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Crowd-Feminism: Crowdmapping as a Tool for Activism

Course Code: MC71138A

Reference Number: 33253654

Submitted by: Sara Rabie in partial requirement for the degree of

MA Digital Media in the Programme in Contemporary Cultural

Processes, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2013

Word Count: 12,763 words

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Literature Review

2.1 Collective Intelligence and Participatory Culture

2.2 Technologies of Domination: Biopolitics and Biopower

2.3 Digtial Activism: Egypt

2.4 Mapping Technology: A Performative Mediation Tool

2.5 Feminism and the Embodiment of Technology

2.6 Local Feminism and Interlink to Sexual Harassment

3. Crowdsourcing and Biopower

3.1 Crowdsourcing: Crowds and Technology

3.2 Crowdsourcing: A Transformation of Biopower

3.3 Crowd-activism in Egypt

4. Mapping as Knowledge

4.1 Mapping as a Performative Mediation Tool

4.2 Maptivism: Ushahidi

5. Egyptian Feminist Movements: Biopower for Resistance

5.1 Egyptian Women: History of Mediation

5.2 Sexual Harassment: A Culture of Shame

5.3 Harass Map: Performative Mapping for Women #EndSH

5.4 Challenges for Online Sexual Harassment Mediation

6. Conclusion

7. Acknowledgement

8. Bibliography

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1. Introduction

There is a massive competition between old media conglomerates and social media forms

in the power of mediation and remediation of information and targeted news. In the past

decade, user generated content has gained more credibility as it provides the recipient

with what is termed as the “wisdom of the crowd1” (Surowiecki 2005). This wisdom is

emphasised in our daily use of social media networks such as Four Square for checking

locations, twitter hashtags in search for trends, status approvals on Facebook, and many

other social technology tools that leverage our opinions and provide us with targeted

news. The „wisdom of the crowd‟ (2005) is not utterly based on new social technology

platforms. The notion of shared knowledge through „collective intelligence‟ is ancient.

As Mark Poster mentions in his book Deleuze and new Technology, “the labour machine

that built the pyramids in Ancient Egypt was a machine of a hundred thousand

manpower" (Poster and Savat 2009:2). The current technologically enhanced „labour

machine‟ is utilised in activist movements as the power created is uniformed and

collectively organised to achieve centralised and individualistic goals. My research

focuses on the power transformation and the cultural impact of crowdsourcing with a

special focus on crowdmapping on the feminist activist movements in Egypt.

Within the understanding of crowdsourcing in Egypt, it is important to relate to the

theoretical platform of the collective intelligence where it emerges and connects with the

situation in Egypt. The evolution of crowdsourcing and its intertwining with technology

as a tool for activism is a unique tool in the Middle East. In regions with a high poverty

rate, social economic depression, minority oppression and highly connected youth

1 The term ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ was coined by James Suroweiki (2005). It claims that aggregation

information in groups can be more powerful than the knowledge of the intellectual elite.

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activity, the utilisation of social technology tools are inherently different. There is a rise

of citizen journalists and a „glocal‟ attribution of activists and workers to disseminate

information through social networks and information to report on news affecting their

local communities (Poster 2006:1). The rise of citizen journalists and the credibility of

the crowdsourced material are also explained in Delwiche and Henderson‟s explanation

of the participatory culture: "Dissidents use distributed communication technologies to

organize political opposition in repressive regimes" (Delwiche and Henderson 2012:40).

As the biological body is the heart of the crowd, then crowdsourcing formulates and

transfers biopower in the society. The research particularly focuses on how technological

mediation in crowd- feminist movement's create a resistance front that challenges the

traditional Egyptian 'culture of shame' associated with sexual harassment.

In the first part of the thesis, I will discuss the nature of collective participation and

crowdsourcing within their theoretical platform. I will associate crowdsourcing as a

mediation process to analyse the biopower of crowd movements in attachment with

technological mediation. There are socio-economic consequences to the technologically

utilised mobilisation of manpower in activist movements. Biopower and bioethics explain

the transformation of the power hierarchy in civil society and crowd management in the

realm of technology. Then I will try to link mapping as a performative median tool to

civic participation. One of the most powerful crowdsourcing tools is crowdmapping,

which has become a commonly used and a powerful mediation form in humanitarian

crisis relief and surveillance tools. "Today mapping and location technologies are helping

to produce all sorts of surveillance possibilities, whether it be your mobile phone,

unmanned system (UAS or drones), or humanitarian relief" (Crampton 2013: 432).

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Mapping is one of the oldest tools of governance, surveillance, and knowledge. Adapting

digital technologies to mapping creates a performative mediation tool as we adapt

performativity from Barad's definition as a "more discursive practices" rather than a

singularly directed mediation tool (Barad 2003:7) 2

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Thirdly, I want to relate my analysis to feminist activist movements in Egypt. In January

2011, Egyptian women repeated the iconic political movement in 1919 where they stood

side by side with men asking for the same social and political demands.3 Later, sex mob

attacks, group rape, and other forms of harassment have tremendously increased in the

streets, leading to further alienating women. The segregation and alienation of women are

also directly associated with the culture of shame and silence in Egypt. The main focus of

my attention in this research is the social and cultural taboos related to harassment in

Egypt. I want to discuss the influence of biomediation powers on the culture of shame

associated with sexual harassment reporting in Egypt. It is crucial to explore the history

of mediation of the feminist movements in Egypt, reaching to the present time in order to

understand their position in the overall societal hierarchy. Egyptian feminists have

struggled with the culture of shame and silence regarding sexuality throughout history.

One of the main topics regarding sexuality that has culturally shifted, leading to changes

in the law, is female genital mutilation. Dr. Nawal El Saadawi, an iconic feminist in

Egypt, has dedicated her life to fight for this cause and others related to Egyptian female

2 Barad (2003) introduces performativity as a more accurate representation of the feminist and

posthumanist ontology. 3 The 1919 revolt was considered by many historians the pivotal moment for Egyptian women in the

political movement and the start of the rising feminist movements in Egypt.

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right to sexuality.4 Same notions of fidelity and chastity regarding women's honour are

behind the culture of shame surrounding sexual harassment in Egypt. The honour-shame

dynamics are an influential form of biopower and dominance of the patriarchal society in

Egypt. In this context, "such feminist analysis of cultural meanings and social practices

would be deeply indebted with Foucault's discussion of power" (Allen 1996:275). With

the political turmoil, economic downfall, lack of security, and rise of religious patriarchal

stigmas spreading across the country, sexual harassment increased and an epidemic of

sexual violence emerged.5 The consistent rise of the problem, especially after the

revolution and during the Muslim Brotherhood, term in the office led to the creation of a

resistance power through the rise of online and offline initiatives attempting to solve this

issue. Most of the initiatives base their efforts on online crowdsourcing efforts in order to

mobilise offline communities. The performativity of crowdsourcing as a mediation tool

affects the culture of sexual harassment reporting and how women fight the culture of

shame that preexisted in Egypt's patriarchal culture. This is also enhanced by the new

ontology of women and their attachment to mobile technology creating what Poster terms

as a "humachinic" identity (Poster in Kember and Zylinska 2012:14). The feminine

"humachininc" identity influenced by mobile technologies are more fluid and are able to

challenge the societal stigmas through their established combination of virtual and real

identities. As Zylinska says,

"To talk about ‘humachines’ is not to posit a seamless one-dimensional flow of life but

4 Dr. Nawal El Saadawi is a controversial feminist who adopted women’s sexuality in Egypt and coined the

famous "unveil the mind" quote. More on her fights: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/nawal-el-saadawi-i-am-going-to-carry-on-this-fight-for-ever-2371378.html 5 Sexual violence refers to using razors and sharp objects in harassing women.

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rather to map out, in a Foucauldian spirit, a network of differentially stabilized,

assymetrical but mutually dependent nodes of power" (Zylinska 2009:94).

In order to explain this particular biopower shift and the performativity of the

biomediation of new technologies, I will refer to Harass Map6 as my case study to portray

the crowdsourcing biopower influence within the realm of the performativity of the

audiovisual components of digital mapping. Through the analysis of biopower within a

global hegemonic structure and its application on the Egyptian context, I will try to map

the new catrogrophy of feminist crowdsourcing biopower in changing the culture of

shame associated with reporting sexual harassment in Egypt.I will also try to pose the

threats and limitations that accompany online mediation in feminist activism.

