Networked activism and 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

Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research, 2011

The Egyptian uprising of 2011 was characterized by the instrumental use of social media, especially Facebook, as well as Twitter, YouTube and text messaging by protesters. Facebook, in particular, was hailed as a key mobilizing tool for the protest movement, spurring the mass demonstrations of young protesters converging on Cairo's Tahrir Square during the uprising. Of the Facebook pages that gained popularity in the Egyptian online community, one page in particular, 'We Are All Khaled Said', was credited with mobilizing and organizing the largest number of protesters. An English-language sister page with the same name was launched approximately at the same time, but was geared more towards spreading awareness in the international community of human rights violations and ongoing events in Egypt, rather than organizing protests on the ground. This article will discuss the multiple roles and changing functions of this particular Facebook page during different phases: namely before, during and after the Egyptian revolution, as well as its potentials and limitations in acting as an effective tool for public mobilization, civic engagement and political change.

The ongoing Arab Spring Revolutions since 2011 have generated a growing dialogue about the role of social media as a tool for political mobilizations. While there is a large body of literature on the topic, this study takes as its starting point the digital activism in Tunisia during the months that preceded the uprising in Tunisia in order to map the network on social media before the 17 th of December, when the Arab Spring started in Tunisia. Some of the main results of this analysis show that they were structured through dense informal networks on social media and they used this platforms for geared toward developing, sustaining and, sharing collective identities in order to fight against the regime of Ben Ali. According to this, the overall conclusion appears to be that Tunisia's network public sphere was a hybrid model, composed of digital elite, on the one hand, who are predominantly affluent, highly educated urbanities and, on the other, peripheral nodes that are located away from the central nodes of the Net.

2023

The fomented fulminations of social disarray, rebellious revolts and the outrageous outbursts of scandalously turbulent political turmoil inflamed during the dystopian plight of the Arab spring have been monumental milestones and remarkably watershed moments old-anchored in the Arab political history and its cultural memory. The tragic war casualties, catastrophic disasters, the horrendous butcheries of innocent civilians and collateral damage have been quintessential centerpieces of intense national and international media coverage alike. Hence, amid the chaotically sweeping whirlwind of such insurgent uprisings and insurrectional upheavals, the indispensably fundamental role of digital media, the practical serviceability of New Information Technologies (ICTs) and Cyber-Activism or digital disobedience become thought-provoking areas of extensive research theoretically reconfigured within the contextual contours of cyber-anthropology and digital sociology.

In this new era of digital revolution, the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are transforming many aspects of modern society. The power of ICTs as a means of passing information to heterogeneous audiences makes it a veritable tool in mass mobilization. Owing due to these ICTs a new form of activism has emerged known as cyber-activism. The Egyptian Revolution can be perhaps regarded as the best example of this new interaction between civil society movements and the new media. Through social media the Egyptian activists were able to carve out a virtual public sphere where they could create political awareness without the interference of the state security.

CyberOrient , 2012

The wave of Arab revolutions and uprisings that has been shaking all corners of the Arab Middle East since 2011 and that has come to be known as the Arab Spring owed a major portion of its success to online activism. The spark that ignited these revolutions in the offline world was ignited by the Arab cyberactivists' well-coordinated campaigns, calling for the toppling of corrupt regimes in their home countries. These campaigns were launched through various forms of social media, such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and Flicker with the goal of introducing drastic political changes and allowing for a higher margin of freedom in a region that has often been associated with autocracy and dictatorship. Three Arab countries in particular-Egypt, Tunisia and Libya-have witnessed sweeping transformations, leading to the ousting and court trials of members of their old regimes and the holding of democratic presidential and parliamentary elections. This study utilizes qualitative, on-the-field interviews with cyberactivists in these three countries to provide a unique perspective into how they have paved the way for a new era of openness and democratic reform in their respective countries.

Global Trends 2013. Peace - Development - Environment

Since the 1990s, the rapid diffusion of new electronic communications ("new media") and technological advancements in this field have changed the role of these media in society. This trend also impacts on the opportunities for political mobilisation and protest. Unlike the traditional mass communications, with newspapers and TV as lead media, the use of the Internet via computers and mobile phones facilitates individualised mass communication, allowing user-generated content to be shared with a virtual community. In this way, users can bypass governments and the mainstream media, in their established roles as conceptual, commercial and organisational gate-keepers and agenda-setters, and use the World Wide Web to transcend the local and, indeed, the national public spheres. With reference inter alia to the upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East, this article demonstrates that the opportunities afforded by the digital media, especially new social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, etc., should, nonetheless, not be overestimated, and that besides having a potentially democratising and emancipatory effect, these new media harbour a number of risks and potential for misuse.

Arab Media & Society , 2012

There is no doubt that social media has played, and are still playing, a crucial role in the calls for political change that have swept the Arab region. However, their role as catalysts for political change and mobilizers for political action must be contextualized within the broader political and social structure in each country, with all their respective complexities and unique qualities. Therefore, in comparing and contrasting the role of cyberactivism in the Egyptian revolution and in the Syrian uprising, one year since they began, it is important to compare and contrast the underlying nuanced social, political and communication structures unique to each country, as well as the different roles of their various political actors and the types of online and offline communication strategies they deployed.

Book Teaser, 2015

How is the adoption of digital media in the Arab world affecting the relationship between the state and its subjects? What new forms of online engagement and strategies of resistance have emerged from the aspirations of digitally empowered citizens? This book tells the compelling story of the concurrent evolution of technology and society in the Middle East. It brings into focus the intricate relationship between Internet development, youth activism, cyber resistance, and political participation. Taking Tunisia - the birthplace of the Arab uprisings - as a case study, it offers an ethnographically nuanced and theoretically grounded analysis of the digital culture of contention that developed in an authoritarian context. It broadens the focus from narrow debates about the role that social media played in the Arab uprisings toward a fresh understanding of how changes in media affect existing power relations.