"Facebook to Mobilize, Twitter to Coordinate Protests, and YouTube to Tell the World" New Media, Cyberactivism, and the Arab Spring
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 Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. Finally, the paper addresses the challenges academics have, and will likely continue to face, as we seek to measure, analyze, and assess the role of social media in political dissent and revolution. 74 Journal of Global Initiatives What's in a name? Dissecting Similarities and Differences in Uprisings To date, there is no official and consistent consensus on what to call the revolutionary movements that have spread across the Arab world beginning in December 2010 in Tunisia, spreading to Egypt, Yemen, and Libya in 2011, and still going on in countries like Syria and Bahrain. Some analysts call these movements the "Arab Spring" drawing on the eastern European precedents of 1989, which in turn draws on the Prague Spring of 1968. Others refer to the events as the "Arab democratic wave." A third group of observers call these movements the "Arab rebellion." A plurality of Arab analysts and supporters of these revolutionary movements prefer to describe them as an "Arab Awakening," an expression with clear antecedents in the social, national, constitutional, and even Islamic modern reformist movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries in this part of the world. Whatever various analysts and observers call these movements, they unanimously agree that these popular uprisings in the Arab world are certainly historical game changers (Willis, 2011) When western observers and media analysts started to use the term "Arab Spring" to refer to the demonstrations and protests that spread across the Arab world in 2011, it was not the first time the term was used in an Arab context. Back in 2005, western observers used the term "Beirut Spring" and the "Cedar Revolution" interchangeably to describe the Lebanese mass demonstrations against the Syrian military presence in their country, following the assassination of then prime minister Rafic Hariri on February 14, 2005. The protesters demanded an end to what they perceived as the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, resignation of the pro Syrian Prime Minister Omar Karami and his cabinet, and holding free parliamentary elections. The initial success of these demonstrations that resulted in the pull out of the Syrian troops from Lebanon and the collapse of the Karami government were touted by some western politicians and media experts as clear signs that democracy was coming to the Arab world via Beirut. As events unfolded in the following months, the Beirut spring unfortunately proved to be more wishful thinking than a social or political reality. This did not stop neoconservatives in and outside the George W. Bush administration from promoting a belief that the American invasion of Iraq and the toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime would bring Jeffersonian Democracy to the country and spark a democratization wave in the Arab world. Beginning in March 2005, those conservative ideologues started to use the term "Arab Spring" as part of the foreign policy lexicon in their appearances on conservative and mainstream media outlets. As a consequence, numerous media commentators in the United States began to use the term Arab Spring to suggest that a spinoff benefit of the invasion of Iraq would be the flowering of western friendly Arab democracies. The 2003 assumption died in the long Iraq war and the failure of the postwar democratic experience in the current failed state of Iraq. Several years later, the self immolation of a young Tunisian street vender, Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2010, sparked an Arab mass fire which is still (in 2015) burning and is often referred to as the Arab Spring. A Lexis Nexis search on the use of the term Arab Spring to describe the recent Arab uprisings shows that the term first appeared on January 14, 2011, in a Christian Science Monitor editorial about the fall of Tunisia's dictator Ben Ali. then on January 25, the first day of the Egyptian "Facebook revolution," Mohamed al Baradei, Egyptian opposition leader, Nobel peace prize winner, and former Mohamed Arafa and Crystal Armstrong 75 director general of the international atomic energy agency (IAEA) used the term "Arab Spring" to characterize the democratization movements in the Arab world in an interview for the German magazine Der Spiegel (Follath, 2011) The term thereafter became an intrinsic part of the framing of news about the Arab upheavals of 2011 in global media. while some scholars approach the "Arab Spring" as though it were a monolithic phenomenon, others (Baines, 2012) rightly point out the fact that while there were several common features and similarities among these democratic movements in various Arab countries, there was much about each of them that was unique. These scholars noted both the common threads of the Arab democratic movements as well as the uniqueness of each individual movement. Despite the recognized fact that the Arab uprisings were not a monolithic phenomenon, they do share many common features worth noting. These include high numbers of youth participation, a structure lacking traditional hierarchical leadership, nonviolent forms of contentious politics, evolving goals, and a degree of shared Arabic language and cultural practicescontributing to shared slogans and protest tactics. Youth Driven and New Media Channeled Large Protests All Arab uprisings included large demonstrations primarily driven by younger citizens using New Media such as cell phones and social networking platforms to organize, mobilize, and circumvent state controls over traditional media and public spheres. The New Media we are referring to here are not just technologies that function as delivery systems. They are also participatory cultural systems (Jenkins, 2006) While the role of more seasoned protesters is not to be ignored, the high numbers of youth participation in the uprisings, and their particular reliance on and tendency to innovate with New Media is of particular interest for this paper. Non Hierarchical Uprisings The Arab Uprisings did not take the shape of traditional protest movements. Initially, the uprisings lacked any visible leadership, charismatic individuals, or vanguard groups in any of the grass roots movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, and Yemen (Shah Sardar, 2011) As Merrick Nelson (2012) noted, the Internet based New Media allowed many individuals the opportunity to participate in these uprisings to create change. These revolutions did not begin nor were they sustained by any international forces or opposition political parties. They came into being and continued by grassroots mobilization of dissatisfied citizens. Traditional political ideologies and political parties were in fact absent from many of the Arab protests, at least in their early stages. Even Islamists, the purportedly best organized political opposition groups in Egypt and Tunisia, were playing catch up with the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. This particular trait of the Arab uprisings proved to be an asset rather than a deficit for these uprisings. Had there been visible leaders, it would have been far easier for the dictatorial powers of Ben Ali in Tunis, Mubarak in Egypt, and Ali Saleh in Yemen to target them for arrest or worse, and thus decapitate the revolutions in their respective countries. The absence of consistently recognized protest leaders and official mouthpieces for the uprisings made a top down approach to quelling dissent virtually impossible for dictators. 76 Journal of Global Initiatives What form did leadership take in the various upris