In order to address the cultural implications of biopower on feminist crowd movements in

Egypt, I have based my research on literature and content analysis as well as a singular

case study investigation. I have tried to analyse the philosophic literature related to

technologies of domination, biopolitics and biopower in an attempt to link them to social

implications on technology platforms. I have reviewed literature related to collective

intelligence and social movements. In addition to, the literature related to public sphere,

remediation, convergence, and participatory culture. Jenkins has also conducted several

interviews on 'convergence culture', participatory culture, giving an optimistic vision of

global democracy based on the humanist utilization of technological platforms.7 I have

looked through journals, articles, and books on the historical significance of mapping,

6 Harasmap website: http://harassmap.org/en/

7 Henry Jenkins interviews on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nrWcFPjnCc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibJaqXVaOaI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGVfJVde164

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post representational mapping and modern cartography, as well as maptivism initiatives. I

have tried to analyse the 'Ushahidi' web and mobile platform to understand its

significance as free, public, and interactive software.

Local feminist writings as well as the ones that discuss the embodiment of technology

within the feminist agency have been effective in connecting between the main

components of my thesis. As an Egyptian woman myself, I have experienced sexual

harassment and have suffered from the culture of silence and shame accompanying it. It

is also worth mentioning that I have worked on culture and media campaigns in Egypt

and have organized open mics and events on sexual harassment, therefore I have a

personal account of testimonies. I have also watched several local and international

documentaries on sexual harassment and have followed the #hashtags and @twitter

accounts of Egyptian movements and @everydaysexism based in London in order to

relate and understand the global biopower change in that regard. There are also TedX

speeches for both Harass Map and international initiatives touching on harassment and

searching for technological means to tackle it.

I also searched for international and local feedback on Harass Map as a feminist

movements in an attempt to measure it‟s affectivity on real grounds. Lastly, I have taken

the accounts of Egyptian feminist bloggers online and related them to my observation of

feminist movements social media presence and offline activities.

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2. Literature Review

2.1 Collective Intelligence and Participatory Culture

The research will start by defining crowdsourcing as a term reflected from Pierre Levy's

Collective Intelligence (1997). Pierre Levy identifies collective intelligence and the

technical accommodations that accompany it in a utopian lens, but rejecting technological

and economic determinism. He writes on virtual identity and the cyberspace in Becoming

Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age (1998) and Cyberculture (2001), Emergence of

participatory cultures and their influence on the media landscape using new media tools

is an interesting phenomenon in media studies. Levy describes participatory culture as

"collective intelligence" (1997). He sets the framework for collective intelligence and

crowdsourcing within the current media landscape. He describes collective intelligence as

an old broad concept that the new digital based tools for communication has augmented

our cognitive ability to cooperate and dialogue. Levy writes that within a knowledge

community "no one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides

in humanity" (Jenkins 2006:139). He acknowledges technological developments within

the knowledge space stating that "high speed networked computing constituted an

epistemological turning point in the development of collective intelligence" (Jenkins)8.

Pierre Levy's philosophy paves the way for other theorists talking about crowdsourcing

and its impact on the world from a humanist point of view. Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer

Henderson discuss the definition of participatory cultures, the power related to

participation, and how it is utilised in creating online communities in their book The

8 Jenkins declarations on collective intelligence of media fans in MIT publication website:

http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/collective%20intelligence.html

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Participatory Cultures Handbook (2012). As Delwiche and Henderson describe the

participatory movement and its impact on the world as being transformed by participatory

knowledge cultures in which people work together to collectively classify, organize, and

build information a phenomenon that Pierre Levy characterizes as the emergence of

collective intelligence" (Dulwiche and Henderson 2012:39). Dulwiche and Henderson

explain the attachment of collective intelligence to our bodies and nervous systems in a

way that the mediation and its effect are directly affecting each other. They claim that

"these knowledge cultures have become an integral part of our lives; they function as

prosthetic extensions of our nervous system and we often feel crippled when our access

to these networks is curtailed" (Dulwiche and Henderson 2012:39). This gives a way to

understand how technology impacts the biological body and the formation of

"humachines" and virtual identity. Henry Jenkins‟ research can help us identify the

connection between old and new media as well as explain the participatory culture. As

main author on Internet convergence, Jenkins is a famous humanist who provides

literature on convergence, Internet fans, and virtual communities. Jenkins also describes

participatory culture as a world where everyone participates. In Confronting the

Challenges of Participatory Culture, Media Education for the 21st Century (2009),

Jenkins explains the importance of media literacy and the challenges facing it. Jenkins

also discusses media participation and what constitutes meaningful participation in

Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in Networked Culture (2013). The

whole concept of media convergence through the multiplicity of the media to singular

and individualistic purposes is discussed by Bolter and Grusin in Remediation:

Understanding New Media (2000). 'Remediation' itself remains the most descriptive term

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for media convergence within its cultural context. It provides a way to understand

crowdsourcing power as media refashions. They also provide an understanding of the

immersive virtual identity due to technological 'hypermediacy' and 'remediation' of media

(Bolter and Grusin 2000:21).

2.2 Technologies of Domination: Biopolitics and Biopower

Foucault introduces biopower as a set of disciplinary regulations that carry the anatomic,

biology, and technology of the body. His formation of biopower falls within the structure

of formal institutions like prison cells or health institutions. "Foucault's proposal of

genealogy, taken over from Neitzsche, offers the most satisfactory resolution to the

problem because it attempts to see each emergence in relation to a field of forces and

because it configures each in relation to its own systematically." (Poster 2001:10).

Robert Esposito, the Italian philosopher, gives an interpretation of the genealogy of

biopolitics in Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics provides

chronological summary of Foucault's lectures on the technologies of domination

describing the conceptualization of biopolitics. Main literature for Foucault's biopower is

also present in Esposito‟s work and the collection of interviews with Foucault in Power/

Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 (1980). The evolution of

biopower has developed in a more imperialistic and globalised manner in the readings of

Hardt and Negri. They have created a distinction between biopolitics and biopower in

which they view biopower as a resistance form. The overruling biopower and resistance

form in their literature takes place in international organisations that impose a different

kind of power on sovereign entities. The development of biopower in „Empire‟ is

presented in Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Hardt and Negri:

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2005). Mark Poster's literature has explored a more social form of biopower related to

technology and civil society. In his books The Mode of Information (1990), the Second

Media Age (1995) What's the Matter with Internet (2001) and Information Please (2006)

he develops the power relation with the development of technology and its affordances

without falling into determinism. The importance of understanding the framework of

biopower and its development is crucial as "Foucault argued in several works in the mid-

1970s that one cannot understand the passage from the „sovereign‟ state of the ancient

regime to the modern „disciplinary‟ state without taking into account how biopolitical

context was progressively put at the service of capitalist accumulation" (Hardt and Negri

2000: 27). Biopower is an explanation of the life's mediation and control. Therefore,

bioethics is a continuation of the moral discourse around lifeness. Crowdsourcing is a

clear case study for bioethics in mediation. Joanna Zylinska provides a comprehensive

account on bioethics and its effect on technological modifications including social

technology and blog forms in her book Bioethics in the Age of New Media (2009). As

Zylinska mentions, "No longer had human existence defined by its unique temporal and

spatial coordinates: one body, one life, in a specific space and time. Instead human life is

increasingly defined by the agential, instrumental deployment for resources for body

renewal, both its temporal and spatial context subject to extension or translocation"

(Zylinska 2009: viii). Bioethics is the realisation of the biopower's role in the

management of the citizen.

2.3 Digital Activism: Egypt

In this research, I will relate biomediation of resistance to social movements, particularly

in Egypt. I have discovered that there are numerous literature and media outlets that

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mediate a determinist view on social movements, especially after the „Arab Spring.‟

Facebook and Twitter have been considered to be the social drive for revolutions and

democracy. The famous revolutionary Wael Ghonim9 who started the "We are all Khaled

Said" Facebook page has written a book entitled Revolution 2.0 (2012) as a praise for

technology in empowering people10

. Therefore, in an attempt to have an objective lens in

analysing power formations and viewing technology as a bridge for new powers rather

than the cause, we can explore literature on hacktivism and technology from a more

humanist view. Within this research, I will relate the public sphere and crowdsourcing to

activism in Egypt. In relation to crowdsourcing in activism, I refer to Mary Joyce's book

Digital Activism Decoded: The New Mechanics of Change (2010). Paolo Gerbaudo's

book Tweets and the Streets (2012) discuss mass movements and mobilisation of people

addressing the power of social networks, while giving credit to the human element and

word of mouth in moving the crowds. Tim Jordan's books Hacking: Digital Media and

Technological Determinism (2013) Cyberpower: an introduction to the politics of

Cyberspace (2002) will also provide an important link between activism and technology

without stating drastic utopian statements and realisations. Evgeny Morozov also makes a

similar link in his books To Save Everything Click Here (2013) and the Net Delusion:

The Dark Side of the Internet (2012). Phillip Howard and Muzammil Hussain‟s work

specifically addresses digital media and the „Arab Spring‟ (2013)11

. It is also very

interesting to review Herrera's work (2012) on youth citizenship in Egypt. Through this

9 Wael Ghoneim is an internet activist known for the part he played in Jan 25 revolution as he was then

founder and administrator of "We are all Khaled Said" Facebook page known to have sparked the revolution, 10

"We are all Khaled Said" Facebook page is viewed by many as the inspiration for the Egyptian revolution in 2011. 11

The book's name is "Democracy's Fourth Wave: Digital Media and the Arab Spring

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literature, an objective account of the citizenship in relation to digital activism can be

created as a form of understanding of the power alternation explained earlier to civil

society and social movements and its impact on power structure in the society.

