Digital activism in the Middle East: mapping issue networks in Egypt, Iran, Syria and Tunisia
Keywords:
knowledge management, digital activism, mapping, Middle East, Egypt, Iran, Tunisia, SyriaAbstract
The shocking image of the young student Neda Salehi dying, after appearing to have been shot by the Iranian government's Security Forces, dominated the global news and online platforms during the 2009 ?Iran election crisis?. Iranian protestors took to the streets, internet, blogosphere and Twitter to express their discontent about the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In the days following the election, the global news attention shifted from the situation on the ground to the role of Twitter in ?the Iran crisis?. With headlines such as: ?Iran's Protests: Why Twitter is the Medium of the Movement? content organisers such as Twitter increasingly become part of reality and the web becomes a space for analysis. Unique to the web and content organizers is that they mediate the formation of online networks and make these networks traceable. Using natively digital research tools, this paper mapped issue networks of digital activism in the Middle East to understand if the internet mediates the organisation of activism for social change in repressive environments. Digital activists are individuals, sometimes organized in social organizations, that actively express or engage online for development and social change.References
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Freedom House 2009. New study identifies emerging threats to Internet freedom. Freedom House.
Available from: http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=70&release=798 (accessed
1 September 2009).
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instructions.html (accessed 15 June 2009).
Human Rights Watch 2005. False freedom: online censorship in the Middle East and North Africa.
Human Rights Watch. Available from: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/45cc445f2.html
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May 2009).
Marres, N. 2006. Net-work is format work: issue networks and the site of civil society politics. In: J.
Dean, J. Asherson and G. Lovink, eds. Reformatting politics: networked communications and
global civil society. New York: Routledge.
Marres, N. and Rogers, R. 2005. Recipe for tracing the fate of issues and their publics on the Web.
In: B. Latour and P. Weibel, eds. Making things public; atmosphere of democracy. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 922?935.
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net/files/ONI_Egypt_2009.pdf (accessed 5 September 2009).
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net/files/ONI_Iran_2009.pdf (accessed 5 September 2009).
Open Net Initiative 2009c. Internet filtering in the Middle East and North Africa. Available from:
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Open Net Initiative 2009d. Internet filtering in Syria. Available from: http://opennet.net/research/
profiles/syria (accessed 5 September 2009).
Open Net Initiative 2009e. Internet filtering in Tunisia. Available from: http://opennet.net/sites/
opennet.net/files/ONI_Tunisia_2009.pdf (accessed 5 September 2009).
Reporters Without Borders 2006. List of the 13 Internet enemies. Available from: http://www.rsf.
org/List-of-the-13-Internet-enemies.html (accessed 28 August 2009).
Roger, R. 2009a. Mapping public Web space with the Issue crawler. In: Claire Brossard and Bernard
Reber, eds. Digital cognitive technologies: epistemology and knowledge society. London:
Wiley, 2009, 115?126.
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Zuylen, E. 2009. Iran: Public dissent in the age of the new media, Hivos newsletter civil society in
West Asia, (1).
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2019-08-02
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