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Social Media and Revolutionary Waves: The Case

of the Arab Spring

Theodor Tudoroiu

To cite this article: Theodor Tudoroiu (2014) Social Media and Revolutionary Waves: The Case of
the Arab Spring, New Political Science, 36:3, 346-365, DOI: 10.1080/07393148.2014.913841

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New Political Science, 2014
Vol. 36, No. 3, 346–365, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2014.913841

Social Media and Revolutionary Waves: The Case of the

Arab Spring

Theodor Tudoroiu
The University of the West Indies at St. Augustine, Trinidad

Abstract This article argues that during the Arab Spring social media served as a tactical
tool of mobilization, communication, and coordination; as an instrument of domestic and
international revolutionary contagion; and, critically, as a means of enhancing pan-Arab
consciousness which, in turn, was fertile soil for that contagion. These three interrelated
functions are best analyzed using a revolutionary wave theoretical approach. In its absence,
the Arab Spring becomes a patchwork of analytically incoherent “cascade protests.” In fact,
the Arab world witnessed an extremely coherent process of revolutionary contagion
whose liberal and democratic ideology was disseminated transnationally by social media.
The impressive speed, scale, and effectiveness of this contagion would have not been possible
without the effect of the Arab public sphere—itself partially enabled by social media—on
the increasingly cohesive pan-Arab consciousness. Fundamentally, the Arab Spring was
the first revolutionary wave ever to reflect the change in power relations originating in the
rise of new communication networks.

Introduction
In December 1989, Romania experienced the first televised revolution ever. Two
decades later, the revolutionary wave generally known as the Arab Spring could
use more advanced instruments: “the revolution may be televised, and it is surely
online.”1 Unlike in the Romanian case, in 2011, “instruments” was not a figure
of speech. As an Egyptian activist put it, “we use Facebook to schedule the
protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world.”2 New
technology—including the internet, cell phones, and satellite television—played
a key role in the organization and diffusion of protest. People interested in
democracy, it was argued, used such technology to build extensive networks,
create social capital, organize political action locally and nationally, and put in
place transnational links.3 Eventually, so much was written about the impact of
new social media on recent Middle Eastern political developments that some
scholars even spoke of “a new fetishism of technology that distracts from the

The author is grateful to Mélissa E. Bryant (Durham University) as well as to two

anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
1
Philip N. Howard and Muzammil M. Hussain, “The Role of Digital Media,” Journal of
Democracy 22:3 (2011), pp. 42 – 43.
2
Habibul Haque Khondker, “Role of the New Media in the Arab Spring,”
Globalizations 8:5 (2011), p. 677.
3
Howard and Hussain, “Role of Digital Media,” pp. 35 – 36, 23.

q 2014 Caucus for a New Political Science

 Social Media and Revolutionary Waves 347

contradictions of capitalism underlying contemporary societal changes and

conflicts.”4 In fact, there are two opposing schools: “cyber-enthusiasts” versus
“cyber-skeptics”5 or, to use more spectacular labels, “digital evangelists” versus
“techno-realists.”6 Their respective merits and demerits are discussed in the
following section. A key element, however, is that “very little of this research
integrates political variables into its analysis.”7 Moreover, the literature provides a
rather fragmented picture of this complex phenomenon, with many scholars
focusing on relatively narrow social media-related sub-fields. The present article
tries to overcome this division. Its goal is twofold. First, it argues that the full
understanding of the impact of social media on Arab Spring regime change
processes is possible only through the analysis of the key role played by this media
at three interrelated levels that, until now, have not been studied together: (1) as a
tactical tool of mobilization, communication, and coordination; (2) as an
instrument of domestic and international revolutionary contagion; and, critically,
(3) as a means of enhancing pan-Arab consciousness which, in turn, was fertile
soil for that contagion. The article’s second goal is to strongly anchor the analysis
of social media in the political—and, more specifically, revolutionary—dimension
of the Arab Spring. Social media might have been very important. Still, one should
not forget that the Middle Eastern process it influenced was fundamentally a
revolutionary wave. As such, the role of social media needs to be addressed
within the analytical framework of revolutionary contagion, which until now
rarely has been done explicitly.

Cyber-Skeptics, Digital Evangelists, and Refolutions

Building on previous analyses,8 I define social media as a communication network
based on the combined use of Web 2.0 applications, cell phones, and satellite
television that allows the production and exchange of user-generated content in
ways potentially leading to the formation of virtual networks and communities.
It is this latter aspect that, in a revolutionary context, impacts strongly and visibly
on the development and activity of protest movements.
While there has been heated debate on their actual effects in relation to
successful regime change efforts, most scholars focus on the same eight
dimensions of social media usage: (1) ideology and planning, (2) training and
tactics, (3) communications, (4) deployment and rapid response, (5) reduction of
the costs of mobilization, (6) flexibility, (7) resilience (raising the robustness of
rebel movements), and (8) propaganda/media diplomacy.9 Based on their

4
Christian Fuchs, “Behind the News. Social Media, Riots, and Revolutions,” Capital &
Class 36:3 (2012), p. 383.
5
Gadi Wolfsfeld, Elad Segev, and Tamir Sheafer, “Social Media and the Arab Spring:
Politics Comes First,” The International Journal of Press/Politics 18:2 (2013), p. 117.
6
Francesca Comunello and Giuseppe Anzera, “Will the Revolution Be Tweeted?
A Conceptual Framework for Understanding the Social Media and the Arab Spring,” Islam
and Christian-Muslim Relations 23:4 (2012), p. 453.
7
Wolfsfeld et al., “Social Media,” p. 117.
8
Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein quoted by Genevieve Barrons, “‘Suleiman:
Mubarak Decided to Step Down #egypt #jan25 OH MY GOD’: Examining the Use of Social
Media in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution,” Contemporary Arab Affairs 5:1 (2012), p. 55.
9
For more details see Comunello and Anzera, “Will the Revolution Be Tweeted?,”
pp. 463– 464.
348 Theodor Tudoroiu

