Social Media and Social Mobilisation in the Middle East

Author(s): Adam Smidi and Saif Shahin

Source: India Quarterly , June 2017, Vol. 73, No. 2, Special Issue: The Middle East (June
2017), pp. 196-209
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/48505308

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Article

Social Media and Social India Quarterly

73(2) 196–209
Mobilisation in the © 2017 Indian Council of World
Affairs (ICWA)
Middle East: SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0974928417700798
A Survey of Research http://iqq.sagepub.com
on the Arab Spring

Adam Smidi
Saif Shahin

Abstract
The role of the media, and especially the social media, in the Arab Spring has
been extensively debated in academia. This study presents a survey of studies
published in scholarly journals on the subject since 2011. We find that the bulk
of the research contends that social media enabled or facilitated the protests
by providing voice to people in societies with mostly government-controlled
legacy media; helping people connect, mobilise and organise demonstrations; and
broadcasting protests to the world at large and gaining global support. Some
scholars, however, argue that social media played only a limited or secondary
role, which ought to be viewed alongside other social, political, economic and
historical factors. We also identify the spatial and temporal focus of the research
and preferred theoretical and methodological approaches and draw attention to
several blind spots that require further investigation.

Keywords
Arab Spring, Arab awakening, Middle East uprisings, social media, legacy media,
Twitter

Since Mohammad Bouazizi immolated himself on a Tunisian street and sparked

region wide protests against authoritarian regimes, social media’s ability to
mobilise masses to bring about social change has been hotly debated. The so-called
‘Arab Spring’ began in 2011 and closely followed the surge in popularity of

Corresponding author:
Saif Shahin.
E-mail: sshahin@bgsu.edu

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Smidi and Shahin 197

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and the like, making social media and
their role in social mobilisation a particularly alluring subject of both idle
speculation and rigorous research. Did social media instigate protests or did they
merely facilitate them? Were they more influential in some parts of the region, or
at certain points in time? How does their influence compare with other social,
economic, cultural and political factors? What about the part played by traditional—
now also called legacy—media, especially newspapers and television?
This study attempts to answer these questions by taking stock of empirical
research on media and the Arab Spring published in peer-reviewed journals in the
past six years. Scores of scholars from around the world have explored various
facets of this subject, using a variety of research designs and methods. Their work
offers a broad understanding of the role of social and legacy media in the Arab
Spring and, more broadly, in producing social mobilisation for internal change
in the Middle East. A holistic look at this body of scholarship also lays bare its
blind spots—important areas that remain understudied—and opens up questions
for future research to answer.
To collect the data for this study, we searched the EBSCOhost academic
database for all articles using the terms ‘Arab Spring’ and ‘media’ published in
peer-reviewed English-language journals. Other search terms such as ‘Middle
East’, ‘North Africa’ and ‘MENA Uprising’ were also tried out, but they did not
yield additional results. The search produced a total of 247 articles published
between 2011 and 2016. After excluding all book reviews and articles in which
either the Arab Spring or the media were mentioned only in passing, we were left
with a final sample of 88 articles that explicitly focused on understanding the role
of social or legacy media in the Arab Spring, published in 64 different journals
(see Table 1 for details).
The articles were analysed using Glaser and Strauss’s (1967) method of
constant comparison. Coding took place in three rounds. The first round produced
a number of emergent coding categories, which were recoded into broader
categories in the second round and finally collapsed into six thematically
meaningful categories in the third round. These six themes are discussed in detail
in the rest of the article, followed by a critical assessment and discussion of the
key implications of our study.

Table 1. Research Published in Academic Journals on Media and Arab Spring

Total Number of Articles: 88 Total Number of Journals: 64

Published in Journals with most articles
2011: 6 5: International Communication Gazette
2012: 19 4: Journal of Communication
2013: 23 3: New Media and Society, Digest of Middle East
2014: 18 Studies, Index on Censorship, Cinema Journal,
2015: 11 Globalisations
2016: 11
Source: Authors’ own.