2.4 Mapping Technology: A Performative Mediation Tool

The case study in the research is "Harass Map", a crowdmapping initiative to fight sexual

harassment in Egypt. Harass Map relies on the affectivity of mapping as a visually

performative and interactive crowdsourcing tool. The understanding of maps and

cartography is a way of interpreting modern surveillance and power. Rob Kitchin, the

Director of Regional and Spatial Analysis-NIRSA, has written extensively on the power

of mapping, relating it to philosophy of power and performativity. The books include The

Map Reader: Theories of Mapping Practice and Cartographic Representation (2011) that

gives a view of the changes of power and the interconnectedness of power and

cartography. Other books following the same theme are Mapping Worlds (2007), and

Unfolding Mapping Practices: A New Epistemology for Cartogrophy (2009). He has also

written articles on Post-Representational Cartogrophy (2010). In his book Mapping

Cyberspace, Kitchin gives a progressive analytical view of how cyberspace that is now

termed as „the cloud‟ works12

. He gives a comprehensive explanation of the Internet and

the intranet relating them to global hegemonies and personal use. Kitchin also relates his

literature to Foucault's biopolitics and Derrida's deconstructionism in his critical view of

mapping. He criticises Foucault for his "very little space to a discussion of practices and

discourses of resistance, in contrast to his lengthy treatment of domination" (Dreyfus and

Rainbow in Reeves 2011:348). Cartography and cultural maps books edited by Kitchin

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The cloud is the use of multiple networks to communicate on a singular technologically empowered space.

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and Dodge are comprehensive, philosophic, scientific, and sociological accounts of maps

and cartography. Crampton and Elden also discuss geography and mapping within

Foucauldian biopower in Space, Knowledge, and Power: Foucault and Geography

(2012). Map theorists relate back to J.B Harley who writes on the history of cartography

in relation to the new maps ontologies in The New Nature of Maps (2002). The ontology

of maps and its performativity are related to their utilisation as activist forces. Maptivism

has become a crucial tool for fighting causes and humanitarian relief.13

Maptivism is a

new term so there is very little literature around it, however, we can relate it to

community mapping as they are both specialised mapping systems that address certain

causes through geo-plotted maps. The performativity of user-generated mapping hasn't

been exhausted in culture and media studies. Based on the research on history of

mapping, GIS technologies, modern cartography, and community mapping I will say that

crowdmapping for activism creates a new form of citizenship with different ontological

behaviour.

2.5 Feminism and the Embodiment of Technology

Women have acquired technology as a part of their ontology. Technology is not separated

from the politics of feminism. Foucault's literature on sexuality and power has been

considered essential to understanding the subjectivity of power and identity within

feminist groups. Technologies of domination and the self in the Hermeneutics of the

Subject (2005) provide "a process of subjectivation that brings the individual to bind

himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at the same time, to an external

power" (Agamben 1998: 5). In those terms, technologies affect the feminist body in the

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Maptivism is the utilization of GIS software in activist causes.

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way she sees herself and presents herself to the world through the ancient 'care of the

self'. Foucault's interpretations along with others explaining the "machinic

hetergenosis"14

of the human is a gateway for realising the feminist post-modern identity

and her attachment to technology. There is a lot of criticism on Foucault's interpretation

of feminism in the Feminist Interpretation of Michel Foucault (1996) edited by Susan

Hekman and Feminism and Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity (2002). The mentioned

books discuss the applicability of the Foucauldian biopower, ethics, and care of the self

on feminist movements and state his limitations and drawbacks in addressing women.

“Most feminists point to Foucault‟s androcentric gender blindness; some do not regard it

as a fatal flow; others believe it contaminates the entire enterprise” (Sawicki 1996:146).

There are arguments that Foucault‟s “rhetoric of feminism is masculine, his perspective

androcentric, and his vision rather pessimistic” (Sawicki 1996:162). The criticism

revolves around Foucault ignoring the feminine structure and the feminine body in his

writings. Addressing the human agency in women and their ontology in relation to

technology can be explained through Haraway's book A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science,

Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s and Judith Butler's Gender Trouble:

Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). Sarah Kember also writes a futurist

manifesto for women (2011) that address technological changes and their implementation

within women's embodiment to technology. The scientific explanation of the women

embodiment with technology is essential for this research as it discusses the cultural

identity of women within their adaptation to technology.

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"Machinic hetergenosis" is a term invented by Guattari (1933) to explain the human's attachment to

technologies explained back then to the attachment to books, periodicals, paintings, etc.. (Poster 2006:84).

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2.6 Local Feminism and Interlink to Sexual Harassment

In this framework of gendered technology, I want to identify the cultural shift associated

with feminism and technology in the Egyptian context. The Middle Eastern feminist

social movements are tackled from a lot of different angles. However the two books

Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East (2000), and Women and Power in

the Middle East (2001) I found most relevant as they focus on feminism from the

religious and traditional sexual taboo. As my research focuses on the culture of shame

associated with sexual harassment, it is important to identify the culture and traditions

surrounding sexual harassment in Egypt. The cultural embodiment of shame, honour,

dignity, fidelity, and chastity are well portrayed in Dr. Nawal El Saadawi's writings on

women.15

Her controversial writings include The Nawal El Saadawi Reader (1997), A

Daughter of Isis (1999), and Walking through Fire (2002). El Saadawi's ethnocentric

literature overcomes the religious barrier and tackles culture from a local and traditional

perspective. She also personalizes her activist causes through narrating her own

experiences. Hudson et al have approached feminism from a cultural perspective through

case studies from culturally sensitive societies in their book Sex and World Peace (2013).

Information on sexual harassment in Egypt including statistics and cases are available at

the Egyptian Center for Women Rights (ECWR).16

ECWR releases yearly detailed

reports on women's position in the socio-political scene. Human Rights Watch, as well as

a number of newspapers and online websites like The Guardian and Jaddaliya, have

reported on sexual harassment and sex mobs – especially after the 2011 revolution.

15

Dr. Nawal El Saadawi has written 47 books tackling problems faced by women in Egypt and spent three months in prison after writing her book Women and Sex for 'crimes against the state' (Roberts 2011). 16

ECWR is the most famous grassroots NGO tackling women rights and approaching sexual harassment: http://ecwronline.org/

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Channel 4 produced a documentary on sexual harassment in Egypt in their show

"Unreported World" and has conducted interviews with victims and social movements

including Harass Map to explore the culture triggering the sexual violence in the

country.17

There is also an independent joint media production between Egyptian

independent channel ONTV18

and Belail Media Productions19

, of an Egyptian actor who

has decided to explore what it feels like to be a woman in the streets of Cairo.20

The

accounts of those media productions give a cultural perspective of the phenomenon

within the local culture.

17

Ramita Navai reports on "Egypt: Sex, Mobs, and Revolution" in Channel 4 http://www.channel4.com/programmes/unreported-world/videos/all/uw-egypt-sex-mobs-and-revolution 18

ONTV Egyptian channel website: http://www.livestream.com/ontveglive 19

Belail Media Productions are an Egyptian independent production house that aims at tackling social problems in Egypt and the Arab countries 20

The independent production got sponsored by CNN http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvNZt1T5rAQ

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3. Crowdsourcing: Crowds and Technology

3.1 The Nature of Collective Intelligence

Pierre Levy explained the current participatory culture and the exchange of knowledge

from humans to computer mediated technology and vice versa as „collective intelligence'.