assessment of these issues and, more generally, on the “revolutionary” role they
assign or deny to social media, two opposing camps of academics and journalists
emerged. The already mentioned “cyber-skeptics” or “techno-realists” did not
support the idea that social media was a key force for democracy and liberation, as
they cautioned against attributing political outcomes too strongly to technology.
On the contrary, the “cyber-enthusiasts” or “digital evangelists” believed that
social media had been a very important, perhaps decisive tool in the coordination
and execution of Arab Spring-type uprisings.10 The first group, whose prominent
members include Malcolm Gladwell and Evgeny Morozov, based their claims on
the fact that only a minority of people in the Arab countries had internet access
and even fewer mobile internet access. Moreover, they considered social media
tools as “irrelevant gadgets, more useful for security forces protecting the regimes
than for protesters (and especially for the surveillance squads operating in
neopatrimonial states).”11 Malcolm Gladwell argued that social media is unsuited
for coordinating or executing social uprisings for two main reasons. First, it only
creates “weak ties.” It is unable to forge the strong social ties needed to take the
“courageous steps” that a revolution requires. Social media can increase
participation, but only because it makes participation easier.12 Second, instead
of hierarchies, this media creates networks with loosely bound members.
Networks are adaptable and resilient in low-risk situations but lack clear goals,
lines of authority, and high levels of discipline. As such, they are unsuited to the
high risks and demands of popular uprisings and revolutions.13 In 2010, Gladwell
famously declared that “the revolution won’t be tweeted.” Ironically, this was
three months before the inception of the Egyptian “Facebook Revolution.”14
The “cyber-enthusiasts” took the opposing stance. Yet, they could not ignore
completely the arguments of their adversaries. Consequently, they admitted that
access to the internet does not automatically lead to openness and democracy:
“Social media was neither the cause nor the catalyst of the revolution; rather,
it was a tool of coordination and communication.”15 Still, social media can
empower small pockets of dissidents by connecting them with like-minded
people. It can reduce the cost of coordination, thus compensating for the
disadvantages of undisciplined groups, and allows for the dissemination of
information and literature. Critically, through such coordination and dissemina-
tion, social media “can produce a sense of shared awareness, eventually creating
an ‘imagined community.’”16 This led to the idea that the critical matter is not
technology itself, but its impact on the development of networks based on choice
and affinity. New forms of networked sociability emerge, creating a social
10
Barrons, “Suleiman,” p. 56; for reviews of this debate see pp. 55 – 58 as well as
Comunello and Anzera, “Will the Revolution Be Tweeted?,” pp. 463– 465.
11
Comunello and Anzera, “Will the Revolution Be Tweeted?,” pp. 453, 463– 464.
12
Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change,” The New Yorker, October 4, 2010, ,http://www.
newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell/.; Barrons, “Suleiman,”
p. 56; Jeffry R. Halverson, Scott W. Ruston, and Angela Trethewey, “Mediated Martyrs of
the Arab Spring: New Media, Civil Religion, and Narrative in Tunisia and Egypt,” Journal of
Communication 63 (2013), pp. 313.
13
Gladwell, “Small Change”; Barrons, “Suleiman,” p. 56.
14
Halverson et al., “Mediated Martyrs,” p. 313.
15
Barrons, “Suleiman,” pp. 55, 56.
16
Clay Shirky quoted by Ibid., 57.
 Social Media and Revolutionary Waves 349

structure that Manuel Castells described using the concept of “network society.”
In this context, social media enables new forms of civic engagement and political
participation.17 Castells argued that the shift from mass communication to
mass “self-communication” marked contemporary social activism worldwide.
As power is strongly related to communication issues, 18 the rise of
communication networks has contributed to changing power relations. It has
stimulated mass citizen participation by using the interactive capacity offered by
the internet. Social media has become the space where power strategies are played
out.19 Indeed, since the mid-2000s—and culminating in the Arab Spring—Arab
countries have provided a good example of how virtual and public spaces
come into a mutual synergy and produce a formidable potential for mobilizing
a broad variety of actors.20 Critically, this was due to the emergence of a new
public sphere. Pioneered by Jürgen Habermas in 1962, this concept can be
defined as “a discursive space in which individuals and groups congregate
to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common
judgment.”21 In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Western Europe, the
bourgeois gathered in literary salons and coffeehouses mostly for mundane
and self-interested reasons rooted in private concerns. However, they started to
deliberate on ways to protect their private interests from potential abuses of the
rulers. Facilitated eventually by the diffusion of newspapers—that period’s
“new media”—rationality and openness in deliberation became antidotes to
exposure to traditional chains of authority. Broadly cohesive processes of forming
a rational consensus about the common good were at work.22 The Frankfurt
School thinker analyzed the emergence, transformation, and ultimate demise of
this inherently liberal, rational, and virtuous political space in which bourgeois-
driven civil society forced the state authorities into accountability through
informed and critical discussion.23 Further details are provided in the section
“Social Media as a Means of Enhancing Pan-Arab Consciousness”,
which analyzes the impact on the Arab Spring of what has been presented as a
Castells-type new Arab public sphere that recently has emerged with the
contribution of social media. At this point, another element has to be brought into
discussion. As Gadi Wolfsfeld noted, “one cannot understand the role of social
media in collective action without first taking into account the political
environment in which they operate.”24 When speaking of the Arab Spring, the
17
Manuel Castells, Communication Power (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009);
Comunello and Anzera, “Will the Revolution Be Tweeted?,” p. 458.
18
More details are provided in “Analysis and Conclusions”.
19
Castells, Communication Power, pp. 63, 327; Halverson et al., “Mediated Martyrs,” p.
314; Comunello and Anzera, “Will the Revolution Be Tweeted?,” p. 459.
20
Armando Salvatore, “New Media, the ‘Arab Spring,’ and the Metamorphosis of the
Public Sphere: Beyond Western Assumptions on Collective Agency and Democratic
Politics,” Constellations 20:2 (2013), p. 225.
21
Gerard A. Hauser, “Vernacular Dialogue and the Rhetoricality of Public Opinion,”
Communication Monographs 65:2 (1998), p. 86.
22
Salvatore, “New Media,” p. 217.
23
Emma C. Murphy, “Between Image and Reality: New ICTs and the Arab Public
Sphere,” in Mahjoob Zweiri and Emma C. Murphy (eds), The New Arab Media. Technology,
Image and Perception (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 2011), pp. 104 –105.
24
Wolfsfeld et al., “Social Media,” p. 115.
350 Theodor Tudoroiu

political environment was a revolutionary one. The literature on revolutions and

revolutionary contagion therefore needs to be briefly presented.
Theda Skocpol and Anthony Giddens identified class and violence as the main
characteristics of revolution.25 These features, however, are not necessarily
associated with all revolutions, especially with more recent ones. Timothy Garton
Ash noted “the increasing blurring of the line between reform and revolution”
and spoke of “a non-revolutionary revolution” he labeled “refolution” or
“revelection.”26 Most of the recent revolutions belong to this category. In his
analysis of the Arab Spring, Asef Bayat used an adapted version of “refolution” in
order to describe Middle Eastern “revolutions that aim to push for reforms in, and
through, the institutions of the existing regimes.”27 This is why the present article
uses the more general definition of revolution created by Jeffery Paige in order to
cover both classical features and recent trends:

A revolution is a rapid and fundamental transformation in the categories of social

life and consciousness, the metaphysical assumptions on which these categories
are based, and the power relations in which they are expressed as a result of
widespread popular acceptance of a utopian alternative to the current social
order.28

Revolutions almost always have an international dimension. Frequently, their

ideology is related to the international sphere: “Revolutions are an international
phenomenon ( . . . ) because the ideas and goals that inspire revolutions diffuse
around the world.”29 Indeed, most revolutionary ideologies imply a logic leading
to the affirmation of ideals that pertain to more than one country. Revolutions
legitimize themselves in terms of appeal to general and abstract principles that
cannot be specific to a particular country or nation.30 At a more pragmatic level,
the practical need for support from similar or related revolutionary forces abroad
can encourage ideological convergence. Sometimes, this convergence and the
political relationship it generates take the spectacular form of revolutionary
waves. Indeed, the most disruptive type of revolution does not spread through
military invasion, but through one revolution sparking affiliate revolutions
elsewhere. This was the case of both the 1789 French and 1917 Russian ones.
The revolutionary idea resonates in other countries, and significant forces appear
that seek to implement it. A revolutionary wave is therefore a group of revolutions
with similar objectives normally containing a primary, central revolution and

