Posts tagged egypt

Harlem Shake, North Africa Protest Edition

Internet culture and the memes it generates can be a wonderful thing. The swiftness with which something happening in one part of the world takes hold in another and many points in between constantly amazes.

Take The Harlem Shake, begun in Australia, emulated about everywhere from the Miami Heat in their locker room to a bunch of folk on a plane.

Better though, from Tunisia and Egypt where protesters have appropriated the dance and are using it to demonstrate against conservative Islamists.

Via The New York Times:

Hundreds of protesters danced outside the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, and students and ultraconservative Islamists known as Salafists clashed in Sidi Bouzid, the Tunisian town where the wave of uprisings in the Arab world began with a very different gesture of defiance.

The clashes in Tunisia came one day after conservative Salafists had tried and failed to stop the recording of a “Harlem Shake” video at a language school in the capital, Tunis.

The rally by about 400 activist dancers in Cairo on Thursday night, outside the offices of President Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, was streamed live to the Web by activists and caught on video by the news site Egyptian El Badil.

The protest in Egypt followed the arrest last week in Cairo of four pharmaceutical students. They were charged with violating the country’s decency laws by dancing in their underwear to emulate the Australian “Harlem Shake” video that sparked the craze and has been viewed more than 18 million times in the past four weeks.

The version I’ve embedded here is from a small gathering in Tunisia with some dancers wearing thobes and fake beards to imitate their country’s conservatives. It starts with a few seconds of Gangnam Style before moving into the Harlem Shake which I find an impressively deft comment on how quickly our global culture moves from meme to meme and appropriates them as our own.

For other examples from larger demonstrations, visit The New York Times — Michael

Citizen Journalism Outfitters in Cairo Succeed in Crowdfunding Campaign

An Egyptian “media collective” called Mosireen, which trains journalists and activists in the Cairo area, successfully finished its crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo.

From an interview with the collective’s leader, Salma Said, posted at The Lede:

The activists initially came together to build an archive of clips documenting the street protests of early 2011, Ms. Said said, but then, struck by the lack of independent reporting on the post-Mubarak government, they began to make their own reports, often incorporating video recorded on phones. Given that the airwaves were still dominated by state channels that were loath to broadcast any critical reports on the country’s new rulers, the Mosireen activists staged a series of public screenings of video that challenged official accounts of clashes, like the claim that the security forces only used force against “thugs,” not peaceful protesters.

With it, they’ll continue to screen films, train journalists, and do archival work. See their videos, taken by those they’ve trained in workshops, on YoutTube or in Cairo.

Egyptian Revolution: “The Flood”

Part one of a three part documentary created by Heba Kandil, a former Reuters journalist, and produced by TrustMedia, the media development wing of the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The series captures the events through the eyes of one family.

Egyptian Revolution Part 2: The Clash. 
Egyptian Revolution Part 3: The Fall.

Run Time: 5:22.

Arabic versions of the documentary can be found here (part 1), here (part 2) and here (part 3).

OR Books is releasing Tweets from Tahrir this coming spring. It’s an edited compendium of Twitter posts from last spring’s Egyptian revolution.

Via Brain Pickings:

Tweets from Tahrir, an excellent new addition to alternative publishing powerhouse OR Books‘ stable of progressive social and political commentary, is a compelling time-capsule of the revolution unfolded before the world’s eyes as young people used social platforms to coordinate an historic uprising, documented it with their mobile phones, and spread it across the social web — a revolution not only of political dogma, but also of media dogma as citizen journalists in the streets replaced traditional newsrooms to deliver rich real-time insight into the heart of a historical milestone…

…Fast-paced and relentlessly fascinating, Tweets from Tahrir is unlike any book ever written, much in the way that the Egyptian Revolution was unlike any uprising ever orchestrated. To miss it is to deny yourself unprecedented understanding of the sociocultural forces that shape our political and media reality.

Crowdsourcing the Documentary, with Help from our Friends

Via Beet.tv:

Amr Salama, an Egyptian filmmaker and a central figure in creating the alternative media universe during the revolution in Egypt, is finishing a documentary about the historic events. 

Through an appeal on his Twitter account, he received 300 GB of camcorder and camera phone footage, he says in this interview with Beet.TV.  

Via Global Voices:

This first part of a documentary on the Egyptian Revolution tells it from the perspective of blogger and viral video producer Aalam Wassef, focusing on how online video and other media accompanied a process of civilian unrest…

…The video is described as a manual on how a civil resistance was built to win, and follows the history of unrest in Egypt going back several years. Aalam Wassef tells his story of how he started posting videos under a pseudonym back in 2007 criticizing the government, and how they became viral.

But it wasn’t just luck: Wassef, blogging under different assumed names, would also publish blog posts, get advertising spaces on Google’s search engine and in short, ensure that whomever could get his message, would. And then, to go onto the “real” world, press.

Run Time - 14:23.