Social Media & the Arab Spring: How communication technology shapes socio-political change

Although social media was not insignificant, we need to take a wider view examining the interac- tion between interpersonal communication, social media, and satellite TV to understand how the Arab Spring was documented and witnessed by local and global audiences, and how the protests were mobilised. Social media was a clearly important catalyst for the uprisings, but it may also ex- plain why the Arab Spring failed in the medium-term: Multimedia and multi-platform communica- tion environments, which facilitated the rapid diffusion of information, are good at supporting the kind of loose coordination necessary for defenestrating one system of authority. But they are not (yet) good at supporting the kind of deep and sustained coordination that designing and support- ing new political authority requires.