According to the data from the Arab Social Media Report in 2011 by Mourtada and Salem, the amount of social media usage increased immensely during the Arab Spring period from January 1st to March 30th. The number of Facebook users in the Arab nations almost doubled, up from 14,791,972 (as of April 2010) to 27,711,503 (as of April 2011) (Mourtada and Salem 9). Similarly, in the first three months of 2011, the number of tweets increased from 55 million to 155 million a day (Mourtada and Salem 15). This increase in social media usage was used to spread awareness regarding the Arab Spring revolution. The Arab Spring was a series of democratic revolutions in the Middle East that resulted in government changes in some Arab countries. According to Howard and Hussain in Democracy 's Fourth …show more content…
In fact, there are a lot of political differences in the Arab nations in spite of the same language and religion. According to Hassan in "Social Media and the Arab Spring," the Arab Spring was the first time in Arab history that "all Arabs were able to experience one world, a world with no borders, boundaries, or censorship" (5). Social media attracted the protesters without borders to engage in the uprisings despite having a short time for planning. According to Mourtada and Salem, 88% of Egyptians get their news from social media tools (9). As a result, in the Arab Spring, the estimated number of protesters gathered in Tahrir Square, Egypt increased from 250,000 (as of January 31, 2011) to nearly 1,000,000 (as of February 1, 2011) and continued to grow in the following days (Storck 24). According to data from a project on Information Technology and Political Islam by Howard, Aiden, Deen, Muzammil, Will, and Marwa, during four days from May 16 to May 20, 2011, the most prominent videos loaded into YouTube with the keyword “Egypt” received nearly 2,127,384 million views (29). Social media has played an enormous role in mobilizing
The issues of how technology is influencing our nation today has come into play with social media and surveillance in our personal lives. We use twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. to express our opinions on things and as a voice to inform people on what’s going on in today’s society. We have learned how to use the tools we’ve been given to change our lives forever; our government has access to all of our personal information in exchange for our protection against terrorism. In Bijan Stephen’s article on “Black Lives Matter” and Rebecca McKinnon’s chapter on “the Arab Spring”, they both touch on the power of technology in negative and positive ways.
The article named “spring awakening” wrote by Jose Vargas describes the impact of social media in converting the mentality of young Egyptian generations into bold and defend their inalienable rights as a citizen. This article justifies how social media can mobilize a tremendous number of people to stand up for their rights. The reasons that inspire my emotion is emerging of “Wael Ghonim” as a legendary vocal figure of action for change, revelation of social media as earthquake for change, and fundamental soci-political change.
Malcolm Gladwell’s article "Small Change: Why the Revolution Will not be Tweeted" raises a significant question about the prospective contribution of web-based social networking to the advent of progressive social movement and change. Gladwell bold declaration that "the revolution will not be tweeted" is reflective of his view that social media has no useful application in serious activism. Contrasting various elements of the “high-stakes” lunch-counter protests in Greensboro, North Carolina in the 1960’s with the “low-stakes” activism achieved through social media, Gladwell concludes that effective social movements powerful enough to impose change on longstanding societal forces require both “strong ties” among participants and the presence of a hierarchical organizations. In contrast, Gladwell characterizes the social networks as an interwoven web of "weak ties" that is inherently devoid of a hierarchy. Gladwell’s prerequisites for social movement are firmly based in strong body of sociological evidence, but his views regarding the nature of online social networks are laughably lacking in foresight and obstructed by a misleadingly selective body of evidence.
In this paper, I consider the growing role of social media in presidential politics during the current era. The research questions the extent of the political impact of social media on the president and his communication with the public. It is necessary thus to examine the properties that make social media an attractive tool to use, the different ways the president interacts with social media, and both benefits and limitations of using social media as a platform for communication. As a result, it is essential to make conclusions regarding the nature of the relationship between social media and the presidential politics.
“A new generation, well educated, connected, inspired by universal values and a global understanding, has created a new reality for us. We have found a new way to express our dreams: these young people who have now restored self-confidence… empowered us to go down to the streets.” (Khanfar 2011)
In 2010 the Middle East experienced a disturbing series of protests and riots against the government. The term Arab Spring was coined as an allusion for the 1848 revolutions that rocked the Arab world. This devastating revolution saw its inception in a chain of small scale protests for the democratization of the Arabian governments. With its start in Egypt and Tunisia it has not failed in affecting every Arab country from Libya, Sudan and Morocco in the West to Yemen and Saudi Arabia in the East. A branch of the same revolution has successfully managed to become the cause for a civil war outbreak in Syria and even stretched its influence outside the Arab world to affect Iran and Mali.