25
See Jeffrey Paige, “Finding the Revolutionary in the Revolution: Social Science
Concepts and the Future of Revolution,” in John Foran (ed.), The Future of Revolutions:
Rethinking Radical Change in the Age of Globalization (London, UK; New York: Zed Books,
2003), p. 20.
26
Farideh Farhi, “The Democratic Turn: New Ways of Understanding Revolution,” in
John Foran (ed.), The Future of Revolutions: Rethinking Radical Change in the Age of
Globalization (London, UK; New York: Zed Books, 2003), p. 31.
27
Asef Bayat, “Revolution in Bad Times,” New Left Review 80 (2013), p. 52.
28
Paige, “Finding the Revolutionary,” p. 24.
29
Mark N. Katz, “The Diffusion of Revolutionary Waves,” in Jack A. Goldstone (ed.),
Revolutions: Theoretical, Comparative, and Historical Studies (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 2003), p. 150.
30
Fred Halliday, Revolution and World Politics: the Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power
(London, UK: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 59 – 60.
 Social Media and Revolutionary Waves 351

other actual or potential revolutions. Aspiring revolutionaries take their

inspiration from the central revolution, attempt to emulate it, and usually seek
its assistance in coming to power.31 It is in this context that the process of
revolutionary contagion is most visible. I understand revolutionary contagion to
be the preparation and start-up of a new revolution under the ideological
influence and, sometimes, with the organizational assistance of an exterior,
primary revolution. Local affiliate revolutionaries diffuse the ideology of the
primary revolution within the local society. When both their ideological influence
over the society and their strength as an organization are considered sufficient,
they initiate actions meant to overthrow the government and install a
revolutionary regime. The section “Social Media as an Instrument of Revolu-
tionary Contagion” will present the details of this process in the context of the
Arab Spring.

Social Media as a Tactical Tool of Mobilization, Communication, and

Coordination
The internet first made its way into the Middle East during the early 1990s.
Initially, its development was exceedingly slow. In 2004, the United Nations
declared that there were too few Arabic-language websites to even be statistically
relevant. Even today, internet usage is unevenly distributed between and within
Arab countries.32 However, there was considerable progress in the second half of
the 2000s. By February 2010, Egyptians could take advantage of broadband access
from US$8 per month. The country of 80 million had more than seventeen million
internet users. In December 2011, there were four million Egyptian users of
Facebook as well as more than 160,000 bloggers, with 30% of blogs focusing on
politics.33 Overall, only 10– 20% of those living today in a typical Middle Eastern
country have reliable internet access. However, this minority is a strategic one.
It comprises an elite made up of educated professionals, young entrepreneurs,
urban dwellers, and government workers. They formed “the networks that
initiated, coordinated, and sustained successful campaigns of civil disobedience
against authoritarian rule.”34 Indeed, by 2004, cyber-activism emerged in Egypt
and began to spread in other parts of the region as “a virtual replacement for the
muzzled media.” This process accelerated after 2008, in the face of the global
economic crisis and enhanced political repression.35
In 2008, protest movements in Tunisia were crushed without significant
backlash. At that time, there were only 28,000 Tunisian Facebook users. In 2010,
three months before Mohammed Bouazizi burned himself in Sidi Bouzid, there
was a similar case in Monastir. Nobody knew because it was not filmed. The
images of Bouaziz, on the contrary, were put on Facebook which, by then, had two
million users in Tunisia. This made the difference. The news of the self-
immolation was transmitted by the new media and triggered the mass protests

31
Katz, “The Diffusion,” pp. 150– 152.
32
Murphy, “Between Image and Reality,” pp. 106, 114.
33
Aftab A. Khan, “The Social Role of Media and Modern Technology in Arabs Spring,”
Far East Journal of Psychology and Business 7:1 (2012), p. 57.
34
Howard and Hussain, “Role of Digital Media,” p. 47.
35
Khondker, “Role of New Media,” p. 676.
352 Theodor Tudoroiu

that resulted in the fall of the regime.36 In Egypt, the internet was employed in
various tactics, from social media organizing and encryption techniques to
sharing online content and using online maps. A Google executive and protester,
Wael Ghonim, organized thousands of protesters to rally against police brutality
and regime corruption through his Facebook page. He urged users to mobilize
those lacking internet access, turning his webpage into an important source of
protest information. He later argued that the revolution would not have been
sparked without online communications and coordination. Indeed, at least
initially, social media platforms were a valuable source of communication and
coordination between protesters.37 The already mentioned “we use Facebook to
schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world”38 was
hardly an exaggeration.
In addition to—and, chronologically, before—the organization of protests,
web-based applications were used effectively to mobilize people against
authoritarian regimes that had total control of conventional media and prevented
it from contributing to the spread of information and ideas delegitimizing their
rule.39 Bloggers used the internet to circulate information critical of government
actions. They also used Western news sites such as the BBC and CNN to provide
credible information to their supporters and to spread ideas about liberty and
revolution.40 Online newspapers and websites published by dissidents abroad
were equally important. In Libya, a network of informal and formal
correspondents sent photos, reports, and video footage on domestic oppression
and protests to these expatriate news outlets. This created a major source of
information for transnational broadcasters and news agencies which helped
spread such information back in Libya.41
Initially puzzled by the use of these new instruments, the repressive forces
tried to adapt to the new arena and fight back. Cat-and-mouse games between
regime officials and activists ensued. In Libya, in January 2011 hackers from the
cyber-security department of the external security service attacked opposition
websites, replacing their content with pro-Qadhafi images and slogans or taking
them offline altogether.42 Protesters took to Muslim online dating sites in order to
hide the arrangements for meetings and protest rallies. In Syria, some believed
that the reopening by the regime of access to previously blocked Facebook and
Twitter was a way of entrapping activists. At one point, Mubarak went as far as
disabling Egypt’s broadband infrastructure. The effect was that middle-class
Egyptians took to the streets in large numbers, many driven by an urge to find out
what was going on. Later, Egyptian security services began using Facebook and

36
Ibid., 676–677.
37
Vasileios Karagiannopoulos, “The Role of the Internet in Political Struggles: Some
Conclusions from Iran and Egypt,” New Political Science 34:2 (2012), p. 160.
38
Khondker, “Role of New Media,” p. 677.
39
Ibid.
40
Philip Howard, Aiden Duffy, Deen Freelon, Muzammil Hussain, Will Mari, and
Marwa Mazaid, Opening Closed Regimes: What Was the Role of Social Media During the
Arab Spring?, Working Paper 2011.1, Project on Information Technology and Political Islam,
,http://pitpi.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/2011_Howard-Duffy-Freelon-Hussain-
Mari-Mazaid_pITPI.pdf. , pp. 2 – 3.
41
Anja Wollenberg and Jason Pack, “Rebels with a Pen: Observations on the Newly
Emerging Media Landscape in Libya,” The Journal of North African Studies 18:2 (2013), p. 197.
42
Ibid.
 Social Media and Revolutionary Waves 353

