Twitter Revolution Research Articles

The Twitter Revolutions: Social Media in the Arab Spring

JURIST Guest Columnist Kevin Govern of Ave Maria School of Law says that social media and networking have proven pivotal in the success of the Arab Spring protest movements in a manner that was previously unforeseen by commentators and scholars.

The facebook and Twitter revolutions: Active participation in the 21st century

Abstract In the past few years, a wave of protest has spread across the world. The particularity of these uprisings lies in the way the Internet is used to support them. Scholars have analyzed these movements as being closely related to a generation that relies on the Internet as a means of organizing themselves as a force of social change. That is, the Internet is seen as a way of promoting the active participation of young people in political issues. Public opinion and the mass media hail the Arab Spring revolutions as movements beneficial to the democratization of oppressive regimes. By contrast, when disobedient movements emerge in democratic countries, they are generally more cautious in evaluating these movements as enriching democracy. This cautious opinion also concerns the use of social media. In this article, the so-called Twitter revolutions are discussed in light of the theories of social psychology that analyze the relationship between disobedience and democracy.

Social media, social movements and the diffusion of ideas in the Arab uprisings

This article studies the 2011 Arab uprisings as social movements for political reform and regime change. Social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, are perceived to be playing a central role in these events, which have even been described as ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter revolutions’. Using diffusion theory, this article examines the role of social media and the extent to which they can be credited for the emergence and achievement of the goals of the uprisings. It argues that while social media played important facilitation roles in terms of inter- and intra-group communication as well as information dissemination, mainstream mass media are still highly relevant to the process. However, the success or failure of the uprisings largely depends on domestic factors and broader geopolitical contexts. This article demonstrates that the use of social media in the Arab uprisings has significant implications for diffusion theory in terms of contact and identity among the social movements involved.

Technology Cannot a Revolution Make: Nas-book not Facebook

“What happened in Tunisia was not a Facebook revolution, and what’s happening now in Egypt is not a potential Twitter revolution...technology cannot a revolution make.” --Nicholas Thompson (“Is Twitter Helping in Egypt?”) in the New Yorker, January 27, 2011 Examining the ongoing academic debate over the effect of the new social media on social movements, I get the impression that we are returning to the era of the “magic bullet” theory that was popular at the beginnings of the past century when people were fascinated by the power of the then-new media outlets of radio and film. The belief then was that the effect of these new platforms was massive and uniform. The present euphoria about social media suggests that we are going through another cycle of theories about media effects, returning to the “magic bullet” argument.

Influences of media on social movements: Problematizing hyperbolic inferences about impacts

Pronouncements about the value of information and communication technology (ICT) (hereafter traditional, new, and social media) to social movements – hyperbolic in popular media references to new and social media (e.g., Facebook revolution, Twitter revolution, etc.) – invite scholarly inquiries that critically assess the implications of these assumptions for African countries. Sensing the tendency toward technological determinism, a position which Castells warns is fraught with failure to recognize complex interactions between society and technology; authors examined popular press vis-à-vis scholarly assumptions about the value of media during social movements. Questions that critically analyze the roles and power of old versus new media in social movements should be posed particularly about 21st century iterations with citizens increasingly doubling as creators and disseminators of news and information. For example: to what extent do various media comparatively facilitate or constrain activists in social movements? How have new ICTs assisted citizen activists in circumventing the power and reach of traditional media? How have the roles of traditional versus new media in social movements been framed in the popular press and academic journals? What contextual factors (e.g., communal networks; third-party- and foreign-interventions, digital divide, etc.) may be accountable for the take-off and successes of social movements? In a continent fraught with cultural, political, and socio-economic divisions of historic proportions, authors critically assessed cases across Africa of variegated employment of old (i.e., radio, newspaper, television) and new media platforms (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, mobile telephone text messaging) by four social movements spanning 35years. Assessments underscore citizen empowerment and multiplier capabilities of new media but affirm the value of contextual factors that minimize hyperbolic assumptions about the contribution of new media to the formation and progression of social movements.

