Last week, the Guardian had an excellent photo feature on Egyptian protest signs. And as the protests continue, there has been no shortage of images in the media of some truly excellent, pithy, and poignant protest placards.
Most of the signs that feature in these images are written in English. This is certainly a function of who is buying these photographs and who is their audience.
But what I find interesting is that protesters are choosing to communicate their frustrations, grievances, and demands in a way that opens the possibility for others around the world to directly understand them and express solidarity. Writing messages on signs in Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindi or other languages is something not common at protests in the Anglo-American world. Perhaps this reflects the privileges of having your own native tongue as the lingua franca?
But, something else is striking about many of the images we are shown of the Egyptian protest signs: the prominence of the iconography and idioms of cyber-culture.
Thus, as a means of expressing concerns with respect to human rights and democratization, are online platform names, twitter tags, and even video game tag lines the preferred common reference points for global communication?
And what is it about the products of cyber-culture that allows them to escape imperialist connotations in a way that other global reference points in popular culture (e.g., coca cola) cannot?
Image credits: Hannibal Hanschke/EPA, Asmaa Waguih/Reuters, Gilad Lotan, Anwar Amro/AFP, Ben Curtis/AP,unattributed,Ben Curtis/AP