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198 India Quarterly 73(2)

Social Media as Harbinger of Social Change

The majority of articles argued that social media were the single most important
cause of Arab Spring protests. Many of them emphasised the novelty of social
media as a means of mass communication and how they altered the dynamics of
the relationship between governments and citizens. The Arab monarchies and
military dictatorships, these articles argued, had retained power for long by
controlling the mass media and using them to manipulate public opinion; social
media, however, took that control away from authoritarian hands and provided a
voice to the public. This fundamental change had wide-reaching effects: making
citizens better informed, turning them into activists, facilitating public organisation
and collective action, and eventually helping the development of democratic
institutions that could replace autocratic regimes.
As Aman and Jayroe (2013) noted:

Since the early part of the twentieth century when electronic mass communication
media was introduced, it has been managed by Arab governments who realize the
importance of controlling and manipulating public opinion. The physical facilities and
contents of their broadcasts are strictly controlled; staff have always been employees
of the government. (p. 318)

The advent of social media, however, changed all that. For the first time, citizens
in low freedom of press countries had gained a say in power politics.

Social media have become the scaffolding upon which civil society can build, and new
information technologies give activists things that they did not have before: informa-
tion networks not easily controlled by the state and coordination tools that are already
embedded in trusted networks of family and friends. (Howard & Hussain, 2011, p. 48)

The articles drew attention to various aspects of social media as an enabler

of social change. For instance, Howard and Hussain (2011) focused on social
media’s ability to organise political action by helping activists form extensive
social networks and develop social capital on an unprecedented scale: ‘Social
media served as an instrument of local and national mobilization, communication,
and coordination; helped propagate international revolutionary contagion; and
contributed to the enhancement of a pan-Arab consciousness which facilitated
the contagion process’ (p. 36). In a similar vein, Soengas-Pérez (2013) observed
that in this new way of communicating, ‘individual actions focused towards group
communication, personal suggestions and ideas working for a common goal’
(p. 154). Focusing on the role of Facebook in the Tunisian revolution, Müller and
Hübner (2014) argued that the social media offered a forum that promoted trans-
parency and built shared awareness, ‘creating a common cause and understanding
that kept mobilizing Tunisian “netizens” to reclaim their rights as citizens, and, in
the end to oust Ben Ali’s regime’” (p. 28). The speed with which people were able
to communicate increased several times thanks to social media, which ‘allowed
messages to travel in an immediate, instantaneous, and spontaneous manner’
(Alqudsi-ghabra, 2012, p. 9).

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Smidi and Shahin 199

A number of articles singled out women being the biggest benefactors of social
media during the time of the Arab Spring. ‘Women activists adopted social media
practices that enabled them to articulate their identities in the public sphere and to
participate in the uprisings in multiple ways, resulting in a sense of personal
empowerment and collective potentiality that was fundamentally linked to the
communicative platform’ (Radsch & Khamis, 2013, p. 887). Women face culturally
sanctioned constraints in many parts of the Arab world, especially when it comes to
political involvement. Social media became a place ‘where many women debate[d]
on equal footing with men, where policy alternatives [were] discussed, and where
regime secrets [were] exposed’ (Cattle, 2016, p. 434). Empowered by free
expression, these young women could speak and be heard publicly in a way that was
rarely possible before. For example, the content analysis of Ali and Macharia (2013)
of 93 million tweets about the Egyptian revolution found that social media allowed
women ‘to make their complaints and worries visible and simultaneously to revolt
against the oppressive regime of Mubarak’s government’ (p. 364).
On the strength of these facets, social media not only undermined the authority
of autocratic regimes but could also ‘contribute to democratic consolidation
beyond rebellion’ (Breuer & Groshek, 2014).