Levy describes the historical background of 'collective intelligence' as the “nomadic

culture in which culture prostheses are transforming our intellectual capabilities as clearly

as the mutations of our genetic heritage” (Levy 1997:viii). This ancient type of mediation

combined with computer mediated technologies lead to “augmenting the intellect” (Levy

1997:10). The augmentation of intellect in the realm of technological affordances leads to

the synergy between the personal and the collective. A clear example of this synergy is

Wikipedia in which collective knowledge acts as a personalised encyclopaedia in this

online participatory platform. This augmentation of intellect and remediation of media

sources are the basis for crowdsourcing initiatives. Wiki knowledge has become the term

defining online collective information. Levy assumes that with the multiplicity of the

media and the remediation of content, the resulted knowledge segmented is naturally

more intelligent. He refers to Authier when he says “Michel Authier argues that the

creation of the knowledge space, and with its possibilities of collective intelligence, is a

direct result of new computer technologies such as hypertext. According to him, the sum

of knowledge is now organized by the cosmos and not the circle: „instead of a one

dimensional text or even hypertext network, we now have a dynamic and interactive

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multidimensional representational space‟” (Levy 1997:ix). Levy's 'collective intelligence'

much like Habermas‟ 'public sphere' can be viewed as being too utopian in creating this

online public space that provides an inclusive platform. Habermas argues that “public

sphere is formed within civil society that fosters resistance to formal institutions” (Poster

2006:63). Applying the „public sphere‟ theory to crowdsourcing mediation and

technology, can help us observe the multitude and the alternation of power hierarchy

when it comes to civil society and advocacy. As Lister et al. mention in New Media: A

Critical Introduction, "The essentially participatory and interactive elements of the pre-

web Internet clearly suggested attractive homologies with Habermas' description of the

idealized public sphere" (Lister et al 2009: 218). The integration of online to offline

communities can create a "virtual social reality" which has an effect on the discourse of

the "real social reality" (Lister et al 2009:214). As Lister reports on Baum's research,

"online groups are often woven onto the fabric of offline life rather than set in opposition

to it. The evidence includes pervasiveness of offline contexts in online interaction and the

movement of online relationships offline" (Lister et al 2009:215). Crowdsourcing acts as

a technology compatible with the politico-technological change and a base for a lot of the

activist movements. With the start of the „Arab Spring,‟ many of journalists and

commentators jumped to the conclusion that social media is the driving force behind

revolutions and have come with drastic determinist terminologies like 'The Facebook

Revolution' or 'The Twitter Revolution‟. It is important to understand that means of

mobilisation are empowered by people to collect people. The multiplicity of the media

allows for campaigning for a single cause and uniting the people on a common public

sphere. An example of this form of remediation on the 'public sphere' has taken place

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during the Internet blackout in the Egyptian revolution in 2011. Google and Twitter

announced phone numbers in Egypt for protestors to call and phone messages were then

tweeted on @speak2tweet. The captured and translated tweets were then compiled and

organised in a Google Document and streamed on Vimeo (THE NEXT WEB: 2011).

There is a sheer abundance of activities associated with social media, however we must

nite that they play the role of mediation platforms rather than motivational powers. As

Gerbaudo describes the social media development "In a way, modern media have always

constituted a channel through which social movements not only communicate but also

organize their actions and mobilize their constituencies" (Gerbaudo 2012:125). This

'knowledge space' is the foundation of online communities. Online communities also

create „postmodern‟ identities that are leveraged and supported by crowds and approved

by digital media forms (Poster 2006:64). Facebook fan pages, likes, comments, retweets,

favourites, and all other social technology forms of approval leverage online

communities. As nomadic culture reflects on identity, online participatory cultures also

form and empower virtual identities. Identities in participatory culture are fluid. They are

affected by their common intersect and mediation source. Rosi Bradotti defines

„nomadic identity‟, as a "practice involving the affirmation of fluid boundaries, a practice

of the intervals, of the interfaces, and the interstices" (Braidotti in Lister et al 2009:210).

Online communities unified by a generation or a cause can harness their collective

powers. (Herrera 2012:37).

22

3.2 Crowdsourcing: A Transformation of Biopower

Crowdsourcing acts as a biomediation power that transforms biopolitics and biopower in

modern societies in an attempt to achieve what can be termed as 'biopolitical democracy'

through collective intelligence. In a Foucauldian sense, adopting the Nitzschean

genealogy "If the body is the material of politics, politics – naturally, in the sense that

Nietzsche confers on the expression – takes the form of the body" (Campbell 2008:84).

The exacerbation of power and its deployment comes from within our bodies. "Michel

Foucault has called 'biopolitics' a form of political regime under which citizens lives and

bodies are being permanently regulated and managed" (Zylinska 2009:16). Foucault

describes government as “conduct” and therefore the term ranges from governing the self

to governing others. He positions the concept of government or „governmentality‟ as a

framework for surveillance and power from the ancient Greco-Roman rule till modern

times (Foucault 1978). Foucault's technologies of domination are mainly concerned with

surveillance in formal structures, but he gives us a tool to analyse the shift of powers.

Foucault links "discursive practices to the materiality of the body" which consequently

links crowdsourcing to biopolitics (Barad 2007:63). Crowdsourcing is another form of a

surveillance that utilises recent technological infrastructure to deploy resistance power in

specific frameworks. Resistance in this regard is not a complete dismissal of the role of

sovereign powers, but an undeniable shift in the global power hierarchy. Therefore,

technology plays an integral part in highlighting biopower and its potential in shifting the

sovereign-power order. Foucault's biopolitics bypasses the shift of power to civil society.

However, Hardt and Negri give biopower more contemporary definitions that address the

emergence of civil society and international organisations while defining a distinct

23

difference between biopolitics and biopower. They describe the new power formation as

"governance without government" (Hardt and Negri in Hatem 2012:97). As Mark Poster

describes the shift in power "From the individuality constructed by disciplinary

technologies of power, we have moved to the individuality or multiplicity of subject

formation in the societies of control" (Poster 2006:59). The multiplicity of the media is

emphasised by the "individual points that are singularized in a thousand plateaus" (Hardt

and Negri 2000:25). The multiplicity of the media has affected the virtual identities and

group mobilization to change the biopower and bioethics associated with it in the

structure of the society. In this research, I am addressing biopower from the human-

technology relationship in the framework of activism. This shift in the power and

resistance forms in the society contribute to sociological and cultural shifts that

accompany the effect of biomediations on society,

“The metaphorical space of societies of control is perhaps best characterized by

the shifting desert sands, where positions are continually swept away; or better the

smooth surfaces of cyberspace, with its infinitely programmable flows of codes

and information” (Hardt in Poster 2006:61).

Biopower bridges social movements and our biological activities in our postmodern

identities. As Jordan explains, Foucault's notions of power apply on everyday life,

attaching technology to individuals and linking their identities to tools of self-knowledge

(Jordan 2002:18). The development of 'biopower' as a term does not explain the

ambiguous, scientific algorithmic coding that happens as a result of a click or web

coding, but leads to the impact of the mediated and remediated results of technologically

resistance activities on the psychological and the socio-economic structure of our beings.

24

Zylinska describes the emergence of digital technologies as ubiquitous but invisible when

she says that:

"we do not see what happens inside our computers or cell phones, we do not

normally perceive the actual sequence of zeros and ones that are transmitted as

data over the internet, nor do we visually register the information base processes

occurring in our DNA)" (Zylinska 2009:72).

Crowd technology is supported by the ubiquity and interactiveness of technology, leading

to changes in the power and governance structure. This constant „clicking for action‟

leads to surveillance and public policy actions that act as a resistance to the governance

and political regimes. This shift in power expressed on social media platforms is

explained by Mark Poster when he says that "youth cultures are not simply rebellious but

trickle up the social ladder to, so to speak, to influence adult styles and habits" (Poster

2001:2). The youth activity through technological devices takes place spontaneously in

relation to their 'humachinic' agency. Younger generations do not spend time thinking of

their attachment to technologies; however they act instantly through their mobile phones

and gadgets. It is safe to say that the biopolitical production of this knowledge and

technological based economic structure provides a clear psychoanalysis of the attachment

and recreation of bodies with technologies. "Postmodern society is characterized by the

dissolution of traditional social bodies." (Hardt and Negri 2005). Attachment of bodies to

their mobile phones and the widespread use of smart technologies lead to changes in the

biomediation culture and subsequently the activism culture. This leads to what is termed

as the „humachines‟ by Mark Poster explaining the bodies' attachment to technology.

„Humachines‟ are not a "seamless one-dimensional flow of life" but rather a "network of

25

differentially stabilized, asymmetrical but mutually dependent nodes of power" (Zylinska

2009:94). In the crowdsourcing context, governance power moves from people to

machines and from machines back to the citizens – empowering them to take action.

Crowd management and participation take place through online interactions which

subsequently transmits power to mediation conglomerates operating as neo-liberal

mediation agents. Multi-agent social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and

other social networks that mediates unfiltered message to the crowds act as biopower

agents and create what is termed as „biopolitical productions' (Hardt and Negri 2000).