Twitter to anticipate the movements of protesters and arrested some prominent

cyber-activists.43 Despite such actions, statistics show that during the Arab Spring
a spike in online revolutionary conversations often preceded major events on the
ground. To give just one example, during the week before Mubarak’s resignation,
the number of tweets about political change in Egypt increased from 2,300 to
230,000 a day.44 Furthermore, dictators were deposed relatively quickly in Tunisia
and Egypt, which had large internet using populations and the most tech-savvy
civil society. In Libya and Yemen, which lacked such features, the victory of the
opposition forces was much more difficult.45
In addition to web-based applications, cell phones played an equally
important role. The opening of mobile telephone markets to private investment
resulted in impressive sectoral growth. In 2005, there were 33 mobile operators in
the Arab world. The last market, Qatar, was opened to competition in 2008.
Subscriber rates in 2005 varied from 102.99% of the population in Bahrain to 9.54%
in Yemen and 4.15% in Libya.46 At the beginning of the Arab Spring, there were 93
mobile phone subscribers for every one hundred people in Tunisia and 67 mobile
phones for every one hundred people in Egypt. Unsurprisingly, “the first
demonstrators to venture into Cairo’s Tahrir Square on 25 January 2011 ( . . . )
found solidarity through digital media, and then used their mobile phones to call
their social networks into the streets.”47 Mobile phones enhanced considerably the
effectiveness of internet applications. Not all Tunisian and Egyptian protesters
had a computer. Yet, given the high rates of mobile phone use, they either had a
mobile phone or were part of a group in which there were several mobile civic
journalists.48 Cell phones, which could be easily carried and concealed, were the
key mediating instrument bridging the communication gaps. Besides voice and
text communication that helped activists to organize and coordinate protest
actions, they were used to shoot and upload photos and videos for instant
distribution to social networks. Aware of the threat, Qadhafi even tried to shut
down his country’s mobile phone networks but failed because they were
too decentralized. Consequently, it was argued that “information infrastructure—
especially mobile phone use—consistently appears as one of the key ingredients
in parsimonious models for the conjoined combinations of causes behind regime
fragility and social movement success.”49
Pan-Arab satellite television channels also impacted visibly on Arab Spring
events. Unlike the internet and mobile phones, their role was negligible with
respect to tactical communication and coordination. However, they did
contribute considerably to anti-regime, large-scale mobilization. The beginning
of these channels can be traced back to 1991, when an Egyptian company,
Egyptian Space Net (ESN), took a position in a European satellite that allowed it
to broadcast across the region. Later, the rapid proliferation of Arab-owned
43
Howard and Hussain, “Role of Digital Media,” p. 39.
44
Howard et al., Opening Closed Regimes, pp. 3, 4.
45
Muzammil M. Hussain and Philip N. Howard, “What Best Explains Successful
Protest Cascades? ICTs and the Fuzzy Causes of the Arab Spring,” International Studies
Review 15 (2013), p. 49.
46
Murphy, “Between Image and Reality,” p. 107.
47
Howard and Hussain, “Role of Digital Media,” pp. 35, 38 – 39.
48
See “Analysis and Conclusions”.
49
Hussain and Howard, “What Best Explains,” pp. 43, 63, 64.
354 Theodor Tudoroiu

satellite television companies resulted in numerous television channels

accessible to Arabs regardless of their country of residence. This eroded state
monopolies despite efforts to impose a new regulatory agenda.50 After the 2003
US-led invasion of Iraq, two stations—al-Jazeera Satellite Channel in Doha
(Qatar) and the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya in Dubai—imposed themselves as
effective regional competitors of Western market leaders such as BBC World and
CNN International.51 As local television channels were controlled fully by the
authoritarian regimes, Middle Eastern “populations found ‘refuge’ in the Arab
satellite channels and, additionally, in the specialized channels directed by
political opponents abroad.” Viewers were able to discover personalities of the
opposition living in exile or who were reduced to silence by the authorities.52 To
give a Syrian example, incitement by al-Jazeera under the inspiration of Shaykh
Yusuf al-Qardawi—who set out to topple ‘the ‘Alawit regime”—contributed
significantly to the beginning of the uprisings.53 It is specifically al-Jazeera
that has continuously focused on political reform within the Arab world.
It questioned the legitimacy and policies of many Arab rulers, who sometimes
temporarily banned it.54 Foreseeably, at the beginning of the Arab Spring the
Qatari channel openly campaigned for the revolutionaries. The regular schedule
was replaced with live coverage of protest actions. There were key revolutionary
figures on talk shows and interviews with rebels from the front lines.55
Furthermore, the channel’s innovative new media team took two important
steps. First, traditional television news products were converted for and
distributed through social media. This included retransmitting free news on
mobile phones.56 Second, social media was used to collect information and
images from countries in which al-Jazeera journalists were harassed or banned.57
A massive amount of broadcasting time was devoted to amateur footage
delivered by activists on the ground, which often showed violent repressive
action by regime forces. In Libya, al-Jazeera was even closer to the street than the
domestic rebel channel, Al-Ahrar.58 This “happy marriage between the wide
screen TV and the small screen social media (and mainly camera-enabled mobile
phones)”59 gave birth to “a new system of mass communication built like a mix
between an interactive television, internet, radio and mobile communication
systems”60 whose effectiveness in terms of revolutionary mobilization was

50
Murphy, “Between Image and Reality,” p. 106.
51
Oliver Hahn, “Cultures of TV News Journalism and Prospects for a Transcultural
Public Sphere of the New Middle East,” in Naomi Sakr (ed.), Arab Media and Political
Renewal. Community, Legitimacy and Public Life (London, UK; New York: I.B.Tauris, 2007),
p. 13.
52
Larbi Chouikha, “Satellite Television in the Maghreb: Plural Reception and
Interference of Identities,” History and Anthropology 18:3 (2007), pp. 373, 371.
53
Itamar Rabinovich, The View from Damascus: State, Political Community and Foreign
Relations in Modern and Contemporary Syria (Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2011), p. 374.
54
Erik C. Nisbet and Teresa A. Myers, “Challenging the State: Transnational TV and
Political Identity in the Middle East,” Political Communication 27:4 (2010), p. 351.
55
Wollenberg and Pack, “Rebels with a Pen,” p. 196.
56
Khondker, “Role of New Media,” p. 678.
57
Howard and Hussain, “Role of Digital Media,” p. 45.
58
Wollenberg and Pack, “Rebels with a Pen,” p. 196.
59
Khaled Hroub quoted by Wollenberg and Pack, “Rebels with a Pen,” p. 196.
60
Khondker, “Role of New Media,” p. 678.
 Social Media and Revolutionary Waves 355

difficult to deny. On February 16, 2011, al-Jazeera broadcast an interview with

activist Idris al-Mismari who shouted into his mobile phone while video footage
of street protests was displayed onscreen. The interview ended abruptly when
al-Mismari was arrested. The next day, the rebellion spread throughout the
eastern part of Libya.61 In Egypt, “while the activists were a catalyst for the events
of January and February, they did not drive them. Television drove them, framed
them, legitimized them, and broadcasted them to a wide audience.”62
Overall, it can be argued that, during the Arab Spring, social media was “able
to provide a movement with powerful, speedy, and relatively low-cost tools for
recruitment, fund-raising, the distribution of information and images, collective
discussions, and mobilization for action.”63 Its tactical implications in terms of
mobilization, communication, and coordination affected the costs and benefits of
action as well as the opportunities and constraints on actor commitment in ways
that were beneficial to protesters.64 Despite the claims of “cyber-skeptics,” the
counter-measures adopted by the incumbent regimes were belated and rather
incoherent. The repressive forces lacked a clear strategy and it is beyond a shadow
of a doubt that they were far from imposing on social media the overwhelming
control that they had on “old” media. Consequently, social media was an effective
tactical tool that, in a number of countries, helped Arab Spring protesters go
beyond the initial, vulnerable phase of their movements, thus placing local
uprisings on the trajectory of fully-fledged revolutions.

