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Soziale Medien und das Internet im arabischen Raum

de Hanan Badr

Was bleibt zehn Jahre nach Beginn des Arabischen Frühlings übrig?

Dieser Beitrag ist nur auf Englisch verfügbar.

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Introduction

Writing on the role of Internet in the Arab region ten years after the Arab Uprisings seems to be haunted by the legacy of 2010 and 2011. The so-called Arab Spring, or better Uprisings, fixed the attention on expressing dissent and mobilizing protests in new online spaces. The breakthrough in forging revolutionary identities using digital tools despite the repressive frameworks was remarkable. While the Arab Uprisings shifted the attention from stagnation to the dynamism (Harders 2018), this moment of discovering the online possibilities of communication sparked an intensive debate on the role of the Internet in politics that pushed the promises of democratization. Often coined as “Facebook Revolution” and “YouTube Uprisings” at first, the Internet got central attention in the academic and public discourses. Early debates that followed on the role of the Internet as “liberation technology” (Diamond 2010) was often techno-deterministic and optimistic. Later developments in the region and worldwide led to the findings that online commu-nication does not always have a positive effect: research on “dark participation” (Quandt 2018) and “dissonant public spheres” (Pfetsch et al, 2018) shows the dystopian potential of user-gen-erated content. The rise of hate speech, polarization and disinformation cause worrying signs all over the world.

This article gives an overview on the role of the Internet in the Arab region beyond the fixation on political uses of the Internet. It contextualizes how media convergence shape the hybrid media ecologies beyond offline-online binaries. Media convergence refers to “both the changes of media technologies themselves and the implications for how we create, consume and distribute media within these converging technologies. It raises questions on how, when, and why new technologies have been included in a media system, and with what effect, are thus important factors in the analysis of media systems” (Richter and Kozman, 2021). Looking at how technology drives the hybridity of the media systems, this concept “draws attention to change and flux, the passing of an older set of cultural and institutional norms, and the gradual emergence of new norms” (Chadwick 2017).

Based on this, the article covers three areas:

  1. the post-2011 learning processes from govern-ments and activists,
  2. divergent media landscapes and questions of digital in/equality beyond access to technology and the infrastructure and finally
  3. hybridity of media systems and its effects on the media practices and landscapes.

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