New Media and the Arab Spring
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Transcript of New Media and the Arab Spring
New Media and the Arab Spring
Alexander HannaDepartment of Sociology
October 4, 2011
Agenda
Narrative of the Arab Spring
Focusing on Egypt
New Media
What's next?
Narrative of the Arab Spring
The Spark
Tunisia Mohamed Bouazizi Sidi Bouzid Ben Ali
#sidibouzid
The Fuel
Egypt Khaled Said Police Day
The Blaze...
Libya Syria Yemen
Bahrain … (Morocco, Algeria?)
Focusing on Egypt
January 25 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThvBJMzmSZI January 28 and internet
blackout Sustained occupation
of Tahrir and other squares
New Media in Arab Spring
Starting from Tunisia, mass attention paid in Twitterverse
Not only from US and abroad, but also from other Arab countries
Different roles of the medium (will get to in a second...)
Includes Arabcentric media ecology AlJazeera, AlArabiyya
Social Graph of @ifirka (Sami ben Gharbia)[source: giladlotan.com]
A Big Ado About Social Media
Malcolm Gladwell – 'Small Change'
Jay Rosen – the generic 'Twitter Cannot Topple Dictators' article
Is the ado about... nothing?
Not 'if' but 'how'
Zeynep Tufekci: 'There has been a false debate. Was it social media or the people? Was it social media or the labor movements? Was it social media or antiimperialist movement? Was it social media or youth? These questions are wrong and the answer is yes. The correct question is how.'
But 'how' exactly?
Citizen journalism Internal and External
Consensus Mobilization Action Mobilization
Citizen Journalism
Internal Egypt's restrictive
media ecology External
International solidarity
Forcing IR community to pay attention
Citizen Journalism
'In a dictatorship, independent journalism by default becomes a form of activism, and the spread of information is essentially an act of agitation.'
Consensus Mobilization
Described by Bert Klandermans Attempts to actively mobilize consensus in a
population
Ideological work 'Frame alignment' (Snow et al. 1986) Priming for action
Action Mobilization
Other side of consensus – getting people to act Coordination and solving of traditional collective
action problems
What happened in Egypt?
Initial sense based on interview fieldwork this summer
Coordination on January 25 Mutual assurance of protesting
PostJan 25: citizen journalism Less consensus mobilization
Don't have to convince people that Mubarak is terrible
Bottom line on social media
Like everything, depends on context
Media ecology Access Politics
Contributes to specific processes
What's Next?
Regimebuilding Still fighting in Syria, Yemen, et al. Social media's role in the future of Egypt?
Differing opinions: mobilization different from building institutions
Thanks!
[email protected] http://alexhanna.com http://twitter.com/alexhanna