Social Media as an Instrument of Revolutionary Contagion

At the beginning of 2011, most Arab states were ruled by highly repressive
authoritarian regimes with strong neopatrimonial or even sultanistic features,65
while many of their citizens faced the nefarious effects of serious structural socio-
economic crises. This combination created a situation that could be assessed as
pre-revolutionary. It was logical to expect that, with or without social media,
protest movements sooner or later would ignite all over the region. What was
surprising was their simultaneity. Uprisings initially confined to specific cities or
towns rapidly spread domestically to other provinces of the same country and
internationally to the entire Arab world. This process of revolutionary contagion
resulted in the development of a spectacular revolutionary wave. Previous
students of this phenomenon have noted that it normally has two dimensions.
First, there is the ideological one. While Arab Spring protestors were united in
their efforts to topple the local dictator, they did not necessarily share the same
convictions. Some were genuine democrats promoting Western liberal values.
Others were Islamists with an ambiguous or hostile attitude toward Western-style
democracy. Yet, it is important to note that the revolutions clearly were initiated
and led by secular, democratic civic activists. Their prominent role and its
acknowledgement by Islamists (who constantly kept a low profile) are well

61
Wollenberg and Pack, “Rebels with a Pen,” p. 196.
62
Jon B. Alterman, “The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” The Washington Quarterly
34:4 (2011), p. 114.
63
Wolfsfeld et al., “Social Media,” p. 117.
64
Hussain and Howard, “What Best Explains,” p. 63.
65
Jack A. Goldstone, “Understanding the Revolutions of 2011: Weakness and Resilience
in Middle Eastern Autocracies,” Foreign Affairs 90:3 (2011).
356 Theodor Tudoroiu

illustrated by a Libyan example. In early March 2011, victory was celebrated in

front of the Benghazi court house. At prayer times, in rows twenty deep, a large
crowd chanted prayers. In the front rows, a few hundred secular-minded youths
cried “Free Libya!” and played Arab pop music over loudspeakers. There was no
negative reaction from the crowd behind them.66 Post-revolutionary develop-
ments notwithstanding, “the rebellions in the Arab world have been over-
whelmingly secular in character.”67 Their main ideology has been the Western-
inspired liberal, democratic one.
The second dimension of revolutionary contagion concerns organization. If the
primary revolution originates in a country which is a middle or great power,
efforts to “export” revolution are likely. A Comintern-type international structure
can be set up in order to provide assistance to affiliated revolutionaries abroad. In
extreme cases, the direct participation by the armed forces of a revolutionary state
in another country can be taken into consideration.68 The case of the Arab Spring,
however, was a special one. As its starting point was the victorious Tunisian
revolt, one could be tempted to perceive of the latter as the primary revolution that
initiated the contagion process. Yet, it may be argued that Tunisia itself was a
secondary revolution, with the West acting as the primary revolution for the Arab
Spring. At first view this might seem surprising, but the Western heirs of the
American and French revolutions have been the only ones to promote and
disseminate a democratic ideology that is undoubtedly revolutionary in Middle
Eastern societies. Liberal and democratic values were diffused in Arab countries
both spontaneously and due to European and American programs of human
rights and democracy promotion. These values were assimilated by a part of the
local societies, who became de facto affiliated revolutionaries of the Western
primary revolution. When political and socio-economic causes led to the
emergence of a pre-revolutionary situation, these revolutionaries initiated the
protests and contributed to the creation of political and sometimes military
structures intended to overthrow the authoritarian regimes. This has nothing to
do with international plots to destabilize the region or other similar absurdities.
The secondary revolutions were spontaneous and their inception was not
triggered, expected or even foreseen by the West. In the case of Libya, the Western
primary revolution acknowledged ideological affinity and intervened militarily in
support of its affiliated revolutionaries, thus saving an endangered secondary
revolution. On a much smaller scale, Syrian pro-democracy revolutionaries also
have received some Western support. These, however, were exceptions. In most
cases, the revolutionary wave of the Arab Spring propagated itself, like the 1848
one, exclusively due to the diffusion of ideas and information. This was a
contagion process that benefitted greatly from the use of social media.
As already mentioned, pan-Arab satellite TV channels, and especially al-
Jazeera, became outlets for revolutionary propaganda. Frequently using amateur
footage uploaded by the protesters themselves, the Qatari station provided live
coverage of all uprisings, switching from one country to another.69 Viewers from
66
The Economist, March 5, 2011.
67
Mouin Rabbani, “The Arab Revolts. Ten Tentative Observations,” Perspectives,
Special Issue #2 (2011), p. 13.
68
Halliday, Revolution and World Politics, pp. 96 – 97.
69
Wollenberg and Pack, “Rebels with a Pen,” p. 196.
 Social Media and Revolutionary Waves 357

all over the region became fully aware of the causes, development, and
consequences of revolutions abroad. Furthermore, in order to compensate for the
dullness of state-controlled media, during the second half of the 2000s many
Arabs started to read foreign news online. They were also using the internet to
communicate with friends and relatives abroad. When Arab Spring revolutions
ignited and the locally generated digital media coverage of protest actions became
available globally, these habits turned into instruments of revolutionary
contagion. Ben Ali’s resignation in Tunisia was followed by large numbers of
tweets from Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco, and Yemen. Democracy advocates
in Tunisia and Egypt found large internet audiences in other Arab countries.
Overall, social media “brought a cascade of messages about freedom and
democracy across North Africa and the Middle East, and helped raise
expectations for success of political uprising.”70 Moreover, text messages and
videos circulated by social media around the region created networks reuniting
international and local democratization movements. The resulting transnational
links between individuals and groups helped civil society leaders in neighboring
countries to learn effective strategies of successful movement organization
through social media (at one point, even the Belgrade-based Center for Applied
Non-Violent Action and Strategies, CANVAS, helped train an Egyptian blogger
and activist).71 This was not the “export of revolution” in its classical sense but
nevertheless strengthened revolutionary forces abroad.72 To conclude, social
media contributed significantly to the process of revolutionary contagion. This
was made easier by the recent enhancement of pan-Arab consciousness described
in the following section.

Social Media as a Means of Enhancing Pan-Arab Consciousness

At first view, the fact that the Spring was exclusively Arab might seem strange.
Similar socio-political conditions existed in neighboring non-Arab countries.
Yet, the revolutionary wave affected the entire Arab-speaking world without
touching any state outside that area (protest movements such as the Iranian
ones had a different, earlier genesis). This geographical containment of the
revolutionary contagion process was attributed to the recent enhancement of
pan-Arab consciousness as a consequence of the development of a new Arab
public sphere, itself partially enabled by social media. This is a process with a
rather long history. During the 1950s, radical pan-Arab radio broadcasting
begun by Nasser and imitated by his rivals allowed pan-Arab movements to
fundamentally challenge the legitimacy of new and still weak Arab states. The
latter’s tightly controlled domestic media environment had to face a less
constrained transnational media space promoting a strongly held political
identity that transcended state borders. This gave particular resonance to pan-
Arab arguments and resulted in the beginning of the construction of a
transnational pan-Arab public sphere. Yet, the increasing institutionalization of
Arab states, the development of television broadcasting—which helped
concentrate media power in states—and, during the 1960s, the decline of

70
Howard et al., Opening Closed Regimes, pp. 3 – 4, 42 – 43.
71
Tina Rosenberg, “Revolution U,” Foreign Policy, February 16, 2011.
72
Howard et al., Opening Closed Regimes, p. 23.
358 Theodor Tudoroiu

