Explaining the role and impact of social media in the ‘Arab Spring’ (original) (raw)
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The role of social media in the Arab uprisings – past and present
Social media in the Arab world before the recent revolutions had been described as marginal, alternative and elitist, and their impact minimal because of the low penetration rates of the internet. The 2011 events across the Arab world have brought ‘social media’ to the forefront, with many crediting Facebook, weblogs and Twitter with facilitating the revolutions that have taken place. Yet we have not fully understood the role of social media during the recent events and the convergence of social media with not only mainstream media but also with actual street demonstrations. Moreover, the role and significance of social media during recent events across the Arab world has varied greatly. What are the cultural, technical and political variables that are conducive to using social media for mobilization? How have citizens and states used social media during the uprising and beyond? How do we research social media movements in the Arab world? A total of six articles in this issue aim to answer these questions. Eaton’s article investigates the use of internet activism in Egypt during the 2011 events. In detail, the article outlines how social media were used by Egyptian internet activists to increase mobility on the ground, starting from the Facebook campaign ‘We Are All Khaled Said’ and leading to the ousting of Mubarak. Gerbaudo’s article, on the ‘kill switch’ as a ‘suicide switch’, focuses on one critical event during the 2011 uprising in Egypt: the internet blackout imposed by Mubarak’s regime during the first days of the 2011 Egyptian revolution and its effect on mobilization. Using empirical research conducted with online activists, the article reflects on the highly complex and ambivalent relation between offline collective action and social media. Ben Moussa’s article takes a step back and examines the strengths and limitations of various theoretical approaches to researching collective action in the Arab world. Critical of the common pitfalls of technological, social and cultural determinism, the author suggests a multidisciplinary approach that draws on social movement theory, radical democracy theory and alternative media theory to study Muslim-majority societies. Marc Owen Jones turns our attention to a country largely ignored by the mainstream media, Bahrain. His 10-month virtual ethnographic study, conducted during the uprising in 2011, examines how the Bahraini regime used social media in a number of different ways to suppress both online and offline dissent. Such methods included naming and shaming, offline intelligence gathering and passive observation. This is followed by the insights of an academic and practitioner into the use of social media during the Syrian uprising, which continues two years after the initial revolt in 2011. Harkin’s article explores the changing media ecology in Syria since the uprising and focuses on how Syrian society is constructing alternative ways of disseminating information. The article by prominent blogger Hussein Ghrer is a sober examination of the role of social media during the uprising in Syria. It highlights the importance of cultural, social and political factors that affect how and why people use internet tools. It contrasts the use of social media in Syria with social media use in Tunisia and Egypt, reminding us again of the importance of context. Unfortunately Ghrer was arrested on 16 February 2012, two days after submitting his first draft to WPCC. Online journalist, and friend of Ghrer, Maurice Aaek, comments on the article a year later, in February 2013.
The Alchemy of Revolution: The Role of Social Networks and New Media in the Arab Spring
The rise of Arab bloggers and cyber activists is not the product of a spontaneous generation. The Arab Spring is rather the social outcome of decades of struggles for civil and political rights, which matured within the virtual space-time generated by an Arab media system wherein press, radio, satellite television, web and mobile telephony constitute different layers of complexity. • Social networks and new media played a catalytic role in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. They accelerated local social reactions, synchronized different levels and intensities of uprisings and permitted the coverage of events through real-time footage directed to global public opinion. • The Arab Spring might herald the first social revolution of the 21st century. It epitomizes the revolt of a new individual and a new collective voice against various forms of fear, control, manipulation and disinformation. Just as economic crises do, social uprisings are transversal and can propagate worldwide wherever "freedom, justice, dignity" are restricted or scorned.
The Role of Social Media in Arab Spring
Since the first wave of “Arab Spring” revolution swept across parts of the Middle East and Northern Africa more than a year ago, it has been increasingly debated whether – or how much – Social Media tools played an instrumental role in that. Some observers deemed these tools so effective for organizing protests and revolutions in the toppling of regimes in Tunisia and Egypt that the uprisings were described as Twitter / Facebook Revolutions. In an inevitable backlash, others have pointed out that revolutions happened long before computers were invented. Although the uprisings are far from over and the digital data is still flowing in million bytes, this paper will attempt to analyze how crucial a role Social Media and other digital communication technologies can play during a crisis by taking Arab Spring as a test case. From enabling people to disseminate information and organize events in an instant, to providing alternative press in authoritarian societies with little or no freedom of expression, it will argue that Social Media is qualitatively different from conventional media in empowering citizens and therefore its effects on shaping the course of a crisis are also qualitatively different. It will further argue that although each country’s circumstances are different and more research on the effects of online activism is needed, Social Media and digital technology likely played a crucial role in helping turn what had been undercurrents of dissent into open revolt in Arab world. It is not to say that these technologies are sufficient –or even necessary – to achieve political reform. Nevertheless, communication technologies deserve credit as a contributing factor in these democratic revolutions to the extent that Arab uprisings would not have happened at the speed and in the manner in which they did without Social Media.
More than a Facebook revolution: Social Movements and Social Media in the Egyptian Arab Spring
The International Review of Information Ethics, 2012
Public opinion leaders and activists characterized the Egyptian "Arab Spring" of January 2011 as a "Facebook Revolution". They highlight the intrinsic power of social media as an influencing factor for social change. Undeniably, social media played important roles in that revolution process. However, these roles cannot be disconnected from the socio-political contexts. This paper discusses the use of social media, particularly of Facebook, by the April 6th Youth Movement (A6YM), a decisive actor of the Egyptian protests. It is based on the analysis of two Egyptian newspapers and one American newspaper, between 2008 and 2011. We propose that a) social media provided alternative mechanisms for political expression and organization, b) social media contributed to the genesis and consolidation of the A6YM and to the establishment of youth political identities, and c) the combination of "bits and streets" amplified not just the movement's mobilization but the degree of opposition experienced by the Egyptian regime.
