The (conference about the Egyptian) revolution will be tweeted! A full-day conference is being held today at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law on the theme of “Democratic Transition in Egypt” and the proceedings will be tweeted. See below or follow @StanfordCDDRL and the hashtag #ARDEG (Arab Reform and Democracy – Egypt).

For a peaceful demonstration organized within a police state to gain sufficient momentum, a critical mass of demonstrators must be mobilized. This critical mass of demonstrators can most easily be mobilized through existing social structures even if it is instigated within novel networks and communication technologies. In different socio-political contexts appropriate social structures will vary, but in Egypt the clear choice for organizers of the January 25^th uprising was the congregation of Friday prayers.

It is no coincidence that each pivotal day of the demonstrations – the “Day of Rage,” the million man march, and the threatened ten million man march (that was eventually quelled by President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation) – all happened on Fridays, the Sabbath day in Islam. Friday is a day off for most of the employed, meaning traffic is very limited and more of the population is free to attend demonstrations, but it is also a day of Friday prayers where millions gather across Cairo to pray and listen to sermons from imams. Numbers at mosques swelled, likely because of the attendance of secular demonstrators, imams discussed the demonstrations in sermons (some to dissuade congregations from attending, others to encourage engagement), and at the close of prayers marches began at mosques and moved toward key areas – bridges, squares, and ultimately Tahrir.

By calling for demonstrators to gather at mosques on Twitter, Facebook, and SMS before protests, the organizers made it possible for demonstrations to continue even in the event of a media shutdown. By localizing meeting points – mosques are in every neighborhood in Cairo – and choosing a meeting point guaranteed to have a large number of people that could potentially be apolitical, organizers allowed for a cover of anonymity that could take the place of communication confirmation of the actualization of a planned protest.

Though mobile telephony was completely disrupted in Cairo on the Day of Rage — undoubtedly a turning point in the uprising — a critical mass of demonstrators gathered at mosques and marched on Tahrir.

Though the Muslim Brotherhood did not engage in the January 25^th demonstrations until they gained momentum after the first few weeks, the meeting points chosen by demonstrators were initially politicized and given a veneer of radicalization by some western media outlets. The trope that the two choices for Egypt are autocracy or theocracy was reiterated and the use of mosques in the demonstrations put forward as proof.

In analyzing the mobilization of populations for change, particularly in the wake of well orchestrated digital media campaigns, it will become increasingly important, particularly in police states, to assess the social structures that are de facto off-limits from crackdown. These structures, that can rationalize the gathering of many under apolitical guise, are likely to be interesting points of focus during uprisings that are subject to media crackdowns. When communication capability is unplugged, organic social and community structures become critical to the mobilization of many and cater to a movement built of a population with radically different levels of risk-aversion and commitment.

In his New York Times op-ed piece last weekend, Frank Rich came out will all guns blazing. He had so many arguments to make: against US media isolation, again the demonization of Islam, against US cable providers, against Donald Rumsfeld. And also against members of the media who said that digital technology was important in the Egypt protests. He critique just drips with disdain:

Three days after riot police first used tear gas and water hoses to chase away crowds in Tahrir Square, CNN’s new prime-time headliner, Piers Morgan, declared that “the use of social media” was “the most fascinating aspect of this whole revolution.” On MSNBC that same night, Lawrence O’Donnell interviewed a teacher who had spent a year at the American school in Cairo. “They are all on Facebook,” she said of her former fifth-grade students. The fact that a sampling of fifth graders in the American school might be unrepresentative of, and wholly irrelevant to, the events unfolding in the streets of Cairo never entered the equation.

And his crowing declaration that digital technology doesn’t matter is pompous:

The social networking hype eventually had to subside for a simple reason: The Egyptian government pulled the plug on its four main Internet providers and yet the revolution only got stronger. “Let’s get a reality check here,” said Jim Clancy, a CNN International anchor, who broke through the bloviation on Jan. 29 by noting that the biggest demonstrations to date occurred on a day when the Internet was down. “There wasn’t any Twitter. There wasn’t any Facebook,” he said. No less exasperated was another knowledgeable on-the-scene journalist, Richard Engel, who set the record straight on MSNBC in a satellite hook-up with Rachel Maddow. “This didn’t have anything to do with Twitter and Facebook,” he said. “This had to do with people’s dignity, people’s pride. People are not able to feed their families.”

No one would deny that social media do play a role in organizing, publicizing and empowering participants in political movements in the Middle East and elsewhere. But as Malcolm Gladwell wrote on The New Yorker’s Web site last week, “surely the least interesting fact” about the Egyptian protesters is that some of them “may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another.”

Anyone actually interested in the empirical study of digital activism/digital repression could tell Mr. Rich that both operate along a tactical continuum (image link) of digital advantage and disadvantage (full post). Yet I don’t think Mr. Rich is interested in making that argument, which admits the accurate observations on both sides and argues for more study rather than making declarations about winners and losers. It is an argument that does not lend itself to bombast.

However, one thing Mr. Rich is interested in is how American views of Egyptian digital activism and repression reflect a cultural chauvinism:

The talking-head invocations of Twitter and Facebook instead take the form of implicit, simplistic Western chauvinism. How fabulous that two great American digital innovations can rescue the downtrodden, unwashed masses.

The real evidence of Western chauvinism, however, is Mr. Rich’s comfort with defining the use of digital technology without referencing the opinion of even one Egyptian in his article. If we listen to Egyptians and their allies, who are frequently interviewed on Al Jazeera English‘s live stream at http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now and who broadcast their own opinions through the Twitter hashtag #Jan25 and put their photos on Flickr, we see a more subtle picture. Are the Egyptians in Tahrir Square using Facebook iconography in their signs (like the one above) because they are absorbing Western chauvinism? No, they are using these symbols because they have resonance, because they are useful to them. Facebook did not cause the revolution, but that is a straw-man argument that not even the so-called cyber-utopians believe. But, as even Mr. Rich’s own newspaper reported:

While it is almost impossible to isolate the impact of social media tools from the general swirl of events that set off the popular uprisings across the Middle East, there is little doubt that they provided a new means for ordinary people to connect with human rights advocates trying to amass support against police abuse, torture and the Mubarak government’s permanent emergency laws allowing people to be jailed without charges.

Facebook and YouTube also offered a way for the discontented to organize and mobilize — and allowed secular-minded young people to seize the momentum from Egypt’s relatively neutered, organized opposition.

But wait, Mr. Rich agrees with this perspective too:

No one would deny that social media do play a role in organizing, publicizing and empowering participants in political movements in the Middle East and elsewhere.

So why is he arguing in the first place? Maybe he just likes to argue.