Hashtags act as memes in the manner that they,” spread themselves indiscriminately without regard to whether they are useful, neutral or positively harmful to us”(Blackmore). For instance, there can be hashtags ranging from peace in the middle east, to Kanye for president. Through the invention of hashtags, a new mechanism commonly referred to as “social activism”(Gladwell) has arisen where people use the power of social media websites such as twitter to protest and spread activism from behind a screen. In 2009 social protesters took credit for the protests against Moldova’s Communist government labeling it as the “Twitter Revolution”(Gladwell). Mark Pfeifle, a former national security advisor went as far as saying, “without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy”(Gladwell). Gladwell strongly disagrees with Mark Pfeifle’s reasoning and quotes Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who points out, “Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist”(Gladwell). Gladwell believes that social networks are incapable of accomplishing acts of the significance of a revolution and states, “The platforms of social media are built around weak ties,” and “weak ties seldom lead to high risk activism”(Gladwell). People feel dependent upon this new method of social activism for
There was total chaos on the roads, rallies and strikers in some places. They yelled with righteous indignation as well as raised signs to express their requirements for the government. I watched these picture on the TV on 18 December 2010 which called Arab Spring which began in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya was wave demonstrations against governments have never happened before . I think that there were two mainly causes to appear protest in some countries, and we will talk about effecting for some protest in this essay (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/arab_spring).
The Arab Spring was an event which became known throughout the world. According to Jason Brownlee, Tarek Masoud and Andrew Reynolds (2013), the Arab Spring started at the end of 2010 in a Middle Eastern country identified as Tunisia (p.29). This shows that a Middle Eastern country had ejaculated a force of civil motivations of activism in the Arab Spring, and this played an important role for the oppressed Arab citizens to demand equality and human rights. Yakub Halabi (2014) claims that a majority of Arab nations have ‘authoritarian’ systems of government with a lack of a unified community (p.100-101). This shows that democracy is lacking in many Arab nations in the Middle East while the citizens of those countries are vulnerable to conflict because of the social circumstances surrounding Arab nations. In addition, Brownlee, Masoud and Reynolds (2013) elaborates on the idea that subsequent to Tunisia’s Arab Spring, Egypt, Libya and Yemen had participated in the Arab Spring, and this caused the risk of civil, political and social unrest being extremely high in 2013 (p.29). This is relevant evidence that Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen are in a worse position than they were before the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring was portrayed as a stride for Middle Eastern states to become an equal democratic utopia. However, an unstable economy, foreign intervention and paid terrorists were some of the reasons of the Arab Spring being unsuccessful for inserting democracy into the channels of politics in several Middle Eastern countries.
“Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted” by Malcolm Gladwell is an article published in the Annals of Innovation, by The New Yorker magazine. Gladwell starts with an example of true activism. He opens the article with a depiction of how the Greensboro sit-ins contributed to the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. Then the author supplies two examples of protests that have taken place in recent years that some people have said were started and organized on Twitter. He then goes on to clarify why Twitter was not a factor in these events and how media and government can distort certain truths about social media’s role in protests. The author continues the article by explaining why communication and relationships were more efficient before the era of social media and then compares social networking from the past and now. He uses this strategy to illustrate social media’s effect on how we interact and our commitment towards one another. Gladwell goes on to explain the organization of activist groups of the past and its
Safranek, Rita. 2012. The Emerging Role of Social Media in Political and Regime Change. s.l. : Proquest, 2012.
Since its creation, social media has caused considerable changes in society. It allows people to connect, create, and learn. Since social media allows people from all over the world to connect, it allows people to share different ideas and promote important causes; social media has become a platform for activism. By sharing, liking, and tweeting all people have become activist for all sorts of causes. In recent years, scholars compared activism of this type to the activism that has occurred during the Civil Rights Movement. Recent debate has quite different views regarding activism through social media as an influential factor in publicizing causes. According to Malcolm Gladwell, social media may aid people in becoming aware of certain issues, but activism through social media does not solve any of the problems they try to fix. He also argues that social media create weak ties between people. I am of two minds regarding Gladwell’s claim regarding social media activism and the ties it creates. On the one hand, activism
Social media is a revolution, which we are currently experiencing. It has changed the way people communicate and interact with one another, and opens up many more avenues to share news, information, and just general chit chat. Social media is relatively quiet young, but is here to stay for the foreseeable future. We are now at a point where online, we can share, read and react to lots of individual information being posted on microblogging websites, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr and more. Twitter in particular has been widely embraced, and will centre most of the discussion.
Society has over time, developed many means of communication starting with the word of mouth to writing letters, the telephone, and now the internet. The internet has developed its own form of communication, which is a social network. Social networks have created a way for people across the world to communicate with each other at the same time, all in one place, thus making it the internet the reason behind the revolution known as Social Network.
In mere minutes, any active user can access information and associations regarding various causes, such as the riots happening in Egypt and the Middle East. Teenagers, in the Middle East, used their Facebook accounts to campaign the “Day of Rage” in Saudi Arabia. Helping to set the Arab riots in motion, the event demanded elections, freedom for women, and the liberation of political prisoners. The activists’ goals to bring democracy to Egypt and removing Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s fourth president from 1981 to 2011, still continue and perhaps with the assistance of Facebook they will accomplish these ambitions. The causes campaigned through Facebook have served as a fundraise...