Abstract
The Arab Awakening of 2011 was wonderful to behold. The established order, unresponsive and often cruel, suddenly found its control of public life slipping away. Energized by unprecedented connectivity to information sources and like-minded fellow citizens, those who had remained silent for so long in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere found their voices and raised a din that caused the walls of autocracy to crack and then crumble in some places. In other Arab countries, the powerful, using force or cunning (or a mixture of the two), retained control, at least for the time being.
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Notes
Jeffrey Ghannam, “Social Media in the Arab World: Leading Up to the Uprisings of 2011,” Center for International Media Assistance, National Endowment for Democracy, February 3, 2011, 30.
Robert Darnton, Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 1.
Jeffrey Ghannam, “In the Middle East, This Is Not a Facebook Revolution,” Washington Post, February 18, 2011.
Frank Rich, “Wallflowers at the Revolution,” New York Times, February 5, 2011.
Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” New Yorker, October 4, 2010.
Clay Shirky, “From Innovation to Revolution: Do Social Media Make Protests Possible?” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 90, No. 2, March/ April 2011, 154.
Manuel Castells, Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 21.
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© 2012 Philip Seib
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Seib, P. (2012). Introduction. In: Real-Time Diplomacy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010902_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010902_1
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