Netcitizens, bloggers, and organizers of all ages should be prepared to use their sharp-
ened and tested skills to combat and counter their authoritarian governments, and force
them to adapt to a democratic system—a system that strives toward social justice,
peaceful resolution, and clear responsiveness to the massive cries for political and eco-
nomic reform. (Aman & Jayroe, 2013, p. 341)

Limits of Social Media’s Influence

In contrast, a number of articles questioned the significance being accorded to
social media’s role in Arab Spring protests. Most of these articles conceded that
social media may have partly contributed to the uprisings, but argued that other
economic, political and historical factors were much more important. The overall
tone of these articles was that the uprisings were a long time in the making and
would have occurred with or without the presence of social media. Some scholars
also suggested, though, that social media companies tried to undermine the protests.
Fuchs (2012), for instance, argued that ‘the Egyptian revolution was a revo-
lution against capitalism’s multidimensional injustices, in which social media
were used as a tool of information and organization, but were not the cause of the
revolution’ (p. 389). On similar lines, Aouragh (2012) noted that ‘preferring
technology over human agency conveniently avoids dealing with the very issues
many were protesting about, such as corruption, neoliberalism, and subservience
to imperialism’ (p. 151). The author described Egypt under Hosni Mubarak as a
society that had become increasingly divided over time. The upper class had taken
complete control of its politico-economic complex and was unwilling to share
anything with the masses. Discontent had been rising and was bound to boil over.

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200 India Quarterly 73(2)

Other scholars focused on the fundamental characteristics of social move-

ments—many of which, they argued, played a more important role in Arab Spring
than social media. One article described how ‘the diffusion of grievances, the
structural availability of protesters, and especially the embeddedness of protesters
in pre-existing networks of civic associations were more significant than Twitter
and Facebook’ (Brym, Godbout, Hoffbauer, Menard, & Zhang, 2014, p. 286).
Some authors claimed that social media activism does not contribute nearly as
offline—or physical–civic engagement. For instance, ‘sharing a dissident
statement, sending a Like to a criticizing picture are not activities that go beyond
the entry-level of political participation actions’ (Serdar, 2013, p. 120).
Byun and Hollander (2015) argued that if social media were indeed the most
important cause of the Arab Spring, then higher levels of Internet connectivity and
social media country-wise should correlate with higher levels of unrest. Using an
experimental design, however, they found no correlation between a country’s
Internet connectivity and Twitter and Facebook penetration on the one hand and
level of unrest on the other.
Some scholars went a step ahead and drew attention to the ways in which social
media undermined protest movements. Youmans and York (2012) argued that the
policies of social media companies are designed to complicate collective action
efforts. They used the example of Wael Ghonim, who became an internationally
known figure for promoting pro-democracy protests through social media in
Egypt. Ghonim initially wished to remain anonymous, fearing backlash from the
Mubarak government, but Facebook deactivated Ghonim’s page stating that their
policy prohibited the use of pseudonyms in accounts or pages.
Nevertheless, there was also pushback against these arguments. Scholars who
were more positive about social media contended that their impact must not be
overlooked. ‘Being unduly skeptical about the political influence and transfor-
mative potential of social media renders them no more than instrumentalities and
thus mere adjuncts to usual politics, rather than the carriers of new kinds of
activism, and facilitators of practical citizenship’ (Axford, 2011, p. 682). The
article claimed that reductionism regarding social media’s role in the Arab Spring
ignored ‘the potentially transformative impact of media whose influence on
consciousness and behavior may be hidden by their routine use in the lives of
millions of people’ (p. 682).

Social Versus Legacy Media

While the majority of articles dealt with social media, a significant number of
articles also focused on legacy media. Many of them argued that Arab newspapers
and television channels, typically operating under state control, delegitimised
protests and presented a largely pro-regime perspective. This was often contrasted
with the ‘independent’ viewpoints available on social media, and some articles
even argued that legacy media organisations, whose reporters lacked access to
protesters, depended on social media to know what was going on and to even get
content for their own coverage.

