Posts tagged Arab spring
Article: Altering Courses in Unknown Waters - Interaction between Traditional and New Media during the First Months of the Syrian Uprising
This paper investigates the relationship between traditional and social media during the first six months of the Syrian uprising.
Author: Lorenzo Trombetta. Published in Global Media Journal, German edition.
ABSTRACT - This papers aims at investigating the relationship between traditional and social media during the first six months of the Syrian uprising. Thanks to direct testimony made available to the author by various cyber activists inside and outside Syria and through constant monitoring of the official propaganda and the coverage of the Syrian events by the two main pan-Arab satellite TVs, this article intends to investigate how both the regime and the activists attempt to represent the “real events on the ground”. In a country where the foreign and pan-Arab press have been mostly expelled since the beginning of the protests and the consequent repression, these two opposite poles heavily fight on the media level. On the one hand, the propaganda dominates traditional media and has sought to show familiarity with new methods, while maintaining the same content and rhetorical tone. On the other hand, the activists, masters of the new media, attempted to overcome the limitations of their tools, aiming at more traditional forms of communication. In both cases, the Internet has emerged as the main weapon of this media confrontation.
Aca-article: The Agonistic Social Media - Cyberspace in the Formation of Dissent and Consolidation of State Power in Postelection Iran
Abstract: In this article an attempt is made to rethink the phenomenon of emerging social media, not merely as a means of communication, but as social space wherein confrontational activities of political significance take place. How do political movements manifest new forums, promoting or resisting state power through social networking sites such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, or YouTube? How do states exert authority in the realm of digital activism? Unrest over official election results in Iran represents a case in which social media sites shape distinct sites wherein dissent is virtualized to challenge authoritarian rule, both offline and in cyberspace. Such cyberspaces of protest should be viewed in close connection with online governance through which the state can exert authority through surveillance operations, propaganda, and hacktivism. Online social media are agonistic arenas where information, ideas, values, and subjectivities are contested between (uneven) adversaries, and where new contexts could potentially emerge for new ways of doing politics.
Article published in The Communication Review, Volume 14, Issue 3, 2011. Special Issue: Twitter Revolutions? Addressing Social Media and Dissent.
NB! This article is toll-access only, thus you need a subscription to access the full article. Here’s the link.
T O P I C S
This blog is run by Medea, a research centre at Malmö University, Sweden.
