Egypt, Tunisia, the social media and the pinnacle of hypocrisy

Tonight as I opened my twitter feed I was shocked by the number of tweets celebrating Mubarak's resignation and Egypt's successful revolution; it's as if the entire World Wide Web was high on amphetamines. Absolute euphoria! As I type this very post, anonymous people from all over the globe are posting "congratulations" tweets and celebrating the end of a dictatorship, the end of a tyrant.

Indeed revolutions were always popular amongst the "watching" crowd… the passive crowd. In our modern times, a revolution has become one of the best entertaining and intellectually stimulating shows - especially if you live 370 miles away sipping your "American" coffee that you just bought from an anti-American coffee shop in some quiet neighborhood in Beirut. In my part of the world – a severely underdeveloped nation - the Egyptian revolution has become the talk of the town, and the most trendy topic to tweet or blog about. What do you know? We love Egypt and hate Mubarak;

Yet, to my untainted memory, no one bothered to think about neither of them before January 25, 2011 (which is another twitter trend #jan25). Any twitter user can go back to the public twitter timeline, hit the word #egypt and go back 2 months in time: you will not find a single tweet - or to be more precise a single non-Egyptian tweet- attacking the Mubarak regime. So what happened? Where did all this justness, nobility and care for the Egyptian people suddenly come from? My guess is that the twitteratis, facebook users or bloggers just found an exciting new topic to blog, tweet or simply talk about.

The reason behind my post is not to belittle the achievement of the Egyptian people. Honestly I cannot judge whether this is a monumental achievement or just a regular achievement. Nevertheless, it remains an achievement; I will leave it up to history to judge it and perhaps categorize it and quantify it; the same history which will write off the "2005 Lebanese cedars revolution" as an utter failure!

The main reason behind this post is to shed the light on the hypocrisy of the "social media" users. Had they been true believers in freedom and democracy they would've tweeted, blogged or shared their concern about the multiple oppressive regimes that are still reigning the Arab world. Truth is that no one cares - or to give the benefit of doubt – very few care about the fate of the Egyptians. A very recent example is what happened less than a month ago in Tunisia. Same hype, same trend and then what? Nothing! The party is over everybody went back home, and left the Tunisian people to clean up the mess; a mess, which most probably, they won't be able to clean on their own. I am not postulating that the change shouldn't have happened, but actions of solidarity have been magnified exponentially and were only restricted to 140 characters. Talk is cheap, especially when comfortably sitting on your lazy ass having a drink in a certain bar, enjoying your time and using your cutting edge cell phone. What would happen when the revolutionaries in Egypt will wake up in a week or two only to realize that none of this "hyperspace" support will actually help them solve their constitutional crisis or boost their crippled economy?

The next time we decide to selflessly and fanatically support a cause using social media, let us be less hypocritical and run a small background check on that cause before hitting the "send", "tweet" or "join" buttons.