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Smidi and Shahin 201

Hamdy and Gomaa (2012) conducted a content analysis of news reports

published in four major Egyptian newspapers in January–February 2011, and
found that the newspapers framed the protests as a conspiracy against the Egyptian
government. Reports depicted protesters as ‘delinquent and violent youth who did
not have the national good at heart’ (p. 198). Their goal was clearly to support the
state and label the movement as hateful and chaotic. Broadly, state-controlled
Arab media was characterised by uncertainty and ideological or sectarian divi-
sions, which ‘created a fertile environment and eager audience for sensationalist
media that fanned rumors, incited hatred against political adversaries, and fueled
divisive and demonizing narratives’ (Aday, et al., 2013, p. 97).
Traditional news organisations lacked sufficient access to report during the
Arab Spring due to government restrictions, ‘rendering their reporting reliant on
social web’ (Ahy, 2016, p. 103). Al Jazeera would often replay videos obtained
through social media throughout Egypt’s 18 days of sustained protests leading to
the resignation of Mubarak on 11 February 2011 (Tufekci & Wilson, 2012).
A number of studies looked at how legacy media outside the Middle East
covered the protests. Not surprisingly, many scholars found that Western media
outlets framed the uprisings differently from Arab media organisations. Elena’s
(2016) content analysis of the coverage of counter-protests that led to the ouster
of the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt
discovered that CNN regarded the coup as a ‘necessary evil’ while Al Jazeera
English emphasised the Islamist government’s democratic legitimacy. Another
article argued that CNN focused a lot more on women and their role in the Arab
Spring than Al Jazeera (Dastgeer & Gade, 2016). This finding reaffirmed that ‘the
coverage of the Islamic World in Western media has a strong focus on Muslim
women’ while that Arab media was culturally more male-oriented (Dastgeer &
Gade, 2016, p. 444).
Du (2016) focused on media coverage in Hong Kong, Taiwan and China and
found that Chinese media was the only one that ‘chose not to take a news
perspective that is favorable toward the uprisings’. The article also noted that
China’s media coverage, unlike the others, attributed the political instability to
‘social and economic problems rather than to political dictatorship and tyranny’
(Du, 2016, p. 110).

Spatial and Temporal Emphasis

Nearly a third of the articles focused on Egypt. Abul-Magd (2012), for example,
compared the Egyptian revolution in 2011 to earlier revolutions that had taken
place in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine, and pointed out the similarities such as the
non-violent nature of protests and the use of Internet to mobilise the masses.
Egypt also provided authors with its own history of public protests; its citizens
have held large demonstrations opposing the oppression of Palestinians and
the Iraq war in years past (Tawil-Souri, 2012). Some scholars even focused on the
critical day of 28 January 2011, when the Mubarak regime cut off Internet access
to the public, which only angered shocked citizens and led to a dramatic escalation

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202 India Quarterly 73(2)

in protests (Hassanpour, 2014). Quite a few articles also looked at Tunisia, where
the protests had started (e.g., Breuer & Groshek, 2014; Pompper, 2014; Wolover,
2016). Other studies had a broader spatial scope, focusing either on select three or
four countries (e.g., Alqudsi-ghabra, 2012; Bruns, Highfield, & Burgess, 2013;
Soengas-Pérez, 2013) or dealing with the phenomenon of Arab Spring as a whole.
Most of the studies focused on the early part of the Arab Spring, especially the
first two years. Their empirical data was gathered between 2011 and 2013, looking
at the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia and their immediate aftermath. Groshek
(2012), for instance, interviewed Egyptian citizens from 23 January to 30 January
2011. Hassan, Kendall and Whitefield (2015) conducted a survey in 2012 after the
first parliamentary elections in Egypt after Mubarak to determine how media
consumption affected democratic attitudes. Srinivasan’s (2014) rare look at 18
months after the revolution examined how new media technologies can ‘provide
a lens into Egypt’s political evolving environment’ (p. 79).

