The message of new medium : politics and the Arab uprisings on social media

Abstract EN

Public Sphere in the Arab world has been under rapid and steady transformation with social media becoming an alternative medium of interactive communication.

In 2011-12, Facebook had emerged as the main site of these interactions and user-producer convergence that helped the Arab uprisings to be communicated to a wider audience by their actors directly to the people who were equally able to interact with the process.

On the other hand, the satellite channels like Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya found themselves challenged by the reach and interactivity of social media and were forced to meet the expectations of an over-ambitious Arab street.

Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, Al Sharq Al Awsat, Al Hayat, and many transnational Arab news organizations became active on cyber-sphere, none of them achieved the popularity of social media, nonetheless.

The Arabic page of Kulluna Khaled Said, for example, was created in June 2010 in reaction to a local police case became a global news maker when it became the leading media against Hosni Mubarak after the uprisings erupted.

This paper discusses the role of social media as a New Medium when most of traditional mediums were trying to censor or remain wary of covering the anti-regime uprisings.

The new medium became a new message in itself where new ways of interactions and new discursive traditions started appearing.

A case study was conducted on the Facebook campaign of Kulluna Khaled Said along with other pages which were actively engaged in staging anti regime protests.

The paper refers Jurgen Habermas’ Public sphere as a theoretical point to what the Arab street used to be at the time of the uprising.