"From the individuality constructed by disciplinary technologies of power, we have

moved to the individuality or multiplicity of subject formation in the societies of control"

(Poster 2006: 59). This trans-cultural diffusion and power alternation can be well

portrayed in the virality of the cultural meme Harlem Shake21

and its use as an activism

tool against the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.22

In May 2013, more than 500 Egyptians

danced the 'Harlem Shake' in front of the Muslim Brotherhood premises as a form of a

protest against the ruling regime at that time. The meme began as an upload on the 2

February 2013 by five Australians as a response to YouTube comedy vloger Filthy Frank

(Nkrumah 2013). The use of cultural memes like the Harlem shake, Gangnam Style, and

others have become a phenomenon in activism and art defiance tools, however, I am

using the Egyptian example as it remains within the focus of this research. The audio-

visual accompaniment to digital cultural objects adds to the performativity of media on

the singular network, which is the Internet. As Poster says "cultural objects – texts,

sounds and images posted to the Internet exist in a digital domain that is everywhere at

22

The Youtube video for the Harlem Shake in Egypt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmofqZjf-Bg

26

once" which changes the governance and biopolitics of the mediation process (Poster

2006:10). This power alternation is empowered "by widespread and increasing access to

the Internet, mobile phones, and related communication technologies, the use of

crowdsourcing for policy advocacy, e-government, and e-democracy" (Bott and Young

2012:48). The increased ubiquity of technology and its multiplicity therefore creates a

more subjective and individualistic approach to the biopower, as technology allows the

crowds to collaborate through web technologies and produce instant public policy

actions. Content platforms from Facebook to Twitter to Youtube to Vimeo and others

have utilised resources from collective intelligence and changed the distribution of power

that used to be centralised in government and mainstream media power structure. "The

next generation of web 2.0 applications, such as search engine advertising, uses massive

databases to harness the collective intelligence of their users through algorithms that

detect patterns and hidden meanings in everyday user activity" (Bott and Young 2012). In

this process of life management, we utilise our biological capabilities in order to serve

our political needs. As Zylinska argues, "the process of life management involves the

constitution of zones of indistinction between political and biological life, which also

entails barring some people and other forms of life from the democratic polis" (Zylinska

2009:33).

With the shifting force of biopower, bioethics emerges as a way to understand the life

associated with technologies and the environment surrounding it. Bioethics here raises

questions related to "the boundaries of human and human life, as well as considering

policy implications of such developments" on crowd technologies and their implications

27

in an activism framework (Zylinska 2009:5). Debates on our body actions and their

mediation through technology

"are never just a matter of individual responses and decisions made by singular

moral entities. Instead they belong to a wider network of politico-ethical

discourses that shape the social and hold it together" (Zylinska 2009: 3).

Technology creates a different controlling pattern in our lives empowered by

biomediation. Biomediation in this regard requires us to look at the biological influence

on technology and the influence of the technological mediation on the public in a form of

biopower.

3.3 Crowd-activism in Egypt

"Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right" Ani DiFranco23

“When there is power there is resistance” (Foucault in Deveaux 1996:198). Egypt has

been under a totalitarian regime for over 50 years which has created an opposing

resistance power represented in political opposition parties and civil society. With the

current technological developments, a wave of bloggers and activists resort to "mass self-

mediation" as a form of expressing their rebellion (Castells 2011:xxvii). Kember and

Zylinska have described self-mediation as " a process that moves us both home and away,

consolidating and authenticating our experience even if it extends and imperils our

23

A quote in the Introduction of Hardt and Negri's book Empire (2000)

28

identity" (Kember and Zylinska 2012:xx). Blogging has become popular in the Middle

East with the emergence of Blogspot in Arabic, allowing anyone with Internet literacy to

start their own account of self-mediation on multiple media platforms (Radsch 2008:1).

As Egypt has been subjective to the global 'Empire' and always wanted to preserve a

liberal image during Mubarak's era, the government hasn't restricted the exponential

growth of the independent bloggers scene on the Internet. Prior to 2005, there were about

40 blogs from Egypt and the number of bloggers could be counted on one hand (Radsch

2008:3). In 2008, the number of blogs had risen to an estimated 160,000 and has

definitely grown larger after the revolution (OpenNet Initiative 2009). This exercise of

biopower is also influenced by the incompetency of the government and lack of

representative bodies. The 'humachinic' identity of the youth population in Egypt is

explained in their large access to mobile technologies. In Egypt, everyone has access to a

mobile phone and it is has the second largest Internet-using population in the region

(Howard and Hussain 2012: 113). This form of postmodern identity and exercise of

citizenship within it is termed by Shirky and Herrera as „symmetrical participation‟

(Herrera 2012:335). Egyptian bloggers have gained credibility among the audience,

particularly the youth, especially with the rise of citizen journalists and the increased

turmoil in the country. There are a number of bloggers that people rely on to receive a

form of subjective and credible eyewitness information. Bloggers like Wael Abbas, Sand

Monkey, and Nawara Negm have a degree of influence on the people they communicate

with on Twitter online platform.24

Digital media and its mergence with our ontologies

have made it hard to split between the real and the virtual,

24

Those are names of some of the famous political bloggers in Egypt. More on the influential bloggers in Egypt is in the book Egyptian Revolution 2.0

29

"The shift from traditional mass media to a system of horizontal communication

networks organized around the Internet and wireless communication has introduced a

multiplicity of communication patterns at the source of a fundamental cultural

transformation, as virtuality becomes an essential dimension of our reality." (Castells

2011:xviii).

It is important to note that the blogosphere is only occupied by the educated elite with

Internet literacy. The Egyptian story is an inspiration "[…] to activists around the world,

but also provides a cautionary tale about the importance of linking cyberactivism with

good old-fashioned grassroots organizing" (Radsch 2009:10). Through understanding of

the biopower of the blogosphere in Egypt, we can assume that new media technologies

are attached to people's identity and ontology.

30

4. Mapping as knowledge

4.1 Mapping as a Performative Mediation Tool

"Mapping is epistemological but also deeply ontological – it is a both way of thinking

about the world, offering a framework for knowledge, and a set of assertions about the

world itself. This philosophical distinction between the nature of the knowledge claims

that mapping is able to make, and the status of the practice and artifact itself, is

intellectually fundamental to any thinking about mapping" (Kitchin, Perkins, and Dodge

2009:1).

Mapping is one of the oldest mediation tools as "the ability to create and use maps is one

of the most basic means of human communication" (Dodge, Kitchen, Perkins 2011: x). It

serves as a performative mediation tool as well as a biopower tool for governance,

control and resistance. Harley draws on Foucault and many others to contest the notion of

an objective, neutral map (Kitchin, Perkins, and Dodge 2009:9). The mediation of maps

provides credibility due to its visually representative nature but it is important to note that

"maps are not a reflection of the world, but a re-creation of it" (Dodge, Kitchen, Perkins

2011: 6). Mapping produces a subjective image of the world coinciding with the cultural

context of its production. However, we can put into consideration that spaces are

representations of maps, therefore the "differentiation between the real and the

representation is no longer meaningful" (Kitchin 2010:8).

Historically, maps have played an important role in society "they have played as cultural

artifacts in political and economic developments of nations and empires" (Dodge,

Kitchen, Perkins 2011: 4). Drawing on Foucault and Derrida,

31

"maps are a product of the society that creates them, and regardless of how much they

seek to represent the truth, they inherently capture the interests of those that produce

them and work to further those interests" (Dodge, Kitchen, and Perkins 2011:4).

Mapping as a representational tool is intertwined with its cultural, social, and political

representations. MacEachern sought to blend cognitive and semiotic approaches, along

with visualisation theory, to provide a coherent picture of how maps work. This work has

become influential amongst these working in GIScience and geovisualisation seeking

ways to scientifically conceptualise and improve mapping within increasingly

exploratory and interactive media" (Dodge, Kitchen, Perkins 2011: 4). The introduction

of GIS technologies in mobile phones has highly impacted the culture of modern

cartography. The new spatial cognition of maps that are empowered by Google Maps or

similar technologies have become an innate part of our ontology and performance.

Digital mapping creates a new form of ontological behaviour. "Coinciding with the

growing popularity of smartphones, a class of geosocial software applications has begun

to emerge that integrates location" (Kelley 2013:181). The integration of location and the

availability of subjective information, visually representative on the map is a powerful act

of mediation. "Recently, with technological advancements cartographers start thinking of

mapping as a „post representational‟ tool that is more impactful on our actions and

values. The embodiment of digital maps affects our human agency and its interaction

with technology and other humans.

32

4.2 Maptivism: Ushahidi

Figure 1 Ushahidi mobile platform from their blog: http://blog.ushahidi.com/2008/10/04/ushahidi-smart-phone-

application-development/

"Maps don't change the world—but people who use maps do.” (The Economist

2009).

Digital maps based on user generated geographic content and geo-crowdsourcing has

created a new form of community maps. Community maps

"represent a socially or culturally distinct understanding of landscape and include

information that is excluded from conventional maps, which usually represent the

views of the dominant sectors of society." (Cope 2009:5).

