Social media and 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 interaction 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 explain why the Arab Spring failed in the medium-term: Multimedia and multi-platform communication 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 supporting new political authority requires.