More than five years have elapsed since the appearance of the unprecedented waves of protests that engulfed the Middle East and North Africa (hereinafter referred to as MENA). During these years, revolutions, counterrevolutions, civil wars, coup dâĂ©tats, and political status-quo maneuvering have failed so far, with fragile and questionable exceptions here and there, to usher the region into or at least situate it on the track of democratic transition. This is neither very surprising nor exceptional. Scholars in diverse disciplines are still struggling to theorize about the origin of revolutions and uprisings, and have yet to account for their outcome. As Goldstone (2003) reminds us, while the roots of revolutions are located in social, economic, and policy transformations, their processes and outcomes are determined by different factors, including elite conditions, international conjunctures, and ideological and ideational innovation (pp. 1â5). Adding another layer to this indeterminacy is the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs), particularly the Internet in these events, which continues to be a hotly debated and deeply polarized issue. On the one hand, technology-centered perspectives advance, the notionâalbeit with different shades of determinismâthat the Internet and social media have played a decisive role in engendering the unprecedented wave of uprisings in the region. Skeptics, on the other hand, have raised doubt about the alleged role of technology, with many scholars arguing that technology has played a limited role, if any, in generating and sustaining the revolutions and subsequent political activities.
In fact, critics have rightly highlighted the complex conflation of socioeconomic variables and regional and international conjunctures that have coalesced towards creating the right conditions for the revolutions. The ramifications of globalization on the region, failure of development policies, epidemic corruption and cronyism, soaring unemployment rates, especially among young and highly educated people, the expansion of middle classes, repression and the abysmal record of basic human rights are among the most-cited factors that have coalesced to produce an optimal setting for radical dissent and popular revolutions to flourish (Castells, 2012; Khosrokhavar, 2012; Mason, 2012; Muasher, 2014; Pollack et al., 2014).
Undoubtedly, communication technologies do not cause revolutions and uprisings any more than they determine economic and social development. While commentators are right to criticize technological determinism, they seldom provide alternative interpretations on how we can better understand the role of new media in the ongoing revolutions and historical transformation. Communication technologies are tools appropriated by social actors to achieve specific goals. When these tools are used they also shape what these actors can do and, in the process, can transform the actorsâ objectives and their implications. This applies to the field of political dissent, where social actorsâ contentious politics is dialectically linked to the repertoires available to them. As Tilly and Tarrow explain (2007), âwhen people make collective claims, they innovate within limits set by the repertoire already established for their place, time, and pairâ (p. 16). That is, while new media such as the Internet and mobile phones have not produced political change in the region, their diffusion has certainly transformed the information and communication ecology in the region, thus facilitating the development of new forms of social movements and a culture of dissent that played a key role in the ongoing uprisings.
In fact, the most important issue is not to ascertain whether or not social media are behind the current uprisings; what is more urgent is to analyze how new communication technologies, as socially embedded artifacts and phenomena, are intersecting with various social structures and processes to produce âhybridâ spheres, and a âspace of autonomy,â to borrow Castellsâ nomenclature (2012, p. 222). Understanding the Internet as a hybrid space allows us to transcend the dualistic oppositions between what is normally perceived as irreconcilable elements and phenomena such as the technological vs. the symbolic and the social vs. the subjective. Certainly, the Internet has intrinsic features and modes of operation that are rooted in the hardware and software proper to its structure and morphology; nevertheless, it is equally rooted in and shaped by social actorsâ usages, legal regulations and protocols, economic and business institutions and structures, as well as social divisions, discourses, and regimes of power. The conception of the Internet as being embedded in the social and the material-phenomenological worlds and experience âallows us to go beyond the common duality between utopian and dystopian understandings of the Internet and electronic space generallyâ (Sassen, 2004, p. 80). Thus, instead of examining the degree to which the Internet has produced political revolutions and uprisings in the MENA countries, the present work seeks to understand multiple forms of articulations between traditional and âoldâ media, on the one hand, and new media, particularly in the Internet, on the other; between mediated and non-mediated forms of communication and political expression; between offline and online forms of collective action; between old and new forms of journalism; and between alternative and mainstream media and communication. These articulations, as many chapters in this book demonstrate, can sometimes develop spaces of autonomy, resistance, and hybrid practices empowering social actors to act beyond the limits set by asymmetrical forms of hegemony, while in other cases empowering them to play only a secondary if not a marginal role compared to more traditional forms of communication and collective action (see, for instance, Chap. 5).