Arabism (strongly marked by the 1967 war) put an end to this trend.73 At the
national level, the appropriation of the role of mass communicator by the state
precluded the open debates associated with a Habermasian public sphere.
Eventually, these were strongly discouraged by the heavily authoritarian
practices of the Arab neopatrimonial regimes.74 However, there were some
exceptions. In Syria, efforts to escape the regime’s control included the salons
of established businessmen and intellectuals, “non-declared” associations,
audio and videocassettes, photocopied leaflets, as well as meetings in coffee
shops, mosques, and church congregations.75 Egypt experienced, during the
1970s, the emergence of audiocassettes, especially in mosque circles, and, in the
late 1990s, the creation of newspapers founded on the initiative of young,
largely independent journalists.76 During the 1980s and 1990s, Islamists in most
Arab countries used video and audio tape recordings as well as fax machines to
spread criticism of authoritarian governments.77 Even if some of these efforts
were Islamist-led, they reflected a general trend associated with the third wave
of democratization. An increasing part of the Arab citizenry had started to
resent domestic dictatorship and, following examples abroad, initiated pro-
democracy actions that included the attempted construction of national public
spheres. Due to effective censorship and repression, progress was slow until
the late 1990s. At that point, something new occurred that enhanced and
reoriented public sphere-related efforts. The development of satellite television
and the internet helped change fundamentally the nature of Arab news content,
leading to the progressive creation of “a relatively open, transnational,
electronic communicative space.” Scholars analyzing the relationship between
long-term individual exposure to these new transnational information sources
and the perceived influence on political and religious identities started to speak
about the rise of a new transnational Arab public sphere.78 Under its influence,
the Arab public turned into something much less susceptible to regime
propaganda and much less deferential to authority. It also became much more
participatory and much more able to connect and communicate across
distances.79
It is important to note that there are significant differences between the new
public sphere and the classical, Habermasian, one. First, the latter is considered to
represent the origin of modern democracy. The former should similarly promote
the democratization of Arab states. Yet, all those involved in its construction could
not ignore the already existing, classical Western one, which served as an implicit
model of open deliberative space. As much as a potential cause of
democratization, the new Arab public sphere therefore can be assessed in part

73
Marc Lynch, “Beyond the Arab Street: Iraq and the Arab Public Sphere,” Politics and
Society31:1 (2003), pp. 59, 61.
74
Emma C. Murphy, “Theorizing ICTs in the Arab World: Informational Capitalism
and the Public Sphere,” International Studies Quarterly 53 (2009), pp. 1132– 1133.
75
Dale F. Eickelman and Armando Salvatore, “The Public Sphere and Muslim
Identities,” European Journal of Sociology 43:1 (2002), p. 109.
76
Salvatore, “New Media,” p. 219.
77
Murphy, “Theorizing ICTs,” p. 1134.
78
Nisbet and Myers, “Challenging the State,” pp. 347, 350– 351.
79
Marc Lynch, The Arab Uprising. The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East (New
York: Public Affairs, 2012), p. 13.
 Social Media and Revolutionary Waves 359

as an indirect consequence of previous democratization abroad. Second, this new

public sphere is transnational and independent from any formal political
structure or institution. Consequently, it lacks direct mechanisms by which to
translate public consensus into policy outcomes, which are controlled by national
governments.80 However, under certain circumstances, a transnational public
sphere can facilitate dramatic political changes that include revolutionary waves.
Third, Habermas confined religion to the private sphere and excluded it from
public deliberations. In a regional context strongly marked by the rise of Islamic
values, the new Arab public sphere brought the topic of religion and the
discussions around it to its very center.81 Fourth, women also were marginalized
by Habermas, whose approach eventually was criticized by some feminists for its
patriarchal nature. However, as participants, opinion leaders, and agenda setters
for public discourses, women are fully-fledged actors of the Arab public sphere.
The two last points substantiate the claim that the new public sphere has “(re)
envisioned and (re)constructed the idealized Habermasian public sphere by
broadening its limits” in terms of both topics and participants.82 Fifth, the
emergence of the Arab public sphere was closely associated with a discourse
focusing primarily on issues of foreign policy and international politics83 and
emphasizing a strong anti-American and anti-Israeli dimension. It can be said that
an Arab collective identity was defined in part on the basis of a sense of
subordination and exclusion from a globalizing and universalizing Western
public.84 This “helped to shape a new, anti-imperialist unity of opinion,” resulting
in a “wider meta-state Arabism.”85 Critically, by promoting this unity, the new
public sphere has modified Arab consciousness in ways that have facilitated the
Arab Spring revolutionary contagion process.
Indeed, it is increasingly difficult to deny that, in addition to (geo-)political
and cultural factors, social media and especially satellite television helped
“forge a strong sense of transnational identity across the region”86 resulting in
“an increasingly cohesive Arab consciousness”87 that intensified the sensitivity
of all Arabs to common challenges. Some journalists even spoke of “a de facto
cultural community, an umma by satellite.”88 There is quantitative evidence
that exposure to transnational Arab television increased the transnational
Muslim and Arab political identification at the expense of national political
identities. A 2008 survey found that only 39% of all Arabs identified
themselves first on the basis of national identity. Thirty-six percent cited a
Muslim identity while 29% cited an Arab identity.89 A 2011 survey showed that
71% of the Arabs maintained a belief in the existence of a united Arab nation

80
Lynch, “Beyond the Arab Street,” p. 58.
81
Mohammed el-Nawawy and Sahar Khamis, “Political Blogging and (Re)Envisioning
the Virtual Public Sphere: Muslim-Christian Discourses in Two Egyptian Blogs,”
International Journal of Press/Politics 16:2 (2011), p. 248.
82
Ibid.
83
Nisbet and Myers, “Challenging the State,” pp. 350– 351.
84
Lynch, “Beyond the Arab Street,” p. 60.
85
Yassine Temlali quoted by Youssef Mohamed Sawani, “The ‘End of Pan-Arabism’
Revisited: Reflections on the Arab Spring,” Contemporary Arab Affairs 5:3 (2012), p. 389.
86
Howard and Hussain, “Role of Digital Media,” p. 45.
87
Lawrence Pintak quoted by Sawani, “End of Pan-Arabism,” p. 389.
88
Gilles Paris quoted by Chouikha, “Satellite Television,” p. 370.
89
Nisbet and Myers, “Challenging the State,” pp. 347, 352.
360 Theodor Tudoroiu

bound together by many factors. No less than 81% identified common threats
to the “national security of Arab homeland,” thus confirming the above-
mentioned unifying effect of geopolitical factors. Finally, 75% of the
respondents were in favor of adopting integration formulas that would
support Arab unification.90
Of course, today political unification is hardly on the agenda of Arab states,
which shows an important gap between citizen identity dynamics and
government-conceived regional strategies. Yet, the “massive interaction in the
Arab consciousness”91 was instrumental in the unfolding of the Arab Spring as “a
single, unified narrative of protest with shared heroes and villains, common
stakes, and a deeply felt sense of shared destiny.”92 Some minority groups might
have disagreed, but overall this was fertile soil for revolutionary contagion,
enforcing considerably the effect of ideas and information circulated by social
media. This explains why, acknowledging the centrality of common challenges,
demonstrators “chanted the same slogans and voiced almost entirely identical
desires.”93 It was not an accident that Arab Spring protest movements “watched,
supported, and emulated each other in real time.” The enhanced Arab
consciousness created conditions to bind together the chaotic regional events
within a shared identity and a common narrative.94 This is to say that the Arab
Spring process of revolutionary contagion can be analyzed as based on three
elements. First, as described in the previous section, the revolutionary wave used
the instrument of social media to propagate itself. Second, its target was a region
whose citizens already had been collectively sensitized to similar challenges due
to a recently enhanced common consciousness. Third, this enhancement was due
in part to the action of the same social media.

