Media, Technologies, Cooperation – Rethinking Publics and Publicness in the MENA Region
Konstantin Aal, Nina Boulus-Rødje, Markus Rohde · Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) · 2022
In December 2010, a young market trader set himself on fire in protest in front of the governor’s palace in Tunisia. This event marked the beginning of mass protests, which within 6 weeks led to the resignation of the Tunisian government and to the departure of the president. Subsequently, protests against unpopular governments spread to neighbouring countries throughout northern Africa, and to additional countries in the Middle East. A number of governments were overthrown, and in Syria a civil war is still raging today. Hundreds of thousands of people in the Mena region have lost their homes and are now on the run, and most countries are now considered politically unstable. These political developments have been described under various labels, such as, the Arab Spring and the Arab Revolution . In the early days of this protest movement, these developments were framed in mainstream media as ‘Facebook’s Revolution’ or ‘Revolution 2.0’. Beneath these headings and framings is the assumption, or rather the thesis, that the rapid spread of the protests and the uprisings would not have been possible without the intensive use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter. To put it bluntly, there was (and perhaps still is), the assumption that these social media made the Arab Spring and the revolution possible in the first place.