Social Media, Global Communications, and the Arab Spring: Cross-Level and Cross-Media Story Flows

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the role of social media in global communications by focusing on social and communication factors that shape social media. In particular, this chapter analyzes the role of social media during the Arab Spring protests by focusing on social, political, and communicative factors that shaped the ways in which social media were adopted and used in global context. A cross-level and cross-media story flow model is presented to demonstrate and analyze the position that social media occupied during the Arab Spring protests. Based on secondary sources and data analysis, the author argues that the significance of social media during the Arab Spring was mainly due to the cross-level, cross-media, and global-local story flows that were shaped by users and social contexts. Analyzing the Arab Spring using the proposed model dismisses both the overly technologically deterministic argument and the no-effects argument. Instead, it provides an analytic tool to understand how the technical affordance of social media was utilized by individuals, groups, organizations, media, and nations to function as a channel for global story flows.