Crowdmapping provides a technologically enhanced type of cartography based on

collective intelligence that offers an aesthetic and interactive map. Therefore, this type of

33

mapping is utilised in activist causes and crisis management. "Community maps can pose

alternatives to the languages and images of the existing power structures and become a

medium of empowerment” (Peluso in Cope 2009:5). Community mapping is the base of

maptivism. Mapping technologies "has matured into a tool for social justice" (The

Economist 2009). Open source crowdmapping projects like MapServer, PostGIS,

GRASS, and Ushahidi have made activism through mapping a simpler and more

interactive process. The easy integration of audio-visual material also added to the

performativity of digital maps. Crowdmaps "emerge in contexts and through a mix of

creative, reflexive, playful, tactile and habitual practices; affected by the knowledge,

experience and skill of the individual to perform mappings and apply them in the world."

(Kitchin 2010:9). The example of Ushahidi is relevant to the study as it is the software

company that empowers Harass Map, the case study in this research. It also empowers

more than 40 countries for a wide range of humanitarian and social causes (Diamond and

Plattner 2012:98).25

Ushahidi means „testimony‟ or „witness‟ in Swahili and operates as a

free and open software that integrates tweets, SMS, and e-mails on the crowdmap.

Ushahidi as a platform has removed technical barriers by integrating multimedia and

interactive components in the crowdmaps. It is deterministic to assume that Ushahidi as

an interactive platform will lead to democracy and solve the world‟s problems. However,

the interactive and geo-plotted nature of Ushahidi can enhance the connectivity of the

activists and provide them with the space to mediate their knowledge and evidence.

In Egypt, attempts in geo-crowdsourced initiatives have been empowered for traffic

solving, electoral monitoring, organisation and violence in protests, along with tackling

25

Ushahidi website: http://ushahidi.com/products

34

main social problems like electricity power outages and sexual harassment. UCLA Centre

for Digital Humanities has created a digital map that collects live tweets from Cairo and

displays them on a map during the Egyptian revolution in 2011 (Sullivan 2011). After

that, during the power outages in the city, a crowdmapping website entitled

"Kahrabtak"26

was dedicated to map areas with power outages (Raslan 2013). With the

new mediation powers "people believe in the authority of the image as a trustworthy

representation of reality" (Dodge, Kitchen, and Perkins 2011:x). Aesthetic elements and

interactive material accompanying the digital maps increases the utility, credibility, and

performativity of digital maps in Egypt. Poster says "when sound, images, and language

are digitally encoded they may be reproduced perfectly and indefinitely" which

compounds to the performativity of digital maps (Poster 1990:74). The intertwining of

human activity with digital maps creates an impactful biomediation process and power

form. In my case study, I will discuss a particular form of a crowdmapping initiative

(Harass Map) empowered by Ushahidi to discuss its performativity and contest its

affectivity. The case touches on a disturbing, but growing phenomenon in Egypt – sexual

harassment. In order to tackle sexual harassment, I will discuss women's relationship to

technology with a focus on Egyptian women and their mediation and culture.

"Maps we argue are not ontologically secure representations but rather a set of

unfolding practices: ‘maps are of-the-moment, brought into being through practices

(embodied, social, technical), always re-made every time they are engaged with;

mapping is a process of constant re-territorialisation" (Kitchin 2010: 9).

26

"Kahrabtak" means electrifying in Egyptian Arabic.

35

With the rise of social network facilities and tools of self-mediation, people are

constantly contributing with user generated plotting locations on digital maps. The user

now acts as a „map producer‟. Gartner says that "users have turned to be very interested

in building their own private maps and visualizing their individual spatial data" (Gartner

2011:76). It has been proven that user-generated maps are also gaining more credibility

within the media stream. The credibility comes from the participatory nature of collective

maps as well as the interactivity of the medium. Affordances of digital maps include

geotagging, geoblogging, and web mash ups (Gartner 2011:71). Crowdmapping adheres

to the social, economic, political, an aesthetic background it comes from. Due to the new

ontological behaviour of technologically enhanced mapping, it has been utilised by

governments, neo-liberal corporate systems, civil societies, and activists. I would like to

explore the new trend of joining activism with mapping via plotting subjective

information and calling for action.

36

5. Egyptian Feminist Movements: Biopower for Resistance

Figure 2 Egyptian women protesting in 1919 against the British occupation. Picture sourced: Egypt Independent

5.1 Egyptian Women: History of Mediation

In 1919, Egyptian women entered the „collective memory‟ of history by participating in a

nationwide protest against the British occupation that was acknowledged by both Arab

and foreign media (Baron 2007:107). This iconic movement has been reassured by

artistic mediations like poetry as well as local and international media. This political

activity affected the public policy agenda and paved the way to liberate Egyptian women.

The nationalist agenda in the 1950s in regards to "furthering the rights and interests of

women was officially viewed as an integral part of modernization and development from

the time of the 1952 revolution" (Hoodfar 1991:107). Various developments occurred in

37

this particular field, moving from a national public agenda in the 1950s up to the re-

emergence of elitist, internationally influenced NGOs with a special focus on women

rights. During Mubarak's era, his wife Suzanne Mubarak adopted women rights with the

implementation of the National Council for Women, and issued laws on female

circumcision, marriage, and divorce. Suzanne Mubarak's women rights interests were

accompanied by high value production campaigns for awareness. Despite the mainstream

media efforts to portray the inclusion of women in major sociopolitical activity, women

remain to be undermined with a huge emphasis on the different biological and gender

role. Government organisations and NGOs mediate womens rights in a way that appeals

to the international community rather than focus on serving their local audience. Women

are usually misrepresented or underrepresented in political and social platforms. One very

clear emphasis of the missing link between the women and their representative is that

until the Egyptian revolution in 2011, women were not allowed to wear a veil on national

television or media outlets. Around 80 percent of the Egyptian female population wears a

head veil, therefore the media is not addressing Egyptian women, but rather approaching

the international community with a polished interface of the modern Egyptian women.

The misrepresentation is also portrayed by the clear deterioration in the 'Global Gender

Gap' report in the World Economic Forum in 2012 where Egypt retreated to level 125 out

of 133 countries worldwide as clarified (ECWR 2012:5). The political marginalisation of

women increased during the Muslim Brotherhood‟s rule when they linked Islamic Shari'a

law to segregation of women and their absence from the social scene and political

movements. As stated by former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton Egyptian women are

being "largely excluded from the transition process and even harassed in the street"

38

(Parvaz 2012). I will focus on sexual harassment as it is a problem that addresses

women's bodies as they are treated as “a political field inscribed and constituted by power

relations” (Deveaux 1996:199).

5.2 Sexual Harassment: A Culture of Shame

"During my 20s, when I had returned to Cairo and wore the hijab, a way of

dressing which again covers everything but the face and the hands, I was groped so many

times that whenever I passed a group of men I’d place my bag between me and them.

Headphones helped block out the disgusting things men — and even boys barely in their

teens — hissed at me"(El Tahawy 2008).

Egypt has sexual harassment laws on the books, but only recently have women stood up

and demanded that these laws be enforced. "Sexual harassment is a daily reality for the

majority of Egyptian women: a UN report released in April 2013 estimated that 99 per

cent of Egyptian women have been subjected to some form of harassment" (Amin 2013).

There is an increasing amount of female activists attacks as well as the soaring number of

sexual harassment incidents and violence in Egypt. According to the Egyptian Centre for

Women Rights, Egypt is ranked the second in the world for sexual harassment activities

(ECWR 2012). Sexual harassment in Egypt is surrounded by a culture of shame that is

linked with the power of tradition in the society. The biopower imposition on women

regarding the culture of shame remains to pose a state of self-surveillance "in a form of

obedience to patriarchy" (Bartky in Allen 1996:275). In a patriarchal society, men have

the soaring need of imposing their superior gender power on women. In Egyptian culture,

victims of rape and sexual harassment are not viewed as victims but rather as "stains to

39

be erased" (Hudson et al 2013:10). Victims are blamed for bringing dishonour to the

family, which consequently results in a culture of silence. A culture motivated by women

who engage in a mode of self-governance that seems to appear in disciplinary society.

