Jose, My pleasure! I believe humor can be seen as part of being playful in this specific context. While people like Brenda Danet have written about why the Internet is playful, I think playfulness here may have some other reasons that have to do with creating and maintaining a common background culture in the cyberspace. Humor varies across cultures and by cracking these jokes and invoking the shared background, a sense of 'Egyptianness' is created and maintained.As the activity takes place in an 'alien' territory (i.e., the FB walls of figures from other cultures), it becomes a way of making these walls look as Egyptian as possible (i.e., true occupation). That in turn helps unite and, yes, re-energize the group: We are similar, so we should unite and keep it up. It's sth like let's celebrate our culture here, let's chat and be playful, we've occupied that platform andwe should behave like typical Egyptians and make the environment typically Egyptian. The above motivation is also related to a sense of national pride and that's why many of the humorous comments are celebratory in essence. By calling political opponents names, drawing them as weak and helpless, and ridiculing them in every possible way, activists seem to be saying we don't care. It's celebratory because they feel they have achieved considerable successes. Perhaps a third aspect is related to the Egyptian culture itself. Egyptians like to call themselves humorous. In the Tahrir square, there was a lot of humorous slogans raised... My two cents! Best, -- Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Indiana University, Bloomington ________________________________ From: jose marichal <marichal@callutheran.edu> To: "air-l@listserv.aoir.org" <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2011 1:18:45 PM Subject: Re: [Air-L] #OccupyFacebook Thanks for this.... really interesting... I wonder if this represents a pattern in on-line mobilization movements..... might humor be a way to "re-energize" or otherwise open up a new front in a social movement. Jose On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 7:01 PM, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed <mumageed@yahoo.com>wrote:
Hi all,
I thought some folks on the list would be interested in this:
http://mumageed.blogspot.com/2011/12/occupyfacebook.html
It's a quick note on Egyptian activists' last iteration of efforts to 'guard' their revolution/'revolution'...
Best,
--muhammad abdul-mageed, Indiana University, Bloomington _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- _______________________________________________________________________________________ josé marichal, ph.d. | associate professor | political science <http://about.me/marichal> department | california lutheran university 60 w. olsen road | #3800 | thousand oaks, ca 91360 805-493-3328 _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/