Theoretical Perspectives
Research on media and the Arab Spring is not theoretically rich, with less than a
fifth of the articles explicitly using a theory to explain their findings and fewer
still attempting to contribute to theoretical development. Articles that did employ
a theoretical approach, however, relied on a wide range of perspectives borrowed
from media sociology to political communication to cultural studies.
Some of the articles that looked positively at the impact of social media on the
Arab Spring drew on Habermas’s (1989) theory of the public sphere, which argues
that open conversations among members of the public are vital for the development
of civil society and democracy. Although Habermas’s conception of the public
sphere involved casual discussions in eighteenth century European cafes and
deliberations in newspaper columns, these articles argued that social media had
provided twenty-first-century Middle East with a parallel infrastructure for
discussion and deliberation. DeVriese (2013) noted that the concept of public
sphere was the key to ‘understanding the role of social media in redefining civic
engagement and reshaping political spaces’ (p. 118). Salvatore (2013) noticed ‘the
connectedness built among people through communication forums and media, to
turn into a self-sustaining political mobilization that brings to full fruition the
critical potential of debate and contentions’ (p.220).
Tudoroiu (2014) took it a step further and combined the idea of public sphere
with the revolutionary wave approach to explain why protests spread so quickly
from one country to another. He argued that ‘the Arab world witnessed an
extremely coherent process of revolutionary contagion whose liberal and demo-
cratic ideology was disseminated transnationally by social media’ (p. 346) and the
revolutionary wave approach helped explain ‘a number of important features of
the Arab Spring perceived as a unitary political phenomenon’ (p. 361).
In contrast, Wolfsfeld, Segev and Sheafer (2013) argued that ‘one cannot
understand the role of social media in collective action without first taking into
account the political environment in which they operate’. They used the political

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Smidi and Shahin 203

contest model to answer what came first—politics or media—and concluded that

‘a significant increase in the use of the new media is much more likely to follow
a significant amount of protest activity than to precede it’ (pp. 119–120).
Some studies drew on the idea of norm diffusion. Norms are understood as
values and expectations that actors share with each other. Harrelson-Stephens and
Callaway (2014) interpreted Arab Spring protests as the diffusion of human rights
norms—and social media as the vehicle through which this diffusion took place.
Pompper (2014) used norm diffusion along with gender role incongruity theory
to understand the differences between print media, news wires and blogs in the
representation of Tunisian women revolutionaries. The study found that ‘print and
wire media consistently clung to traditional female gender stereotypes, repre-
senting women as emotional, communal, and nurturing mothers and wives,
whereas blog content represented women as fully engaged agentic leaders and
citizens’ (p. 487).
Legacy media coverage was more often studied using framing theory, which
suggests that journalists and media organisations, intentionally or not, emphasise
certain aspects of social reality while marginalising other aspects (Du, 2016;
Elena, 2016; Rennick, 2013). These studies were typically critical of international
media coverage of the Arab Spring. Another article utilised cultural theorist Stuart
Hall’s perspective on ideology to problematise ‘Western democratic ideals’ and
‘media representations of cultural Others’ (Lawless & Chen, 2016 p. 188).

Methodological Approaches
Many of the articles did not follow any formal methodological approach,
describing their empirical method simply as political or historical analysis. In the
rest of the corpus, content analysis—both qualitative and quantitative—was
commonly used. For instance, in a study that examined how the First Ladies of
Arab regimes were covered in the media during the Arab Spring, Ibroscheva
(2013) employed a qualitative textual analysis after collecting data ‘using Lexis
Nexis, as well as blog entries, online news outlets and news aggregate websites,
such as Google News’ that yielded a sample size of 128 articles (p. 874). Harlow
(2013) ‘employed a textual analysis approach to examine how protesters,
supporters, and the media talked about the Egyptian uprising’ (pp. 67–68). She
analysed Facebook posts from the ‘We Are All Khaled Said’ group page, as well
as reports from Al Jazeera English website and articles from The New York Times.
Wolover (2016) performed keyword searches to collect articles from The New
York Times, The Guardian and Al Jazeera English that appeared between 11
November 2010 and 28 February 2011 for a qualitative textual analysis that
provided insights on ‘what the journalists cited as the causal factor of revolution
and how they discussed the Internet’s role’ (p. 190).
Quantitative analyses were also common, like the one executed by Bruns
et al. (2013) that tracked the hashtags #egypt and #libya from 23 January 2011 to
16 February 2011 through the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API).