“Nancy Fraser characterizes the scenario of the perfected panopticon as one in which

disciplinary norms have become so thoroughly internalized that they are not experienced

as coming from without” (Fraser in Sawicki 1996:148). This is the situation in which

Egyptian women self-govern themselves in the form of a self-tracked obedience based on

their own feelings of guilt and shame of becoming sexual harassment victims. In many

cases, women also impose the patriarchal culture of shame on themselves as a part of

their holding on to their Egyptian feminine identity. Sexual harassment is not just a form

of physical attack; more importantly it portrays the power structure of the society. "A

minor example of sexual harassment, a wolf whistle, maybe insignificant considered by

itself but gains greater meaning as an instance of the differential relations of power

between men and women" (Jordan 2002:16). In Egypt, violence against women is

normalised. Women are in a confused state on how to report their daily attacks and how

this will affect their image and prestige. Women are advised not to respond to harassment

attacks, especially if the attacks are only verbal. Those „disciplinary power rules‟ that act

as the parameters for normal or deviant behaviour constantly subject women to social

pressure to create a culture of shame or silence surrounding sexual harassment (Hardt and

Negri 2000:23). The masculine enforcement of power in regards to harassment adds to

women vulnerabilities in a culture of shame and silence. In the Middle Eastern structure,

sexual harassment reporting in Egypt is labelled as shameful and undignifying to women

and their parents. Statistics indicate that 83 per cent of Egyptian women have been

40

sexually harassed, where 97 per cent of those never reported the crime (Hudson et al

2013:182). In Egyptian society, women continue to be viewed as a possession of her male

beholder who is the closest male relative to her. In this sovereign structure, the male

dominant society imposes a 'culture of shame "where honor is worth more than a

woman's human right, worth more than her freedom, and certainly worth more than her

life" (Hudson et al 2013:10).

Gender biopower relations regarding the 'culture of shame' changes with social

technology developments. Technology does not in itself liberate women or challenge

social taboos, but the development of women's centred platforms and their attachment to

the body are responsible for slowly changing the culture of shame. As Joyce describes the

collective intelligence as means to form solidarity and coordinate action to achieve

political movements (Joyce 2010), the same notion applies to women resistance

movements. As Foucault emphasises on the “sexual body as a target and a vehicle of

biopower”, then online communication and technologies act as a platform to mediate and

remediate this power (Sawiki 1996:146). The biopower force accompanying technology

is more aligned with the western mode of thinking, fighting the culture of shame and

silence that accompanies sexual harassment in Egypt. Women performing as 'netizens'

have influenced their ability to express their anger and frustration. Within what Rosi

Braidotti terms as „cultural cartography‟, women‟s use of technology as a collective

platform engages women and makes them part of a community that tackles harassment

and empowers them to speak and fight for their causes (Braidotti 2010)27

. Dr. Nawal El

27

Rosi Braidotti puts the term "cultural cartography" (2010) in an interview with Rigenerazioni as what happens is what is happening to bodies, identities, belongings, in a world that is technologically mediated, ethnically mixed and changing very fast in all sort of ways

41

Saadawi, an iconic Egyptian feminist, says that there is a need to unite crowds and

activists with modern technology to achieve new levels of women freedom in Egypt

(Saadawi 1988:88). Dr. Saadawi resorts to feminist solidarity on both the local and the

global scale; in other terms she is resorting to biopower resistance forms. Crowdourcing

offers new forms of collaboration directed at singular causes because of the technology's

"internal architecture, its new register of time and space, its new relation of human to

machine, body to mind, its new imaginary, and its new articulation of culture to reality”

(Poster 2006: 84). The transmission of the online culture to reality leads to a reduction of

the culture of shame as a taboo and opens the platform for victims and activists to

highlight their problems and discuss them on online support groups. Online platforms

also expose the problem by transmitting women's accounts and posting it on

technological platforms. Zylinska recalls Foucault in his interpretation of the

technologies of the self "writing transforms the things seen or heard to tissue and blood"

(Foucault in Zylinska 2009:88), which is the process that makes harassment a tangible

and an approachable cause on online platforms. Online reporting also acts as a form of

storytelling which is a “strategy of resistance” in Haraway‟s terms (Sawicki 1996:154).

In a sense, the culture of reporting harassment has alternated due to the fact that there is a

biopower transformation from the traditional governmental structures to online platforms

that are influenced by the online communities, collective intelligence, and the

materialistic function of the web. As Braidotti says, "All technologies have a strong 'bio-

power ' effect, in that they affect bodies and immerse them in social relations of power,

inclusion and exclusion" (Braidotti 2006:30).

42

The recreation of life mediation through technological devices has resulted in shifting our

identities, giving more power to the platforms we utilise to project ourselves. As Foucault

says, "the relationship we have with ourselves are not ones of identity, rather they must

be relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation" (Foucault in Poster

2006:88). This shift in women's identity in Egypt is highlighted by the emergence of the

"machinic heterogenesis" as termed by Guattari (Poster 2006:84). An identity influenced

by the process of "subjectivation" that takes place on technological platforms. Women's

intimacy to technological devices that provides them with a sense of security, mobility,

and anonymity is within the power offered by technology. Women communicate to their

supportive community through devices that they don't feel are patronised by their

superior male power. This helps in avoiding the patriarchy of sexual harassment in

reporting the case and avoiding the feeling of guilt accompanied with it. The meaning of

this type of connectedness is portrayed especially in the use of mobile technologies in

developing countries. There are a number of case studies devoted to discuss the role of

mobile phones in confronting social problems in culturally sensitive communities. In a

study conducted in Anita Borg Institute of over 2,000 women in developing countries, as

well as interviews with 40 development and mobile experts states that " Nine in ten

women report feeling safer because of their mobile phones, while 85% say they feel more

independent" (Vital Wave Consulting: 2008). The digital culture and transformed identity

bypass the taboo and makes it easier for women to report sexual harassment and attach

their new emerging identities with their virtual counterparts rather than their surrounding

societies. As mentioned before, there is a social stigma that prevents women from

reporting, and as reported by Human Rights Watch “women in Egypt rarely report to the

43

police when they have been sexually assaulted" (Human Rights Watch 2013). This trend

differs with online reporting and geoplotting. Harass Map, OpantiSH, Tahrir Bodyguard,

and other online social groups receive constant and daily reporting from women who

want to share their stories and create a form of awareness both locally and internationally.

This form of online resistance is described in Hardt and Negri's emergence of biopower

where "nation-state is not capable of guaranteeing rights" (Hardt and Negri 2005:

kindle)28

. In Multitude War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Hardt and Negri

discuss the resistance power shift to NGOs and international organizations, where I think

social technology platforms and crowdsourcing are the next wave of biopower. In a

'glocal' technologically enhanced environment, crowdsourcing in Egypt is following an

international trend and applying western representation standards in addressing gender

topics, particularly sexual harassment. In an emphasis on a case study that utilises

crowdsourcing and crowdmapping in addressing sexual harassment, I will discuss a

platform dedicated to fighting sexual harassment in Egypt called Harass Map.

28

Kindle location: Kindle Locations 4736-4737

44

5.3 Harass Map: Performative Mapping for Women #EndSH

Harass Map is an independent initiative founded in 2005, fuelled by women‟s anger and

frustration towards their daily encounter with sexual harassment. Harass Map uses

frontline SMS and Ushahidi‟s free software to create an anonymous reporting and

mapping system for sexual harassment in Egypt (Harass Map 2013)29

. The founder,

Rebecca Chiao, is an American who came to Egypt to work in a local NGO specialising

in women‟s rights (El Refai 2011). Chiao describes sexual harassment in Egypt as the

“elephant in the room”. For decades, sexual harassment in Egypt has been surrounded by

a culture of silence emphasising the guilt and shame that women should feel by exposing

themselves to a situation that instigates men to sexually harass them. The shameful

situation here refers to either her indecent clothing or, her exposure to men in either a

socially unacceptable location or unacceptable timing. This male domination disciplinary

power in the society is a reflection of the patriarchy of the system that provides men with

29

Harass Map crowdmapping website: http://harassmap.org/en/

45

the power to overlook women‟s behaviour and associate women‟s bodies to the male

dignity and self. As the body is the centre of power, the regulation of the body is the

centre of biopower in this regard. The culture of shame surrounding sexual harassment is

the type of biopower that is applied based on tradition and culture to control over women.

Chiao believes that, from the data gathered across the years, it is clear that sexual

harassment “is a power issue”30

(El Sayed). Therefore, Harass Map works as a collective

resistance technology that resists the culture of shame in society by utilising interactive

technologically enhanced mapping platforms. Harass Map relies on the fact that around

100 per cent of women own mobile phones. A research conducted by the World Bank

states that the total mobile subscriptions in Egypt jumped from 13 million in 2005 to over

80 million in 2011 (Lee and Kermeliotis 2012). Harass Map collects reports from victims

through text messages, tweets, and e-mails that are then plotted on the map as red dots

and women reporters remain anonymous. The map has different coloured dots

representing different types of harassment and categories including catcalls, comments,

facial expressions, indecent exposure, ogling, rape, sexual invites, stalking, and touching.

The main mission of Harass Map is to fight the social acceptability of sexual harassment.