Social Media Activism in the Arab Uprising
A version of this paper was presented at the First West Asian Studies National Convention, Centre for West Asian Studies, JNU on 14 November 2014. The goal of this paper is to place the role that new social media has played in achieving collective action using the early events of the Arab uprisings and the experiences of Egypt and Tunisia as particular references. Almost four years since the uprisings began, their disrupted momentum has challenged the oft hypothesized and heavily mediatized season of unified Arab awakening. The political economy of communications differed across the affected region making it evident that these countries were in different stages of social, economic, political and digital development. This informs why different regimes were more or less vulnerable to opposition (including cyberactivism) and why the structure of opposition, in turn, varied. Though resisting techno-optimist narratives, the paper seeks to explain the communicative and connective power of social media in the Arab context as well as its disruptive potential in discourse-shaping. In setting up the stage for street protests, the use of ICT’s by Arab activists most crucially aimed at revealing an accurate picture of their respective societies, not just within but also to a broader international audience. Rather than support the cohesive neoliberal success stories quoted in the international media, the respective online Arab publics cast film onto the reality of everyday economic and political repression. Moreover, Arab cyberactivists created virtual forums for citizen journalism through enabling ordinary citizens to question regime legitimacy and record instances of governmental brutality, corruption and violations of human rights. This allowed for the continued exchange of civic discourse, deliberation and articulation, enhancing the region’s social capital and contributing to the growth of a tentative virtual civil society. The liberating role of cyberspace in overcoming gender, class and geographical barriers is, however, tempered in the final analysis by the contradictory impact of networked technologies – in terms of the quality of content generated and by whom as well as the capacity of regimes and traditional political actors to monitor, control and manipulate online communication (“Tyrants can tweet too”). Further, in the persisting debate between those on the optimist and pessimist sides of networked technology communication, an underlying tension is that while leaderless network structures can mobilize and even unite a disparate coalition of protestors around issue- specific demands such as “The people want the fall of the regime”, they are ineffective at articulating nuanced demands in the subsequent negotiation processes. Cyberactors are also reluctant to participate in the political processes of party building and institutional organization. In other words, digital storytelling supersedes the political communiqué and expressive protest- politics tends to depoliticize the impact of cyberactivism.
Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective, 2016
Research on media and contentious politics in the Arab world point to the vital role that social media played in the Arab Spring. For the purposes of this article, the Arab Spring is defined as a series of demonstrations and democratic uprisings-and in the cases of Libya, Syria, and Yemen armed rebel movements-that arose independently and spread across the Arab world from Tunisia and Egypt to Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria in 2010-2011 and beyond. This article advances the theoretical assumption that while not causing the Arab uprisings, New Media (defined here as all forms of digital communication technology including satellite television, cell phones, social networking, video-blogging, and citizen journalism platforms that allow broader dissemination and participation than traditional print or broadcast media) provided the technical infrastructure for these uprisings to develop, sustain, and intensify over relatively short periods. With this assumption at its focus, this paper digs out the political, economic, social, and cultural roots of the Arab Spring. It explores how Arabs' hunger for decentralized news and information paved the road for the organic growth of a new breed of Arab "citizen journalists." It describes how New Media technologies, which Larry Diamond (2012) of Stanford University calls "Liberation Technologies" have combined words and images on iPhones, Blackberries, laptops, and social media platforms and managed to turn previously underground oppositions in several Arab countries into Virtual Public Spheres. It explains how the socalled "Generation-in-Waiting" who could no longer wait and took to the streets in waves of demonstrations against police brutality, economic deprivation, corruption and dictatorship. It then examines how these Liberation Technologies helped to convert Arab subjects into engaged citizens. It assesses how these revolutionaries broke the government monopoly on traditional media and used New Media to mobilize, organize, and take to the streets. Furthermore, it explains how this enabled the Arab revolutionaries to "occupy" in a matter of days, not just the virtual cyber-space, but also the physical space including Habib Bourguiba Avenue in Tunis, Tahrir Square in Cairo, Pearl Square in Manama, and the University Quarter in Sanaa, which ultimately brought the fall of entrenched dictators
Social Media & the Arab Spring: How communication technology shapes socio-political change
Orient: German Journal for Politics, Economics and Culture of the Middle East, 2016
Although social media was not insignificant, we need to take a wider view examining the interac- tion between interpersonal communication, social media, and satellite TV to understand how the Arab Spring was documented and witnessed by local and global audiences, and how the protests were mobilised. Social media was a clearly important catalyst for the uprisings, but it may also ex- plain why the Arab Spring failed in the medium-term: Multimedia and multi-platform communica- tion environments, which facilitated the rapid diffusion of information, are good at supporting the kind of loose coordination necessary for defenestrating one system of authority. But they are not (yet) good at supporting the kind of deep and sustained coordination that designing and support- ing new political authority requires.
THE SPRING OF THE NETWORKED NATIONS: SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE ARAB SPRING
This essay argues that social media played an important role in the Arab Spring and contributed to a change in the political culture of some of those countries that have gone through regime--change through 2011--2012. The article further posits that the contribution of social media was mainly instrumental, not causal, and that the main reasons behind the Arab Spring were problems generated by regional, local and global trends, affecting each country differently.