Mobile phone users in Egypt are using American location-based social network Foursquare to “check in” throughout that country, including the tumultuous Tahrir Square, site of repeated and ongoing protests first against the Mubarak government and now against the interim military government that took its place.
Tahrir Square has been checked into 1,821 times to date; its “mayor” (the user with the most recent check ins) is a gentle-looking man named Khaled Ali. Ali has checked in at the Square 42 times in the past 60 days. He’s also the Foursquare Mayor of spots like Ard El Golf, the Cairo Roastery, Carino’s italian and a venue titled simply “Revolution” — a figurative place also located in Tahrir Square.
Most moving perhaps is that people have used their phones to snap pictures from the Square and upload them along with their check-ins. Egypt is a place where telecommunications are developing quickly; this August, Alcatel-Lucent installed the region’s first 40 gigabit per second system in Egypt, connecting the Middle East faster to the rest of the world, via cables to France. While much attention has been paid to the region’s use of mobile social networks to organize protests, there’s also something to be said for their use in recording everything from the revolutionary to the mundane. As novelist Teju Cole wrote this week in a critique of the snarky Twitter hashtag #firstworldproblems, citizens of the world are all now engaged with and dependent on modern mobile technology.