Analysis and Conclusions

As Genevieve Barrons aptly noted, “the Egyptian Revolution was not a Twitter or
Facebook or YouTube revolution. Rather, it was a revolution that used Twitter,
Facebook, and YouTube.”95 When the Arab Spring is assessed, the independent
variable is the revolution. Social media was just an instrument. No matter how
important, it would have been unable to bring social mobilization and political
change in the absence of the structural socio-political causes of revolutions96:
“Socio-technological devices do not determine political outcomes, but simply alter
the matrix of opportunities and costs associated with intermediation, mobilization
and the organization of politics.”97 This is a point on which there is a large
scholarly consensus. Yet, most of the Arab Spring literature misses the main

90
Sawani, “End of Pan-Arabism,” p. 385.
91
Khair El-Din Haseeb, “On the Arab ‘Democratic Spring’: Lessons Derived,”
Contemporary Arab Affairs 4:2 (2011), pp. 116 – 117.
92
Lynch, The Arab Uprising, p. 9.
93
Sawani, “End of Pan-Arabism,” p. 388.
94
Lynch, The Arab Uprising, pp. 102– 103, 105, 125.
95
Barrons, “Suleiman,” pp. 57 – 58.
96
For a review of theses causes see Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley, “Structural Theories
of Revolution,” in John Foran (ed.), Theorizing Revolutions (New York: Routledge,
1997/2005), pp. 36 –70.
97
Bruce Bimber quoted by Hussain and Howard, “What Best Explains,” p. 63.
 Social Media and Revolutionary Waves 361

analytical consequence of this situation: the role of social media should have been
studied in a revolution-based approach. Instead, while “revolution” is mentioned
here and there, a majority of authors prefer to study “uprisings” and “rebellions.”
Such an approach fails to address appropriately the contagion dimension and,
implicitly, the key role social media played in unifying Arab world protests.
Indeed, the revolutionary wave approach is the only one that can explain
a number of important features of the Arab Spring perceived as a unitary political
phenomenon. The fundamental one is the structural connection among protest
movements all over the region. The Tunisian-initiated process basically consisted
of an effort to launch and lead secondary revolutions by local de facto affiliated
revolutionaries of the primary Western revolution. They tried to take advantage of
similar domestic grievances in order to overthrow similar authoritarian regimes.
This had five important consequences. First, the speed of revolutionary contagion
resulting in the quasi-simultaneity of protests in different countries, despite the
absence of any structure ensuring formal coordination. Second, the fact that all
protest movements interacted by inspiring and imitating each other in terms of
mobilization, planning, organization, and actions. Third, their remarkable
ideological coherence. As mentioned above, the Spring was based on democratic
values despite the fact that an important proportion of the protesters shared
Islamist convictions. The latter only joined opportunistically the wave of
democratic protest movements, whose inception they were in no way responsible
for. Fourth, considerable public sympathy for the Arab protest movements in the
countries of the primary, Western revolution. This resulted, on the one hand, in
legitimating multinational military support for the Libyan secondary revolution
and, on the other hand, in serious US embarrassment when, for important
Realpolitik reasons, Washington did not condemn vocally the Saudi-supported
brutal repression of the protest movement in Bahrain. Fifth, precisely because it
was a revolutionary wave and not an erratic combination of local political crises,
the Arab Spring created—within as well as outside the region—expectations of
large-scale, fully-fledged democratization. This explains the generalized, highly
pessimistic “Arab Winter” discourse triggered by eventual authoritarian
resilience and Islamist ascent.
If this revolutionary wave perspective is adopted, the six-stage Arab Spring
framework for political change set up by Muzammil Hussain and Philip
Howard98 can be expanded to take into consideration the revolutionary contagion
dimension it lacks. The pattern—that, as the two authors stated, can be seen, with
different degrees of strength, across the entire region—starts with (1) the
enhancement of a pan-Arab consciousness facilitated by the development of
satellite television and the internet since the late 1990s. During the second half
of the 2000s, activists initiated (2) a preparation phase, with social media being
used domestically and transnationally to identify collective identities and goals
and to build solidarity networks. Except for the Tunisian primary revolution, (3)
an inward revolutionary contagion phase followed, with social media conveying
impacting images, information, and calls for solidarity from more advanced
revolutions abroad. This was a process greatly facilitated by the common pan-
Arab sensitivities created during the first phase. (4) An ignition phase ensued in
each Arab country, with triggering events that galvanized the public.
98
Hussain and Howard, “What Best Explains,” p. 49.
362 Theodor Tudoroiu

(5) Subsequently, the protest phase saw small groups of activists using social
media as well as more classical revolutionary methods in order to mobilize and
coordinate the actions of large numbers of protesters. Then, there was (6) an
international buy-in phase, with social media extending the range of local
coverage to international broadcast networks. This brought solidarity messages
and some know-how support (in terms of movement organization) from protest
networks in other Arab countries; helped mobilize more local supporters;
encouraged other regions of the country to join the protests; and created a source
of outward revolutionary contagion. (7) The climax phase ensued, where the
regime adopted conciliatory, brutal, or mixed measures to put an end to protests.
Depending on local conditions, this resulted in the demise of authoritarian rulers,
limited or no reform, or civil war. Finally, there was (8) a follow-up information
warfare phase, with—no matter the outcome of the revolution—various domestic
and external actors competing to shape the future of civil society and, critically, of
the information infrastructure that made the protests possible.99
Out of this sequence, most authors prefer to ignore the first phase. The
relationship between social media-intermediated contagion and the enhancement
of Arab consciousness depicted in the previous section is an important factor in
explaining the speed, scale, and effectiveness of the Arab Spring revolutionary
contagion process. The fact that it is seldom mentioned might seem quite
surprising. One simple explanation is that Arab Spring social media studies focus
on 2011 events and therefore lack a long-term perspective. That change in
consciousness took fifteen years to become visible. Another more complex cause is
related to the issue of the pan-Arab public sphere itself. There are critics who
argued that, despite its claims to offer free and critical debate, new pan-Arab
media remained “inherently political.” The Qatari al-Jazeera and the Saudi
al-Arabiya were in fact concealed “tools of national foreign policy rather than
genuine efforts to open up the dialogical space.”100 The existence of a genuine
Arab public sphere compatible with the definition presented in the section
“Cyber-Skeptics, Digital Evangelists, and Refolutions” was therefore seriously
questioned.101 At a more abstract level, it was argued that new social media
creates “transient interest-based communities rather than the embedded identity-
based communities that fostered the public and counter-publics of the classical
Habermasian public sphere.” Moreover, the latter’s effectiveness was due to the
fact that, through informed and critical discussion, the public forced the state
authorities into accountability. Critics claimed that a pan-Arab public sphere not
confined to a nation state could not fulfill the function of critical review and serve
as a foundation for political reform and liberalization at the national level.102
It is true that al-Jazeera was not—and could have not been—politically neutral.
It nevertheless was fundamentally different from regular Middle Eastern
government-owned or controlled television channels. Its focus on political reform
within the Arab world as well as its emphasis on talk shows and call-in formats
implicitly allowed for very diverse opinions to reach the viewers. Moreover, the
99
Based on Hussain and Howard, “What Best Explains,” p. 49.
100
Mamoun Fandy quoted by Murphy, “Between Image and Reality,” p. 111.
101
For more details see Hahn, “Cultures of TV News,” pp. 13 – 14, and Murphy,
“Between Image and Reality,” p. 109.
102
Murphy, “Between Image and Reality,” p. 109.
 Social Media and Revolutionary Waves 363