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204 India Quarterly 73(2)

Another quantitative content analysis examined the coverage of Arab Spring in

Belgian newspapers and broadcast media to find out how they display diverse
sourcing practices (Van Leuven, Heinrich, & Deprez, 2013).
Other articles used survey and in-depth interviews. Soengas-Pérez (2013)
distributed a series of online surveys to 30 young people of Tunisian, Egyptian
and Libyan decent, living or working in Barcelona, Madrid or Santiago de
Compostela from the time the uprisings broke out until the dictators where ousted.
These people were later interviewed to help better understand the role of social
media in the Arab Spring, specifically the ‘efficacy of technology as a comm-
unication tool in underdeveloped societies that have been subjected to repressive
regimes for decades’ (Soengas-Pérez, 2013, p. 150). To examine how Egyptian
citizens used social media to participate in political protest, questionnaire-based
interviews were conducted in Arabic with 1,200 people who participated in the
Tahrir Square demonstrations, constituting perhaps one of ‘the largest samples of
protestor surveys conducted under such difficult conditions’ (Tufekci & Wilson,
2012, p. 368). Another article implemented a mixed methods design, consisting of

semi-structured interviews with 16 Tunisian bloggers and Internet activists, followed

by a second quantitative phase that utilized survey questionnaires, with the goal of
learning about Tunisians patterns of political attitudes and internet use, as well as self-
descriptions and assessments of online/offline protest activities. (Breuer & Groshek,
2014, p. 33)

Conclusion
Our survey of research suggests that social media played a multi-pronged role
in the wave of protests that came to be known as the Arab Spring. First, and
perhaps most importantly, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other such modes of
communication made citizens believe they had a ‘say’ in public affairs. Their very
presence helped common people feel empowered—something they had never
felt in the autocracies that witnessed the uprisings. Second, social media allowed
people to connect, mobilise and organise on a large scale against their regimes,
which they had found extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do in the past.
Third, social media’s global reach not only allowed activists across Arab nations
to share ideas and strategies with each other but broadcast the protests world-
wide, helping them gain global support—which, in turn, galvanised even more
Arab citizens.
Some scholars have rightly argued that social media’s influence ought to be
viewed in consonance with other social, economic, political and historical factors.
However, our research shows that little attention has been paid to some fundamental
limitations of social media’s impact. Allowing people to connect over Facebook
or Twitter is not the same thing as helping them develop a collective conscious-
ness that sustains over long periods of time. Protesters in Egypt, for instance,
could not agree on anything beyond wanting Mubarak out of power. Egypt’s
experience of democracy was fleeting as a result. The Muslim Brotherhood

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Smidi and Shahin 205

government that came to power in the post-Mubarak elections faced its own wave
of protests—also facilitated by social media—and this eventually allowed the
military to retake control. Egypt’s revolution was thus undermined by a long-
standing social rupture between Islamists on the one hand and secularists and the
Coptic Christian minority on the other. The revolutionary wave in countries such
as Syria and Bahrain was similarly undone by social tensions—typically between
Sunnis and Shias.
Scholars who argue that social media caused the protests have had little to say
so far on why social media could not help people overcome such differences and
work towards a common agenda with clear priorities. Traditional forms of media
and communication have, in fact, done so in the past. Anderson’s (1983) study of
the emergence of nationalism in eighteenth century Europe, for instance, shows
that newspapers and novels played a vital role in helping people across long
distances develop a shared sense of identity and gradually come together to
constitute nations as ‘imagined communities’. Habermas (1984) has argued that
communication allows people to develop a shared understanding of what is right
and what is wrong—or what he called ‘communicative rationality’—which then
leads to a shared plan of public action–or ‘communicative action’.
These processes unfold over long periods of time. Conceived in this way, mass
media are not merely instruments for the transmission of predetermined ideas and
interests held by pre-constituted subjects; instead, mass media produce those
subjects in terms of their identities, which in turn shape their interests. The Arab
Spring experience showed that long-held identities—religious versus secular,
Islamic versus Christian, Sunni versus Shia—meant a lot more to people than
instant connections formed on social media. Twitter and Facebook managed to
bring people to public squares for a few days or weeks, but they did not produce
new rationalities, new identities or new imaginations. Future research needs to
investigate why this was the case.
Another glaring gap in this body of scholarship is the absence of longitudinal
studies. Almost all the research we found in our survey is cross-sectional—or
focused on a moment in time. But the vagaries of the Arab Spring necessitate an
approach that emphasises how protest movements evolved over months and years.
In Egypt, for instance, the anti-Mubarak uprising was followed by protests that
were anti-Brotherhood and sometimes explicitly pro-military. In Syria, protests
started peacefully but eventually transformed into civil war. Understanding how
the issue agendas of these and other such protest movements transformed over
time on social media is an important research question, especially for scholars
who have argued that social media’s impact is constrained by other factors. Such
analysis can shed light on the interplay of multiple causes and potentially lead to
a more precise understanding of the degree and nature of social’s media role in
bringing about social change.
The role of legacy media, especially local and regional Arabic newspapers and
television channels, also needs greater scrutiny. It is not surprising to find that
legacy media controlled by autocracies took a pro-regime stance during the Arab
Spring and framed protesters as deviant or inept. Even in democracies, legacy