Book Review: Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran

Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran. Annabelle Sreberny and Gholam Khiabany. London: I.B. Tauris, 2010. 240 pp. $75 hbk. $27.50 pbk.In June the world was riveted by news of demonstrators taking to the streets in Tehran to protest the reelection of Mahmud Ahmadinejad. Images of a young woman, Neda Agha-Sultan, dying in the street were posted on YouTube and watched by hundreds of thousands. Ultimately, Iran's Twitter Revolution did not lead to a regime change. Although Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran was largely written before the uprising, Annabelle Sreberny and Gholam Khiabany explain the roots of the protest and give context to the events of 2009.Sreberny, professor of global media and communications at the University of London and president of the International Association of Media and Communication Research, builds on her earlier studies of communication during the Iranian revolution in 1979. Khiabany, a reader in international communication at London Metropolitan University, has written about the paradox of modernity in the Iranian media.In Blogistan, they draw on news accounts, as well as reports from Iranian bloggers and previously published studies, to describe the growth of the Internet and blogosphere in Iran. They argue that when the country's regime suppressed traditional media and face-to-face political discourse, the Internet became the space for political debate. In creating an atmosphere of suspicion and keeping people indoors with little to do but fiddle with computers, the regime helped to induce a generation of digital adepts, the consequences of which it was to rue in the summer of 2009, they write.Sreberny and Khiabany carefully make their case, reaching back in history when necessary to give context to present developments. In chapter 1, the authors describe how the Iranian government both used and sought to curtail access to the Internet following the 1979 revolution. The government's ambivalence toward technology gave rise to ad hoc and contradictory regulations. Internet growth in Iran has been phenomenal. In 2006, eleven million Iranians had access to the Internet, an increase of 50% over the previous year. Still, Internet usage has been stymied, not only by government restrictions, but by the country's financial crisis, which leaves citizens with less money to spend on computers and Internet access fees.In chapter 2, the authors explore reasons behind the growth of the Iranian blogosphere and conclude that despite political oppression-and even because of it-Iranians have embraced blogging as a means of self-expression. Sreberny and Khiabany estimate that there are seventy thousand Iranian blogs; many are personal diaries that espouse the writers' interests in sports, games, and entertainment. …

Thoughts on Revolution, State Aid and Liberation Technologies

The terms 'Twitter Revolution' and 'Facebook Revolution' gained currency during the so-called 'Arab Spring' which began in early 2010. It was then that representatives of the conservative Swedish coalition government began to make increasingly overt statements regarding the role of social media in the uprisings in North Africa, and the desire of the administration to offer not only political, but also material support to 'Net activists' working in the region. In this paper, I will discuss a number of the ways in which the Swedish government addressed and rationalised such support, and I will expand on the conclusions reached in a study conducted on the discourse surrounding technology and social change present in Swedish policy documents and political speeches. Of particular importance to the study was the question of the extent to which the Swedish government utilised what is called a 'liberation technology' perspective on the use of social media in the service of democratic change.

