Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: The wake-up call for millions of people in Arab countries is now.It began with the events of the Tunisian uprising in December 2010 and proliferated, leading to similar revolts later, in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, and other Arab nations.While resistance movements and confrontations between the state and the rebels are ongoing in most of these countries at the time of this writing-namely in Libya and Syria-the focus of this feature section is limited to Tunisia, the initiator of this revolutionary wave, and to Egypt.Both revolutions happened almost simultaneously, and they share a number of similarities regarding communication technologies' role in shaping the outcome of the uprisings.This collection of articles is meant to shed light on the role of new media during these revolutionary events.In Tunisia and Egypt, we have witnessed a new genre of revolution whose distinguishing feature lies in its organization by networks and particularly in social networks, which played an important informational and organizational role.Neglecting the complexity of these transformations, the media first attributed the overthrow of Tunisia's Ben Ali and Egypt's Mubarak to digital media, particularly social media and Facebook.Claims and attributions such as "This is a Facebook revolution" were common in the media and in the street, whereas deep problems of corruption and dysfunction in most of the Arab states were toxic.Tunisians and Egyptians decided to put an end to years of humiliation, corruption and deprivation.Having used Facebook, mobile phones, YouTube, or just word-of-mouth, a number of people-computer literate and analphabetic alike-gathered in the streets, protested, and some eventually died.But they won their peaceful and unarmed uprising; they won their revolution.If we learned political leadership and coalition building from the Russian Revolution and popular initiative from the French Revolution, the Arab revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt demonstrated the power of
Authors: Ilhem Allagui, Johanne Kuebler
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1894015544