Digital social media played a vital role in shaping the political agenda of the Arab Spring, newly-released research suggests. But some analysts believe the young tech-savvy activists that arguably led the revolts are unlikely to be the beneficiaries of emerging transitions.
“Our evidence suggests that social media carried a cascade of messages about freedom and democracy across North Africa and the Middle East, and helped raise expectations for the success of political uprising,” said Philip Howard, an associate professor in communication at the University of Washington.
Liberation technology proved to be a vital tool for connecting activists and disseminating information, even if it did not determine the course of events.
“People who shared interest in democracy built extensive social networks and organized political action. Social media became a critical part of the toolkit for greater freedom,” he said, drawing on analysis of 3 million tweets, gigabytes of YouTube content and thousands of blog posts by the Project on Information Technology and Political Islam.
Social media did not cause the democratic upsurge, but did enhance citizens’ capacity to impact political events, said Howard.
“Recent events show us that the public sense of shared grievance and potential for change can develop rapidly,” he said. “These dictators for a long time had many political enemies, but they were fragmented. So opponents used social media to identify goals, build solidarity and organize demonstrations.”
Authorities’ efforts to stifle social media helped generate greater public activism, as in Egypt when officials’ shut down of the Internet prompted many middle-class Egyptians to go on the streets when they could no longer monitor events through social media, Howard said.
Tech-savvy activists were among the key drivers of the revolts, which confirm that the “Arab masses have started moving decisively towards democracy and accountability,” writes David Gardner, the FT’s international affairs editor:
It was Arab youth, numerous, educated and globalised but made to feel like outsiders in their own looted and prostrate countries, that upended a despotic order that incubated the most virulent forms of political Islam as its mirror image, engendering jihadism,” in its perverse embrace.
He cites Jean-Pierre Filiu’s analysis in The Arab Revolution: Ten Lessons from the Democratic Uprising of the upheavals as a call for “dignity, pride, honor”, and “a struggle for self-determination, for liberation from a corrupt clique, for regaining control and power over a nation’s and the individual’s destiny”.
The revolutions show that the al-Qaeda network “is just a parenthesis, a most dispensable one in the history of Islam and the Arab world. Not a culmination, but an aberration.”
The cyberactivists’ networks provide a potent alternative for the region’s youth, says Filiu, who believes “their power and their rage could be the energy of the future,” reflecting the actions of “the most exposed generation against the sterilization of its aspirations, the privatization of its nation-state and the obliteration of its future.”
Digital media facilitated “leaderless revolutions” with “no central planning and no operation room” which, Filiu insists, represent “not only a political choice but also a condition for survival.”
But subsequent events have highlighted the shortcomings of e-based “slacktivism” as the digitally-connected youth have been outflanked and out-organized by real world forces and movements. The region’s transitions could yet be subverted by illiberal actors, new governments’ inability to address the socio-economic grievances that motivated the revolts, and democrats’ incapacity to organize broad-based terrestrial coalitions.
“The ability of these movements to remain inclusive across religion, sect and class, in the face of provocative attempts to divide and rule, will be critical to preventing roll-back and restoration by the anciens régimes, and the return of jihadism,” Gardner concludes.
The Project on Information Technology and Political Islam is supported by the National Science Foundation and the George W. Bush Institute.
This article has One response