channel’s popularity led to the emergence of many similar transnational television

stations since 2003,103 which together performed a role quite similar to that
attributed by Habermas to the bourgeois newspapers. The issue of transient
interest-based communities as opposed to embedded identity-based ones can be
discarded if the pan-Arab consciousness presented in the previous section is taken
into consideration. That is precisely an identity-related phenomenon that hardly
can be associated with short-term interests. The most interesting issue, however, is
that of the alleged incompatibility between the transnational character of the new
pan-Arab public sphere and Habermas’s state-based view.104 The confinement of
public sphere interactions to the narrow framework of classical nation-states
ignores completely Castells’s non-territorially defined perspective. A “network
society” approach changes considerably the way participation, accountability, and
legitimacy are perceived. The technology creates new “assemblages of power”
that, at least under certain circumstances, make the national level less relevant.
Social media allows for new forms of political activism that utilize specific
techniques105 in a way that makes possible the effective functioning of a
transnational public sphere. In fact, it was even argued that “the Arabs of today
are a complex social phenomenon and reality that the Western concept of nation
may not express and encompass.”106 Their new social media-based
communicative political space has immersed individuals in a cohesive message
system of hegemonic Arab and Islamic representations and narratives. These were
internalized and increased the salience of transnational political identities.107
Consequently, the Arab public sphere exists and is working despite its
non-national nature. It has “inaugurated new spaces which the authoritarian
Arab regimes observe with much apprehension.”108 The Arab Spring
revolutionary wave was possible precisely due to the existence and the
democratic orientation of these new transnational discursive spaces. Moreover,
the functioning of such spaces is closely associated with the change in power
relations originating in the rise of new communication networks. The Arab Spring
showed how virtual and public spaces actually came into a mutual synergy,
turning transnational connectedness into tangible mobilization109 that threatened
and sometimes overthrew stable, consolidated authoritarian regimes: “virtual
networks materialized in the streets.”110 It would be difficult to claim that this
does not represent a major change in domestic as well as transnational power
relations. This change is not visible in day to day politics mainly because, as
mentioned above, the transnational nature of the new Arab public sphere
deprives it of direct mechanisms by which to translate public consensus into
policy outcomes. This, however, might change at least in part if the public sphere

103
Nisbet and Myers, “Challenging the State,” p. 351.
104
For a complex analysis of this topic see Nancy Fraser, “Transnationalizing the
Public Sphere. On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian
World,” Theory, Culture & Society 24:4 (2007), pp. 7 – 30.
105
Jodi Dean, Jon Anderson, and Geert Lovink quoted by Murphy, “Between Image and
Reality,” p. 110.
106
Burhan Ghalioun quoted by Sawani, “End of Pan-Arabism,” p. 388.
107
Nisbet and Myers, “Challenging the State,” p. 352.
108
Chouikha, “Satellite Television,” p. 371.
109
Salvatore, “New Media,” p. 225.
110
Howard and Hussain, “Role of Digital Media,” p. 35.
364 Theodor Tudoroiu

continues to develop and the fear of new Springs makes national governments
more responsive to public demands.
Up to this point, the present article might have given the impression that the
impact of social media on Arab Spring processes had little to do with the micro
level of analysis. In fact, there is a major mutation that has to be mentioned
which concerns precisely that level. A key group in the revolutions used
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to put pressure on governments both before
and during the protests.111 Critically, the members of this group took advantage
of the aforementioned combination of television, mobile phones, and the
internet in ways leading to the “massive empowerment of the citizen
journalist.”112 In addition to messaging, they uploaded images and videos
taken with their cell phones. People could access many of those images on the
internet or simply by watching al-Jazeera. Their authors began to perceive
themselves—and to be perceived by others—as activists because they were
creating media content. This is how the use of social media—and the implicit
shift from mass communication to “mass self-communication” depicted by
Castells—transformed many observers of activism into “activists with a greater
stake as leaders, not just followers, of unfolding events.”113 This was an
important change for many individual protesters whose revolutionary
engagement might have been much more modest in the absence of social
media. At the same time, it represented a mutation in the very functioning and
organization of social movements.
Equally important, by scrutinizing the identity and social position of these
activists one can reach interesting conclusions with respect to the socio-economic
class dimension of the Arab Spring. In demographic terms, the engine of the
protest movements was represented by urban, middle-class, relatively well-
educated, underemployed, and technology-savvy young people, many of whom
were women.114 Acting as mobile civic journalists and bloggers, these were the
main creators of user-generated content and therefore the key actors of
revolutions. The serious problem represented by the limited access of the
population to computers and especially to mobile technology115 was overcome by
the grouping of protesters around one or several such individuals, who uploaded
text, photos, and videos and accessed internet-available information on behalf of
the entire group.116 This is why the limitations of such a narrow class base were
hardly visible during the high-mobilization episodes of the Arab Spring.
Yet, things changed in the aftermath of the revolutions, when the limited number
of these activists became an electoral liability. Consequently, the struggles to
consolidate the emancipatory gains of the Arab Spring were not always
successful. The electorally-supported Islamist “Arab Winter,” the reaction of the
Egyptian military, and, more generally, the fact that in most cases “the
authoritarian model of government is still replicated in the society, especially in
111
Howard et al., Opening Closed Regimes, p. 2.
112
Wollenberg and Pack, “Rebels with a Pen,” p. 196.
113
Alterman, “The Revolution,” p. 104.
114
Hussain and Howard, “What Best Explains,” pp. 48 –49; Howard et al., Opening
Closed Regimes, p. 2.
115
See the section “Social Media as a Tactical Tool of Mobilization, Communication, and
Coordination”.
116
Hussain and Howard, “What Best Explains,” p. 63.
 Social Media and Revolutionary Waves 365

state sector institutions,”117 suggest that, for the time being, social media activists
and, at a more abstract level, the pan-Arab transnational public sphere itself are
not strong enough to ensure democratic consolidation. The continuing
development of social media might allow that; rising Islamism, on the contrary,
could endanger it further. These aspects, however, fall beyond the scope of the
present article.
To conclude, during the Arab Spring, social media contributed to turning
“individualized, localized, and community-specific dissent into a structured
movement with a collective consciousness about both shared plights and
opportunities for action.”118 This was a complex transformative process with
individual, local, national, and pan-Arab dimensions. 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. These three interrelated functions are difficult to analyze without the use
of a revolutionary wave theoretical approach. In its absence, disparate “Facebook
uprisings” take the center of the scene, turning the Arab Spring into a patchwork
of erratic and analytically incoherent “cascade protests.” In fact, the Arab world
witnessed an extremely coherent process of revolutionary contagion whose liberal
and democratic ideology was disseminated transnationally mainly by social
media. The impressive speed, scale, and effectiveness of this contagion would
have not been possible without the effect of the Arab public sphere—itself
partially enabled by the social media—on the increasingly cohesive pan-Arab
consciousness. Fundamentally, the Arab Spring was the first revolutionary wave
ever to reflect the change in power relations originating in the rise of new
communication networks.

Notes on Contributor
Dr Theodor Tudoroiu is a lecturer in International Relations at the University of
the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad. He works mainly on subjects related to
Middle Eastern and post-communist regime change and democratization.

117
Patrycja Sasnal, “The Pessoptimist’s Arab Revolution: A Mismatch between Social
Evolution and Political Revolution,” Insight Turkey 14:4 (2012), p. 25.
118
Howard and Hussain, “Role of Digital Media,” p. 41.