Now here he was, plunged back into the waters of instant digital gratification and continuous digital input. And he was, quite understandably, appalled. Not just by the replacement of carefully chosen words by crude emoticons, but, one senses, by the dissonance between the enormous stakes of the struggle for liberation against the military regime – fallen comrades, thousands of political prisoners, tortured bodies, death sentences – and the light-hearted, absurdist tone that characterizes how pretty much everything now gets discussed online, in Egypt and beyond.
