Art critic Hal Foster began his article, "The Artist as Ethnographer," by claiming, "one of the most important interventions in the relation between artistic authorship and cultural politics in ‘The Author as Producer’ by Walter Benjamin, first presented as a lecture in April 1934 at the Institute for the Study of Fascism…Benjamin urged the "advanced" artist to intervene, like the revolutionary worker, in the means of artistic production—to change the "technique" of traditional media, to transform the "apparatus" of the bourgeois culture.” In Egypt during the Nasser era, a period in which a military regime embarked upon the construction of a new civic identity for an independent Egypt, filmmakers began to explore issues of social inequity, colonial and feudal exploitation, changing gender roles, religious and cultural traditions and, finally, the disappointments of the revolutionary project itself.

In a recursive fashion, these same social justice and human rights issues have continued to reemerge in waves through 2011 and beyond. More recently aimed against the military regime, the cultural production—stories, symbols, and popular imagination—has again played a significant role in shaping the evolving national identity. However, during these revolutionary times, the cultural logic of our contemporary Egyptian national identity is not only articulated through cinema or broadcast TV as it was in the mid-20th century. Platforms of social media authored by everyone and disseminated to the world through the Internet have also become a powerful medium through which the messages are being broadcast.

By the end of this century’s first decade we had already moved from “new media” to “more media.” When the Egyptian revolution began, the ubiquity of computers, digital media software, and computer networks had led to the exponential rise in the numbers of cultural producers worldwide and the media they create—making it very difficult, if not impossible, to understand global cultural developments and dynamics in any substantial details using 20th century theoretical tools and methods.
In this investigation, I will introduce a new approach to studying culture that is produced at such large, computational scales and authored by many people. Alongside various ethnographic and film studies methodologies, cultural analytics provide new methods and intuitive visual techniques to address both the new and existing research questions, which currently drive the humanities.

To demonstrate this approach, I will analyze the visual elements, icons, symbols embedded in the many YouTube videos that have been collected on the Arab news feed and cultural aggregator, R-Shief, in particular, from YouTube channel Mosireen (with over 2.6 million views). Taking into consideration Walter Benjamin’s contribution to cultural politics, this examination will contextualize the new cultural memes in contrast with symbols from Nasser’s era, the “golden age” in the history of Egyptian cinema. Ultimately, this research seeks to understand the sensibilities and cultural logic(s) that are being expressed by the people. In what terms is the argument for human rights and social justice being expressed? What are the terms of these cultural productions on the Egyptian revolution?

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