The Spatiality of Protest... Coverage

One fascinating side-story to come out of the ongoing revolutionary uprising in Egypt has been the spatial emphasis in the media’s coverage. That the protests themselves have been quite essentially spatial (and urban) is unsurprising of course. As Lefebvre, Sassen, and others have long argued, political struggle in the modern era is in many respects fundamentally a struggle over space, with the urban the primary site of expression and contention (see also my post from last year on the link between urban space and "everyday" resistance). What is perhaps more surprising is the degree to which the media – especially, it seems to me, The New York Times online, in addition to Al Jazeera of course – has taken a street-level perspective and embraced the value of spatial data in covering and communicating the news.

From the beginning, right alongside the influential and eye-opening live coverage streaming from Al Jazeera’s website has been an emphasis on mapping the locations of the uprising. The NYT had similar information up almost as immediately. Op-Ed pieces with titles like "The View From Tahrir Square" quickly appeared. Particular spaces became the subject of coverage, such as the Kasr al-Nil Bridge, in the battle for which the Times declared "Egyptian hopes converged."

More recently, as government-organized supporters clashed with opposition demonstrators in the streets, the Times featured this striking graphic:

See also the one used atop this post. Meanwhile a Nicholas Kristoff op-ed piece in today’s paper captured the revolution from the micro-space of a few people in a few tiny corners of the square. And on television it has become quite common even on cable news for the desk anchor of the moment to throw it back “live to Tahrir Square” for an update. Hard to know what to make of this - it is certainly partly explained by the fact that these protests have in fact been largely focused on the particular and iconic space of this square, much like the Berlin Wall and Brandenburg Gate a generation ago. And the sheer amount of information of all types being made available by media outlets is the bigger story overall. But it is fitting that, with "the Arab street" having long been an important concept in political science, international affairs, and even foreign correspondence, the uprising in Cairo has welcomed an especially urban spatial consciousness in the media that now has the technology to visualize it as well.

UPDATE: one more nice map from the New York Times summing up 18 days of protest: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/02/12/world/middleeast/0212-egypt-tahrir-18-days-graphic.html?hp