New Media and Democratisation

New Media and Democratisation John Doyle Centre for International Studies, School of Law and Government, Dublin City University This issue of Irish Studies in International Affairs opens with a collection of articles on the question of 'New Media and Democratisation', drawing on a series of papers presented at the annual conference of the Royal Irish Academy's Committee for International Affairs, held in Dublin in November 2011. The 'traditional' media coverage of the Arab Spring emerging across North Africa and the Middle East during 2011 started a high-level debate on the actual and potential impact of social media in facilitating communication and mobilisation internally in authoritarian states, and also in allowing activists to communicate internationally. The international communication might ultimately have been the more significant (due to limited access to means of communication internally), as it gave media organisations and international activists direct access to information and, crucially for the media, powerful images that commanded widespread attention. Combined with the broad support for internal protests in some countries in the region, this made it very difficult for those states who traditionally lent support to the authoritarian leaders, who they perceived to be better allies than popularly elected Islamist parties, to continue such support. Using the changes in the Arab world as a starting point, Professor Philip Seib (from the University of Southern California), one of the leading international figures on public diplomacy, explores the pressures for diplomacy from, first of all, the vast range of information sources now available to policy-makers and their advisors, and also from the expectations of speed from a public used to getting 'instant' news updates. His analysis of the tensions created by the competing pressures of instant response and the need for careful analysis is an extremely valuable contribution to this debate. Of course, the debate on new media and democratisation goes far beyond the Arab spring. I§il Turkan (Science Po Aix-en-Provence and Bah?e§ehir University, Istanbul), using Turkey as a case study, highlights the tensions caused by a relatively accessible 'new' media in situations where the work of journalists is constrained, not only by controls in advance of publication but also by threats afterwards. Christian Christensen (Uppsala University) provides a very interesting discussion on the ways in which the Swedish government has rationalised offering not only diplomatic but also material support to 'net activists' working on the Arab Spring, and he seeks to analyse the extent to which the Swedish government utilised what is called a 'liberation technology' Irish Studies in International Affairs, Vol. 23 (2012), 1-4. doi: 10.3318/ISIA.2012.23.1 2 Irish Studies in International Affairs perspective on the use of social media in the service of democratic change. In another angle on the role of new media, Michael Foley, Nóirín Hayes and Brian O'Neill (Dublin Institute of Technology) describe a training programme for young journalists in Turkey, Romania, Georgia, Macedonia, Serbia, Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan, which sought to imbed a children's rights perspective into journalists' training, using new media both in the delivery of training and as an opportunity for building alternative journalism platforms. Bringing these debates back to Ireland, Paul Candon (Trinity College Dublin) explored the use of online intervention in the 2011 Irish general election to examine the extent to which online media represented a new 'public sphere', promoting greater accountability and deeper democratisation. His conclusion highlights the very limited extent to which this actually occurred and is an important counter to the overly exaggerated stories of 'Twitter revolutions'. He does, however, also highlight the increasing use of new media for organisational purposes by political organisations. Ireland is not simply just one other country dealing with a global phenomenon. Behind the construction led elements of the Irish economic boom was a much more sustainable focus on information and communication technologies, and any economic recovery from Ireland's current crisis will need to be grounded in a 'knowledge economy'. The universities will need to play a crucial role here, not only as knowledge generators in new technologies, but more fundamentally in developing a culture of enquiry and problem-solving to deliver a knowledge-based society, and this has...

Thoughts on Revolution, State Aid and Liberation Technologies

The terms 'Twitter Revolution' and 'Facebook Revolution' gained currency during the so-called 'Arab Spring' which began in early 2010. It was then that representatives of the conservative Swedish coalition government began to make increasingly overt statements regarding the role of social media in the uprisings in North Africa, and the desire of the administration to offer not only political, but also material support to 'Net activists' working in the region. In this paper, I will discuss a number of the ways in which the Swedish government addressed and rationalised such support, and I will expand on the conclusions reached in a study conducted on the discourse surrounding technology and social change present in Swedish policy documents and political speeches. Of particular importance to the study was the question of the extent to which the Swedish government utilised what is called a 'liberation technology' perspective on the use of social media in the service of democratic change.

