The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

by Martin Gurri

Ghonim used the images, and the story of Khaled Said, to fuel what was essentially a marketing campaign against regime injustice on his website.

Roland Schatz, a brilliant commercial practitioner of agenda-setting theory, has identified a level of media diffusion below which a message sinks without notice, but above which it quickly rises to public attention. Schatz calls this boundary the awareness threshold, and has estimated the tipping point at 15 percent of diffusion. Scholars have charted a similar trajectory for the adoption of every kind of innovation, including new political beliefs. “Critical mass” occurs at between 10 and 20 percent of adoption—the level at which enough diffusion networks become “infected” by the virus of change to make the latter self-sustaining.

If that was the case, the issue of psychological distance was answered empirically. It’s simply false to say that the public can’t make the leap between virtual and real politics. The problem has been posed in terms of online “weak bonds” as against real-life “strong bonds”—a proposition I will explore later in greater depth. All we need to know about the “strong bonds” objection, in connection with the Egyptian uprising, is that it applies only to the old mode of forming a mass movement. If the protesters had sought to replace the regime with a specific set of people, programs, and principles, the weak bonds of the digital world would have been insufficient. But that’s not what brought out the variegated Egyptian public to the streets. They just wanted to get rid of Hosni Mubarak.

Ghonim’s raw, emotional performance on Dream TV has been credited with turning the tide decisively in favor of the protesters. It was a testament to the power of TV to capture and communicate sincerity: his sorrow when confronted with photos of dead demonstrators was both compelling and painful to watch. Before a mass audience, Wael Ghonim, that extraordinary ordinary person, gave the revolutionaries a face that ordinary Egyptians could identify with. He embodied information which changed the direction of political life in his country. His interview went viral on YouTube, new media compounding the effect of the old. The crowds in Tahrir swelled in size. Four days later, Hosni Mubarak resigned from office.