“History has never been recounted in this fashion”

Reading these words on the back cover of Tweets from Tahrir, indicates a remarkable change in the way history is documented. Usually history is written by historians who study the past by the rules of their discipline, and sometimes they apply a public-oriented form of historiography, by which we mean the scientific study of the way normal people comment about the distant or recent past. In addition to this, there exists a special category of books that concentrates on the assemblage of historical accounts, and it is in this category that we should put Tweets from Tahrir, the book we will be discussing here. Tweets from Tahrir gives a compilation of historical accounts describing the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 by means of selected tweets, but the book does more than just that. The book zooms in on the cultural importance of the services that Twitter provides for our time, as it also tries to place the feelings of the tweeters who were involved in the Egyptian Revolution, all of this urgently with the intention to define the tweeter’s role in history. To a considerable extent it were the new media who attributed to the scope of the revolutionary year 2011 and made a substantial contribution to the way people organised themselves politically.

Read the full review at the Eutopia Institute of Ideas.