Arab Revolutions and the Iranian Uprising: Similarities and Differences

A year and a half after the Iranian uprising in 2009, the unprecedented popular uprisings in several Arab countries at the beginning of 2011 provided some of the most evocative moments when power met its opposite, in decisive and surprising ways. In a matter of weeks, some of the most powerful hereditary/republican regimes in the region, such as Tunisia’s and Egypt’s, crumbled under relentless pressure and opposition from highly mediated “street politics” that shook the foundations of authoritarian and repressive rule, undermining hegemonic structures and configurations of power within nation sates and between nations. Technology, as in the case of Iranian uprising, emerged as one of the main explanations on offer to make sense of this new wave of revolts against tyranny. The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt in particular, inevitably drew some comparisons with the Iranian uprising of 2009. The most significant question for many Iranians was how come that the two revolts in Iran and Tunisia which immediately and rather simplistically labelled as ‘Twitter revolution’ had a totally different outcome? Many in Iran started raising such searching questions: “Chera Tunis Toonest v ma natoonestim?” (Why Tunisia could and we couldn’t) or “toonestan az Tunis miad”! (Capability comes from Tunis). So how can we compare Arab Revolutions with that of situation in Iran? What the different outcomes tell us about the similarities and the differences, and what lessons can be learnt? This paper takes a broader comparative frame, beyond technology, to explore the issue of power and revolutions and to examine the similarities as well as the differences between Iran and the Arab World.

Journalism as usual: The use of social media as a newsgathering tool in the coverage of the Iranian elections in 2009

ABSTRACTThe Iranian elections of June 2009 and the ensuing protests were hailed as the ‘Twitter revolution’ in the media in the United Kingdom. However, this study of the use of sources by journalists covering the events shows that despite their rhetoric of the importance of social media in alerting the global community to events in Iran, journalists themselves did not turn to that social media for their own information, but relied most on traditional sourcing practices: political statements, expert opinion and a handful of ‘man on the street’ quotes for colour.This study shows that although the mythology of the Internet as a place where all voices are equal, and have equal access to the public discourse continues — a kind of idealized ‘public sphere’ — the sourcing practices of journalists and the traditions of coverage continue to ensure that traditional voices and sources are heard above the crowd.

Security in a Communications Society: Opportunities and Challenges

Information can often provide a key power resource, and more people have access to more than ever before. In this world, networks and connectedness become an important source of relevant power.3Joseph S. Nye, Jr.Power always depends on context.2 The year 2011 has made Joseph Nye's statement starkly visible concerning all actors in realm of security policy. The Arab Spring uprisings (still ongoing in Syria) and protests that have erupted in nations around world of ineffective government policies regarding global financial and economic crisis have categorically proven that political stability (security) cannot be considered and achieved only in context of institutions and norms of representative democracy, or through inspiring fear and beliefs in a closed These events have demonstrated forms and scales of political activity, and have called for competent political participation. What unites them, in spite of their widespread geography, is that they were organized and conducted with help of communications technologies.The current context of security policy is communications The phenomena that fall under rubric of have radically changed characteristics of objects of security (individuals, society, state), as well as problems facing security - starting from Twitter revolutions, going through protests of the indignant, and culminating in key role of social as tools of soft power. This article is an attempt to assess and analyze parameters of these changes as challenges and opportunities for security systems in a communications society.The Communications SocietyUntil recently, we used to define world that we live in as an information society. But if we carefully analyze trends of past decade, we could argue that this statement does not reflect well enough specifics of present anymore. Although quantity of accessible continuously increases, today it is more appropriate to say that we are witnessing a revolution that provides alternative instruments for communication. These technologies focus not on increasing volume of accessible information, but on developing various innovative and effective forms of mass from central points to large numbers of people, and also on creating modes of exchange between individual actors. The phenomenon of is moving toward obtaining status of main explanatory principle in many of social sciences.The evolution of Internet at beginning of twenty-first century saw development of a variety of technologies that combined to create what is known as Web 2.0. This stage in Internet's evolution is characterized by social networks, social media, and user-generated content - by granting of creative agency to individual users, not just outlets. A vital feature is use of Internet not only as a communication medium but also as a platform.3 These platforms can be created and improved upon both by designers and users. One of most significant outcomes of Web 2.0 is creation of social (new) as a means for online mass information, where every Internet user - even those without any special programming abilities - can take part in process of creating, storing, and disseminating socially important information, addressed to a wide audience.4The widespread dissemination of these new media has turned them simply into the media for a large number of people. The following are considered traditional media: printed material (newspapers, magazines, etc.), radio, television, cinema and video programs, and digital editions (so-called Web 1 .0) of newspapers, information, and news feeds. Although no official scientific definition exists yet, notion of new media characterizes Internet-based (Web 2. …

