Facebook in Cairo: Not What You Thought

Social media amulets in Cairo

Aboard this Air Egypt flight from Cairo to Munich, I am grateful for five hours in limbo before being deposited back into Western life. After a week on the ground in Cairo with Jan Chipchase and other colleagues from frog design, I have a sharpened understanding of how little I know about this region. Anyone who has spent time talking to people on both sides of "the line" in Egypt is struck by the monumental gap between those found in the poor, illiterate corners of the city and the fountain-ringed office parks filled with the savvy Egyptian businessmen educated in the best schools the West has to offer. Our research traversed much of this continuum. While we were not in the poorest of poor areas (meaning, communities living in and mining garbage dumps), our interviewees ranged from the latte-sipping, shisha-smoking students wearing designer clothing to the tea peddlers in dusty, goat-filled alleys. When I asked, with the assistance of my translator, if they used Facebook, faces lit with a smile and a nod—even in the goat-inhabited corners.

Admittedly internet users in Egypt only make up a sliver of the population and some who claim to use it may only look over a friend’s shoulder. Yet, upon further questioning, three unfamiliar themes emerged around Facebook:

All about groups
People were telling me they used Facebook and then saying, “…you know, like ‘Friends forever.’ ’’ After a few puzzling conversations, it became clear that many go to Facebook each day - often on their mobile phones – just to read group pages like ‘Friends forever.’ Are these groups the Egyptian equivalent of Farmville? Obviously they are not games, but they produce a high volume of lightweight chatter that provides a constant umbilical cord of warm-fuzzy content connecting the Egyptians to one another.  This mirrors the offline relationships that display physical and emotional connectivity between people on the streets of Cairo and the extent to which Egyptians love to talk. On the connected front, men often walk arm-in-arm down the street, and girls stand and talk with one hand on the other’s shoulder. Any small verbal exchange, like when you approach a vendor to by a Coke, involves a surprising torrent of words instead of a fleeting transaction. This translates to the mobile space as well, as most Egyptians will tell you they’d rather talk than text. The cultural desire to deeply connect definitely drives behavior in the virtual social networking space in Egypt

Though our conversations, we found that people of all ages were visiting groups as their main action on Facebook.  While we mostly heard about this from teens and people in their twenties, a man in his mid-fifties, sitting in the shade on a dusty street corner, told me about a Facebook group called “My first love.” Later, our sixty year old driver introduced me to the group, “We love Egypt.” While the groups about friends and love contain predictable content (jokes about friendship and betrayal, poems about love and broken hearts) the “We love Egypt” group is more political in nature. A recent post on that site was calling for all Egyptians to join a type of work-for-Egypt movement a few weeks ago. Each person was asked to come to work an hour early and leave an hour later in an effort to deeply contribute to Egypt. Even the unemployed were asked to find something to work on for the day to improve the country.

Spam
In more educated circles, groups like “My first love” are often looked down upon. We heard complaints of that group’s content as 'spam’ when people post and re–post clips from the nightly news and political talk shows. With about eight hours of political content on national television every day and a country that has a deep desire for change, the temptation to post news containing allusions to change is irresistible.  It seems that it is driving some in this demographic away from Facebook to the more ‘filter friendly’ Twitter. One man told me that his Facebook page was merely covered with posts of the same three or four clips and nothing else. He has finally given up on it entirely and is now a Twitter fan.

Volume
The high volume of Facebook friends people have stood out as an apparent pan-demographic Egyptian truism. During our street interviews I initially wrote off many teen-agers’ claims of 300 plus friends as bravado. I’ve modified my perspective. My guides patiently explained to me that Egyptians diligently keep in touch with their extended family members, faithfully attending events in each other’s lives from weddings to birthday parties. Both lateral and cross-generational family connections are extremely important. For example, people often need to provide their grandfather’s name on formal applications.

There is likely some hyperbole in the amount of friends people have, but the generous Egyptian definition of family combined with a passionate loyalty towards relatives makes it easy to click the ‘Accept’ button on a friend request without the deliberation you often find in the West. A businessman I spoke with offered me ‘proof’ by showing a conversation thread on his phone between himself and family members about his father’s cousin’s son’s wedding. I have to admit, in this city of many millions, it did often feel like everyone knew someone just around the corner. The business men nearby us grinned and told me that in the rest of the world it may be six degrees of separation between any two people, but in Egypt it is only three.

Take family loyalty, extreme interconnectedness and an eagerness for change and you have the perfect eco-system for Facebook to thrive – with the space for growth. According to Socialbakers, Facebook users only represent 39 percent of the online population, but since the revolution on January 25th, the number of Facebook users has gone up by nearly 30 percent. As this number increases, it reduces the degrees of separation and increases unity. As long as self-inflicted spam does not get in the way, Facebook could become the force Egypt needs to feel truly unified in these critical post-revolution months.

Many thanks to the terrific frog team made up of Jan Chipchase, Justin Maguire, Basil Omar, Rayna Wiles, Juhani Lehtimaek and to our terrific student guides, Rana, Aida and Omar.