What has the ‘Arab Spring’ taught us about the role of digital media in political uprisings and democratisation? What are the implications of these events for our understanding of how democratisation works today? This study argues that social media have become a significant tool for civil society. New information technologies give activists information networks not easily controlled by the state and coordination tools that are already embedded in trusted networks of family and friends.
Since the beginning of 2011, social protests in the Arab world have cascaded from country to country, largely because digital media have allowed communities to unite around shared grievances and nurture transportable strategies for mobilising against dictators. In each country, people used digital media to build a political response to a local experience of unjust rule. Digital media became the tool that allowed social movements to reach once-unachievable goals, even as authoritarian forces moved to devise both high- and low-tech countermeasures.
Real-world politics is about much more than what happens online. However, digital media helped to turn individualised, localised, and community-specific dissent into a structured movement with a collective consciousness about both shared plights and opportunities for action:
- Digital media spread the details of successful social mobilisation across the region.
- Facebook provided a logistical infrastructure for the initial stages of protest in each country. Text-messaging systems fed people with information about where the action was, where the abuses were and what the next step would be.
- Widely-circulated PDFs of tip sheets explained how to pull off a successful protest.
- The Atlantic Monthly translated and hosted an ‘Activist Action Plan’ and boingboing.net provided tips for protecting anonymity online. Telecomix circulated ways of using landlines to circumvent state blockages of broadband networks.
- Information brokers used satellite phones, direct landline connections to ISPs in Israel and Europe, and software tools for protecting user anonymity, to supply the international media with pictures of events on the ground.
It would be wrong to suggest that digital media can cause either dictators or their opponents to succeed or fail. However, several aspects of the Arab Spring challenge our theories about how such protests work:
- These movements had an unusually wide or ‘distributed’ leadership.
- The first days of protest in each country were organised by a core group of literate, middle-class young people who had no particular affiliation or ideology
- Broadcast and print media – long associated with the mobilisation phase of democratisation waves – took a backseat to communication via social networks.
- This communication did not consist of simple ideological messages beamed by an elite at a less-educated mass public, but had the character of a many-sided conversation among equal individuals.