Noted: The twitter revolution


 
 Reviewed book edited by Philip Behnke
 
 
 
 Publication date: October, 2011
 
 
 
 
 This book provides an informative snapshot of where contries in and around Asia are with thier technology and how governments are responding. Behnke binds together reports from Pakistan to the Pacific, some of which include analyses of election such as the 2010 'Twitter election' in Australia, and more conflicting chapters of politics such as the Thai 'Red Shirts' political crisis during 2010, as well as the 2010 Philippne election. 
 
 

BB = BlackBerry or Big Brother: Digital media and the Egyptian revolution

This article examines the use of digital media in the 2011 Egyptian revolution (25 January–11 February), termed by many analysts and commentators a “Facebook revolution”, “Twitter revolution”, “digital revolution” or “electronic revolution”. Such appellations highlight the role of the youth who organized and mobilized for the revolution and the essential role played by digital media. Disengaging from the controversial debate over whether Egypt’s revolution was instigated by social media or simply used them for its purposes, the article demonstrates the uncontestable role that social networks, text messages, and satellite news channels played as a tool of control and manipulation, on the one hand, and a mode of resistance, on the other. Delineating some key reasons why the Egyptian revolution came to be associated with digital media, the article shows the government’s reaction to the threat posed by such media through analysis of a key moment on the night of 27 and 28 January 2011, when the Egyptian government decided to cut off all Internet and smart phone connections. Through a detailed chronology of the development of events during that period of blockage, the article analyzes the government’s decision along two axes: manipulation through blockage and manipulation through propaganda and brainwashing. It concludes by showing how the government’s attempts to sabotage the revolution came in the end to be used subversively by the protestors as means of resistance. It injected the revolution with more momentum, and in fact inadvertently led to its success.

Religious Cosmopolitanism?: Orhan Pamuk, the Headscarf Debate, and the Problem with Pluralism

Is cosmopolitanism compatible with religion? This essay explores what it might mean to cultivate a sensibility of religious cosmopolitanism through the study of narrative literature. I begin by analyzing the intersection of these terms — the religious and the cosmopolitan — across their longue duree . The resulting history helps to clarify how and why cosmopolitanism, conceived and theorized in opposition to political boundaries, has come to conceive religion — religious practices, convictions, and communities — as its theopolitical limit while becoming increasingly compatible with nationalism. To travel smoothly among the flows of global culture and public reason, one need not abandon the nation, but one must, in the dominant account, be willing to shed the parochial trappings of religion — or at least relegate such attachments to one’s private life. In a time of Twitter revolutions and constant connectivity, celebrants of globalization and its critics alike are prone to thin accounts that fall back on metaphors of a flat world and the short text. Against the perils of the short and the flat, this essay celebrates the long formats and sustained acts of imaginative investment fostered by narrative literature. Focusing on Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow , I analyze the ways in which worldly faith and parochial secularity unravel the religious/cosmopolitan agon. As Pamuk’s novel underscores, because the most prominent boundaries of the modern world system are not territorial or political but religious, any cosmopolitanism worthy of the name must offer a model of inclusivity and universalism that both recognizes and reckons with the substantive differences that separate varieties of religious and secular experience.

Media and the Arab uprisings of 2011: Research notes

In the opening months of 2011 the world witnessed a series of tumultuous events in North Africa and the Middle East that soon became known as the Arab uprisings. What is striking about them is not only their historical momentousness and stunning speed of succession across so many countries, but also the different ways in which media and communications became inextricably infused inside them. Indeed some have been so bold as to label them as the ‘Twitter Revolutions’ or ‘Facebook Revolutions.’ This, however, does less than justice to the media complexities involved. This essay sets out to capture something of the broader, overlapping and interpenetrating ways in which media systems and communication networks have complexly conditioned and facilitated these remarkable historical events and communicated them around the world. In this way it aims to broaden the frame of reference for future in-depth, scholarly research.

