The role of information and communication technology (ICT) in the 2011 upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa (Case study of Egypt)

Information and Communication Technologies are a set of tools, machines, technical knowledge, methods and skills to be used for production, trade, processing, storage, recycling, transferring, and transport of “information”. In the globalization process, information has created the possibility for formation of various formal and informal networks by individuals, groups, and even other networks, and by contraction of time and space, information has mobilized these groups for the formation of movements and causes. Middle East and North Africa Region enjoys a specific geographical status due to having three important straits (Hormoz, Bab-el-Mandeb, and the Suez Canal), great energy reserves, and energy corridors. These factors make it a geopolitically, geoeconomically, and geostrategically significant region. Beside natural conditions, factors such as common religion, language and race, and post-colonialist backgrounds increase speed of diffusion of events all over this large area. In recent years, especially in 2011, Information and Communication Technologies have played an important role in expansion of uprising in the region. Egypt is a country with unique characteristics, which has traditionally led intellectual developments in the Arab region and Muslim world. It seems that the course of the recent political events in Egypt will have a prominent role in identifying future geopolitical developments in the region. Using a descriptive-analytic method, the current article investigates how political developments in North Africa and the Middle East, especially in Egypt, have been influenced by Information and Communication Technologies, namely by “social networks”. Results of this research show that these technologies have been strongly instrumental not only for the generation of the mentioned developments, but also for the rapid expansion of social unrest in the Arab Middle East and North Africa; they have been used for increasing people’s awareness, changing the type of requests and methods of expressing them, intensification and organization of protests, and attraction of the exponents inland and abroad by managing the transmission of news.