One of the more interesting facets of the current upheaval in Egypt is the importance of religious services. The evidence – while still _very_ tentative – suggests that Internet and cellphone based social networking played a considerably more important role in Egypt than in Iran (where arguably it had no direct role in organizing protests). But shutting down the Internet did nothing to stop the protests. Why? Because people were already going to congregate at Friday prayer, and mosques hence served (as Marc Lynch says on his “Twitter feed”:http://twitter.com/abuaardvark ) as natural ‘focal points’ for social action. This is strongly reminiscent of the Leipzig protests, as described by “Susanne Lohmann”:http://www.jstor.org.proxygw.wrlc.org/stable/2950679
bq. Since 1982 the Nikolai Church had been conducting peace prayers on Mondays from 5 to 6 P.M. In the course of 1989 small-scale protests occurred in connection with the peace prayers, leading to a number of arrests. By mid-1989 the church and the peace prayers were firmly established in the minds of the people as an “institution” of protest associated with the local oppositional subculture.
bq. It was commonly known that each Monday at about 6P.M. a large number of people would come streaming out of both the Nikolai Church and other nearby churches that held late afternoon services. Many of these people would cross the Karl-Marx-Platz, the central town square. We know from the diary of one of the regular demonstrators that small groups of friends typically met on Monday afternoons in the city center, where they would join churchgoers and other strangers to form a demonstration.
One of the most significant problems in coordinating widespread collective protests in undemocratic regimes is figuring out where and when people should meet. One can converge upon major public sites – but one faces obvious risks in so doing, unless one is already part of a large group. When there is (a) a social institution or set of social institutions through which people meet in large groups at particular places at regular times, and (b) that institution is vaguely or strongly associated with unhappiness with the regime, then they help solve this problem. People can meet and congregate in larger groups and then take action. Mosques (in a country where the Islamic Brotherhood is repressed) can obviously play that role in Egypt and did play that role. Even without any other means of communication, people could plausibly have predicted that the mosques’ Friday services would be the obvious place for protestors to congregate in large groups (or, if there was no large group, to reassess the probable costs of protest and slink away).
Hence their centrality to today’s protests, and hence the failure of Egypt’s attempts to prevent people communicating with each other. Protestors do not _need_ to communicate with each other when they can independently arrive at a very good surmise about when, where and how protests are likely to begin.