This initiative is employing online technologies to support offline community efforts

creating different forms of relationships women have with technology. A relationship that

contributes to affecting the „panoptic disciplines‟ related to the culture of shame in the

society (Sawiki 1996:147). As Zylinska describes in her explanation of the bioethics of

blogs, it is

30

Making Egypt a Safer Place: Rebecca Chiao at TEDx Barcelone Women: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JblRTiB7xeg

46

"merely mirroring the banality of their own and other's lives and the possibility

that they maybe reworking of life forces and establishing a new relation to one's

life (on- and offline) that the ethical potential of Live Web lies" (Zylinska

2009:88).

The social platform that women gather to exchange experience and overcome the social

barrier is a platform with a unified resistance cause that is empowered by the combination

of technology and the human agency. As mentioned earlier, online communities unified

by a cause harness collective powers and create a collective intelligence network. The

power of storytelling is a crucial as a form of resistance in feminist politics (Sawicki

1996:154). The narration of stories is a crucial component of its existence. Foucault links

"self-observation practices to agency and self-effeciacy" which relates storytelling like

self-mapping to the "care of the self" (Broadhurst & Lachon 2012:xii). This amounts to

the importance of self-mediation in tackling social and cultural issues. The choice of a

map with a visual representation incentive and different colours makes the map both

performative and truthful with user-generated geo-plotted information. Barbara Samuels,

a campaigner for fair housing at the American Civil Liberties Union says that "Maps help

you take complex information and portray it in a clear, intuitive manner. You can show

segregation in a way that talking about it doesn't do” (The Economist 2009). Community

maps are an effective mediation tool that reflects a powerful and urgent cause to the

international community. Therefore we can say that "despite all the difficulties that

women in particular and activist movements in general face, the world is witnessing a

new creative solidarity of peoples, a solidarity seeking common goals in the richness of

diversity" (Saadawi 1988:75).

47

As the 'culture of shame' is fuelled by „mass intellectuality‟ the bio power can then shift

to crowdsourcing initiatives to utilise this form of individualistic subjective power (Hardt

and Negri 2000:28). As Hardt and Negri assume that “agentic subjectivities within the

biopolitical context produce needs, social relations, bodies, and minds – which to say,

they produce producers", biopolitics produce subjective notions of fighting for a

particular cause. New formation of biopower associated with mass women movements

take place through the affordances of technological mediation including immediacy of

technology, the remediation of interactive performative media, and the virtual identity of

women influenced by the support of the crowd and the international audience. Biopower

movement to crowd-mediation as a form of resistance on technological platforms creates

what is termed a postmodern identity for Egyptian women. This postmodern identity is

responsible for alternating the culture of shame and silence associated with reporting

sexual harassment by integrating the emerging virtual culture within the realms of

technology. The crowdmapping project still faces a lot of challenges; however it is an

elaborate portrayal of the biomediation of sexual harassment within the realm of a

„humachinic‟ embodiment of women in the movement and action of the crowd.

5.4 Challenges for Online Sexual Harassment Mediation

It is naïve and deterministic to impose a utopian vision and reduce the complexity of the

social problem to an issue solved by technology. Crowd mediation on technological

platforms does not create the ideal universal society and solve culturally sensitive

problems. Mark Poster defines technological agency and affordances without falling into

notions of limited dualism saying that:

48

"Those speculations are not to assert the existence of an ideal domain of human

communication in cyberspace, nor is it even to suggest that the prospects for

improving the human condition are significantly enhanced by this network. It is

rather to call attention to the possibility for the establishment of global

communications, one that is practically dispersed across the globe than previous

systems, one that is inherently bidirectional and ungovernable by existing

political structures" (Poster 2006:84).

We cannot achieve global democracy by individualised, subjective movements. However,

as Hardt and Negri say "desiring and demanding global democracy does not guarantee it's

realization, but we should not underestimate the power such demands can have" (Hardt

and Negri 2005:xvi). Technology can be a very subjective tool and crowdsourcing results

in individualised opinions based on virtual disembodied communities. Due to the

subjective nature of online platforms, there is a high chance of the alienation of the

virtual communities and their segregation from offline grassroots movements. As Lister

et al mention in A Critical introduction to new media, some community practices are

anything but inclusive" (Barlow in Lister et al 2009:214).

There is also another mass movement opposing the international power enforcement of

women rights, basing their arguments on religion and tradition. This crowd adapts an

opposing view to the Western influence on women and they also act as a resistance tool

and a form of biopower. Rosi Braidotti has conducted an interview on nomadic culture

and collective participation of women and points out that we do not have to follow the

post-colonial model of feminism, and that we need to map out contradictions so that we

look at different feminist groups with different ethnic, religious, and social backgrounds

49

(Braidotti 2010). In this sense, there are right wing fundamentalist Islamists who are

opposing the global and biological transformation of power in the feminist movements in

Egypt. This power that has been established on a taboo and a social dogma can be

difficult to shake with liberal movements and virtual identities.

Moreover, "research suggests that young women have less access to new technologies

and experience lower usage of Internet." There is a clear gender gap in technology as

stated in United Nations reports. The "disparity extends to the world‟s most ubiquitous

technology: mobile phones." (Vital Wave Consulting 2008). Vital Wave Consulting has

produced a report that states that "women are 21% less likely than men to enjoy the

benefits of mobile phone ownership. This figure increases to 23% if she lives in Africa,

24% if she lives in the Middle East". This might pose a problem to online feminist

movements especially Harras Map who are using "digital geospatial data" to identify

sexual harassment activity and create awareness (Dodge, Kitchin, Perkins 2011:x).

Sexist and patriarchal stigmas are also present in virtual communities where anonymity

can lead to vicious hate campaigns on a male dominated Internet. Virtual violence can

become more vicious than real confrontations due to the disembodiment of the body from

the technology. Online harassment is also an issue, as many women are attacked by

cybermobs. Most people harassed online are women as the Internet is still considered a

male dominated sphere:

"Public space has traditionally been an entirely male sphere. It's only recently that this

has begun to change. But, like street harassment and the threat of violence that give it its

50

suppressive power, namely rape and physical assault, this kind of online abuse is largely

tolerated" (Chemaly 2013).31

The mentioned limitations are just a summary of the resistance that opposes the neo-

liberal global feminist forces in Egypt. However, it is important to note that the discussed

biopower is still influencing the culture of shame related to reporting incidents of sexual

harassment, causing a noticeable change of culture in the few past years.

31

Anita Sarkeesan, Canadian- American feminist is the author of the video blog "Feminist Frequency" and was heavily attacked by a massive online sexist hate campaign: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZAxwsg9J9Q#t=16

51

6. Conclusion

Technology is not the cause: we are the cause and technology is merely a platform.

Referring back to Foucault; all technologies old and new change our ontological

behaviour (Foucault1988:18). Therefore, the culture of shame associated with reporting

sexual harassment has been gradually changing especially on online platforms.

Resistance biopower portrayed in the crowds efforts on online platforms to challenge

taboos and social stigmas have tremendously increased. The recreation of life takes place

through the refashioning of identities that happens through the integration of the body

with digital technologies. There is a myriad of online initiatives and campaigns tackling

sexual harassment in Egypt. However, we have to note that the influence is more tangible

within the liberal, Internet literate societies. Recently, a Facebook campaign started

encouraging women to wear dresses again on Cairo streets in August 2013 with the

hashtag #WeWillWearDresses assigned to it. The campaign has gone viral on Facebook

and Twitter addressing women to dress freely in the streets. The campaign was

considered successful by some and shallow by others. (Hegazy 2013). However, it

remains to be an evidential proof of the change occurring in the culture. We must note

that power is not a unilateral relation; the impacts of technology platforms on the crowd

are multiple and lead to different end results that sometimes contradict each other. The

two bipolar power forces in Egypt create extremist opposing views in addressing women

rights. The bipolar powers are the liberal and the fundamentalist powers that approach

women's rights and culture from very different perspectives. Through my research, I

assume that the culture of shame attached to sexual harassment is noticeably changing

especially on online platforms. The online platforms have remediated both the concern

52

and the multimedia content leading to opening conversations on harassment on other

forms of mainstream media. Reporting harassment on online platforms does not solve the

problem but it provides a tangibility that can be used later in public and social policy

actions. While the present study has been focused on providing the social and cultural

context to biopower shift in the Egyptian feminist movement; I would like to suggest

further research on the psychoanalysis of women's embodiment of technology in this

cultural context within the racing speed of technology.

53

7. Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to my professors Joanna Zylinska and Sarah

Kember for their contribution to my understanding of media from a unique, critical,

and analytical perspective.

My gratitude also goes to Egyptian feminists throughout history who fought social

gendered stigmas, paving the way for current crowd-feminist movements to fight for

their rights and liberty

54

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