Discourses of Technology and Liberation: State Aid to Net Activists in an Era of “Twitter Revolutions”

Although the use of social media for the purposes of protest organization and dissent in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya was widely reported by bloggers, journalists, and academics, these reports were rarely rooted in detailed research. In fact, the terms “Twitter Revolution” and “Facebook Revolution” have now been called into question as overly techno-utopian, and as ignoring the use of social media by authoritarian regimes for the purposes of repression. Despite this lack of concrete evidence, representatives of the Swedish state were quick to declare social media as key tools in the battles over freedom of speech rights and democratic change. On January 21, 2011, the Swedish Minister for International Development Cooperation published an opinion piece in the Expressen newspaper, titled, “Net Activists Are the New Democracy Fighters.” The response of the Swedish administration—primarily how the administration made clear links between technological innovation and democratic/social change, and translated those links into concrete action in the form of aid—raises a number of questions regarding the ways in which a powerful stakeholder appears to assume a causal relation among technology use, the expansion of access to information, and democratic change. The purpose of this article is to examine how the technology discourse forwarded by the current Swedish government—in policy documents and public statements—reflects a liberation technology perspective on the relation between technology and sociopolitical change in developing countries, particularly in relation to possible foreign aid to net activists.

Social Media and the Organization of Collective Action: Using Twitter to Explore the Ecologies of Two Climate Change Protests

The Twitter Revolutions of 2009 reinvigorated the question of whether new social media have any real effect on contentious politics. In this article, the authors argue that evaluating the relation between transforming communication technologies and collective action demands recognizing how such technologies infuse specific protest ecologies. This includes looking beyond informational functions to the role of social media as organizing mechanisms and recognizing that traces of these media may reflect larger organizational schemes. Three points become salient in the case of Twitter against this background: (a) Twitter streams represent crosscutting networking mechanisms in a protest ecology, (b) they embed and are embedded in various kinds of gatekeeping processes, and (c) they reflect changing dynamics in the ecology over time. The authors illustrate their argument with reference to two hashtags used in the protests around the 2009 United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen.

Iran and the Democratic Struggle in the Middle East

Many commentators in the West have referred to the uprisings sweeping the Middle East and the Maghreb as the “Arab Spring”. If we take a closer look at the young Middle Easterners who launched these democratic demands, it is clear that the Arab Spring started in Iran back in June 2009. As such, the Arab Uprising had a non-Arab beginning in Iran’s Green Movement, and in what was known as the “Twitter Revolution” of young Iranians. Furthermore, the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt have reenergized Iranian civil society, helping it become fi rmer and more outspoken in its demand for democratization in Iran.

New Media and Social‐political Change in Iran

AbstractThe increasing penetration of new communication technologies into everyday life has attracted a growing interest in the social, economic and political implications of these technologies. Most studies have looked at Western democratic societies and the literature on the developing countries is unfortunately small in comparison. In 2009 Iran witnessed a political upheaval in the aftermath of the presidential election in which the Internet was utilized effectively by the political opposition. News and videos of police brutality and repression were uploaded online, including onto social networking sites, in what was called the ‘Twitter Revolution’. Expectations rose on the capacity of new media to bring about democratic change in Iran. Later developments, however, showed that ‘mouse clicks’ alone do not produce profound political changes. In this article we look at the role of the new media and the social and political functions it took on in the post election period. We suggest that, firstly, new media has helped ordinary citizens and the political opposition challenge the government's monopoly of information. Secondly, we suggest that new media have paved the way for the emergence of a global public sphere for Iranians across the globe. This article also looks at the social and cultural impacts of the satellite channels which have been an ongoing source of concern for the Iranian conservative regime. Finally we take a critical stance and analyze the effects of new communication technologies in light of the ‘digital divide’ and ‘the radicalization of the Green Movement’.