Moreover, much of the debate around the role of the Internet in the Arab Spring has conveniently focused on the period situated between the appearance of the Tunisian uprising in December 2010 and Morsiâs ascension to power in June 2012. It is a perspective that follows the logic of highly visible events and media spectacle to the detriment of a deeper analysis that pays closer attention to how communication technologies have contributed over the years to paving the way for the uprisings. The use of ICTs in political dissent in the region, in fact, dates back more than a decade. These technologies and platforms have for many years played a critical role in expanding the limits of agonistic public spheres and collective action repertoires since the late 1990s. In Egypt, for instance, the Movement for Change, Kifaya (which means âEnoughâ), launched in 2005, efficiently tapped into new media, including Facebook, to mount a vibrant resistance to Mubarakâs regime (Oweidat et al., 2008). This also applies to other countries such as Tunisia and Morocco, where oppositional civil society and social movements have drawn on the Internet in collective action for much of the first decade of the twenty-first century (Ben Moussa, 2013). Studying the role of social media in the ongoing upheavals in the region therefore needs to be situated within a wider historical context in which the intersections between ICTs, socioeconomic variables, and cultural processes are taken into consideration in the explanation of the seemingly âsuddenâ and rapid eruption of popular protests and revolts that have swept through the region. Longitudinal studies such as the one conducted by Eid Mohamed and Emad Mohamed in Chap. 4 on the political and PR maneuvers of the Muslim Brotherhood over many years prior to 2011, and El-Masryâs and Auterâs study on the framing of the Egyptian military coup dâĂ©tat in Chap. 8 are examples of efforts to fill this gap.
Equally important, commentators have generally dealt with the issue within the framework of regional and state politics. Nonetheless, the unprecedented uprisings engulfing the region constitute significant developments of historical proportions that call for fresh perspectives in order to understand their ramifications, which extend beyond regional politics and societies. Khosokhavar (2012), for instance, points out that the uprisings are the first truly âmodernâ revolutions in the Arab world heralding a renewed meaning of the self, the other, and the individual vis-Ă -vis grand ideologies and societal collective consciousness (p. 2). Similarly, Dabashi (2012) contends that the revolutions signal the end of postcolonialism as an extension of colonialism and the rise of a post-ideological era characterized by âcosmopolitan worldlinessâ and the decline of absolutist ideologiesâfrom nationalism and socialism to Islamism (pp. 9â11). In the same vein, both Castells (2012) and Mason (2012) perceive the Arab Spring as being part of a worldwide struggle led by social movements against the global financial and economic empire and its surrogate national governments that have denied people the right to shape their fate and construct egalitarian societies. As Mason (2012) aptly argues:
Concurring with him, Castells (2012) maintains that the rapid spread of waves of protests and popular uprisings across the globe is not a mere coincidence; nor can it be interpreted solely against the background of local politics and power dynamics at the national levels. While taking place in diverse sociopolitical and cultural contexts, these protests share a common indignation against neoliberal policies and their ravaging impact on societies across the world:If the Arab Spring had happened in isolation, it might have been categorized as a belated aftershock of 1989; if the student unrest had been part of the normal cycle of youth revolt, it could have been quickly forgotten. But for the momentum gathered, from Iran to Santa Cruz, to London, Athens and Cairo, the events carried too much that was new in them to ignore. (p. 65)
Analyzing the implications of the Internet in the Arab Spring thus has to overcome the common pitfall of reducing the events into purely political phenomena pertaining to and originating from the Middle East and Oriental Arab World. This can only be done by situating these events and processes within regional and global transformations and conjunctures encompassing economic, technological and cultural fields. Joo-Young Jungâs study in Chap. 2 does exactly that as it succinctly analyzes the interconnections between regional and global media flows that contribute to framing the uprisings and their understanding around the world.The movements spread by contagion in a world networked by the wireless Internet and marked by fast, viral diffusion of images and ideas ⊠It was not just poverty, or the economic crisis, or the lack of democracy that caused the multifaceted rebellion ⊠But it was primarily the humiliation provoked by the cynicism and arrogance of those in power, be it financial, political or cultural, that brought together those who turned fear into outrage, and outrage into hope for a better humanity. (Castells, 2012, p. 3)
Understanding Collective Action and Technology in the MENA Countries
Indeed, addressing these issues and others is a task that often faces additional theoretical and methodological obstacles underpinned by hegemonic discourses on the region. Indeed, scholarly literature on political culture, in general, and political activism and political communication, particularly in Muslim-majority societies, has remained remarkably under-theorized, as it is isolated from mainstream literature on collective action and social movements (Wiktorowicz, 2004). It also gives priority to metrics and digital artifacts over theories and explanations (Howard, 2011). Until recently, public opinion and the public sphere in the region have been predominantly framed in terms of an âArab streetâ, an epithet that connotes âpassivity, unruliness, or propensity to easy manipulationâ (Eickelman & Anderson, 2003, p. 62). The âexceptionalistâ perspective of majority-Muslim societies subscribes to the enduring neo-Orientalist narratives prevalent in some corners of academia that âfocus on the qualitative analysis of historical, textual, or anthropological data in making their caseâ (Brynen et al., 2012, p. 99). Such perspectives have also informed interpretations ...