Filming the Revolution: Youtube Videos and Collective Action Framing in the 2011 Egyptian Uprising

The uprising that toppled the Mubarak regime in Egypt was distinct from previous events of political contention. One of the things that made it so, as many analysts have argued, was the directly observable role that new media technologies played in the strategic mobilization of the #Jan25 protests and in the continuous documentation of the events during the uprising. This paper explores the mobilizing role of digital images of the protest events.

In this research, I investigate how the internal narratives of videos of the uprising—produced and circulated through new media technologies between January 25 and February 11, 2011—aided the anti-Mubarak protesters in constructing, negotiating and reinforcing discourses that idealized collective direct action and delegitimized the Mubarak regime. Based on my visual discourse analysis of eighty YouTube videos and online interviews with some Egyptian protesters, this paper looks into the making of the “people power” narrative. It explains how moving images of the event became a site for the construction of collective action frames, mobilizing ideas that warranted the revolution. It examines the dominant images and themes in the videos, revealing a politically meaningful overlap of visual and verbal layers of event signification. It argues that the selective highlighting and toning down of certain aspects of Egypt’s changing state-society relations through visual representations of the uprising conjured up a coherent narrative of the eighteen-day event, in effect reinforcing the anti-Mubarak protesters’ resolve to overthrow the Mubarak regime.

Through this paper, I interrogate the interaction between mainstream media reportage and citizen journalism, arguing that in the case of the Egyptian uprising of 2011, the simultaneous video production by professional journalists and amateur footage takers created a plethora of visual materials that corroborated each other. However, I emphasize the necessity of agency in harnessing the subversive potential of media images.