands, the network operators have to hand this information to the government which keeps this information for half a year. I don’t know how this is arranged in Egypt but the secret police had a reputation of being everywhere. Go figure. The digital revolution has lots of benefits, but like many revolutions, only history will tell how many of its own children it will eat.

tagged with: security, egypt, social media, privacy, mediabattle

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