Spectres of the Good Old Days: Egyptian Facebook and the Sociotechnical Imaginaries of the Dispossessed

• In Event: Ghosts of Modern Futures Past – II

Abstract

Bereft of the present and future to look up to, the Egyptian middle class has turned to the past and particularly to what it perceives as "the images" of its lost cosmopolitan modernity both as refuge and as a powerful resource for cultural capital. I investigate this silent social movement through the lens of social media, particularly, Facebook, a platform that was once related to a promise of emancipation in 2011. I focus on the Facebook page “Alexandria 1900”, dedicated to collecting and exhibiting the images of what is referred to as “the good old days”, usually vernacular photography, postcards, and vintage memorabilia form 1900-1950s. These images represent a social imaginary of a lost modernity, a spectre of a specific social order, that is manifested through the technology of Facebook, related to each other via hashtags and comments, confined in groups and pages, and limited to the affordances of the medium. Thus, I argue that this online movement represents a complex sociotechnical imaginary of the past where both the social and the algorithmic imaginaries intertwine. I propose a theoretical advancement to the concept of sociotechnical imaginary by relating it to class dispossession and the collective sense of defeat that the Egyptian middle-class expresses currently. Through online/offline ethnography and digital methods, I propose a critical discourse analysis of the narrative of remembrance happening in this page over the past year, that dissects the relation between the image and the text and follows this spectre of the past in the present.

Author

• Nermin Elsherif, University of Amsterdam