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206 India Quarterly 73(2)

media are known to do so (Benson, 2013; Gitlin, 1980). What is interesting is the
possibility that they may have still ended up inflaming the protest movements. As
agenda-setting theory has long argued, what the news media talk about can be
more important than how they talk about it (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). By just
covering the protests, legacy media could have put them on the public agenda and
caused people to join the protesters, including many who did not have access to
social media. That is why pro-regime domestic media in some authoritarian
countries such as Mainland avoid covering domestic protests altogether (Shahin,
Zheng, Sturm, & Fadnis, 2016). A more detailed examination of the specific
effects of legacy media would lead to a more nuanced understanding of the
interplay of multiple factors behind social mobilisation.
Theoretical indigence is another weakness of extant research on media and
the Arab Spring. As noted earlier, only a fifth of the studies we found used a
theoretical perspective. The ones that did were largely limited to theoretical
approaches that have originated in the West and have historically derived empirical
support from studies of American and European media. Especially glaring was the
absence of postcolonial approaches in our corpus of articles. This is not surprising
for two reasons. One, the field of social media studies in general remains more
descriptive than theoretical. Two, although postcolonial scholars have often
turned attention to legacy media (Kraidy, 2005; Parameswaran, 1999; Said, 1981),
social media have largely escaped their notice so far.
The Arab Spring constitutes an ideal context for postcolonial scholarship to
start filling this gap. Postcolonial theory can approach this area of research in a
number of novel ways, raising vital and hitherto unasked questions. Does social
media use in the Middle East constitute a form of mimicry of the West (Bhabha,
1994)—and is that a reason why connections formed over social media failed to
forge new forms of collective consciousness in the region? Or, are the norms of
social media use—with their focus on individual profiles and personal impression
management (Krämer & Winter, 2008)—so fundamentally atomistic that they
cannot produce sustainable collective identities? These are vital questions that not
only bear upon social mobilisation for change in the Middle East but also on the
future of contentious politics in the Global South, questions that a postcolonial
intervention can help answer.
It is important here to note the limitations of our study. We have focused on
peer-reviewed English language journal articles, which means that articles
published in non-English scholarly journals as well as books on the subject—in
English or other languages—were outside the scope of our study. Second, our
choice of keywords likely excluded any articles on the rise of Daesh in Syria and
their use of social media for recruitment and other purposes. Although Syrian
protests started as part of the Arab Spring, they soon transformed into civil war.
The absence of research on Syria from our corpus also indicates that scholars did
not use the term ‘Arab Spring’ to refer to Syrian uprising at all. Nonetheless, the
Syrian civil war represents its own kind of social change, and one in which social
media have potentially played a significant role as well. Research in that area
requires separate and exhaustive survey and analysis.

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Smidi and Shahin 207

Adam Smidi is an entrepreneur, activist and doctoral student in the School of

Media and Communication, Bowling Green State University, USA. His research
focuses on organizational and intercultural communication.

Saif Shahin is an Assistant Professor at the School of Media and Communication,

Bowling Green State University, USA. His research focuses on media, technology
and politics.

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