New Media and Revolution: Resistance and Dissent in Pre-uprising Syria

by Billie Jeanne Brownlee

Overview

The Arab Spring did not arise out of nowhere. It was the physical manifestation of more than a decade of new media diffusion, use, and experimentation that empowered ordinary people during their everyday lives. In this book, Billie Jeanne Brownlee offers a refreshing insight into the way new media can facilitate a culture of resistance and dissent in authoritarian states.Investigating the root causes of the Syrian uprising of 2011, New Media and Revolution shows how acts of online resistance prepared the ground for better-organised street mobilisation. The book interprets the uprising not as the start of Syria's social mobilisation but as a shift from online to offline contestation, and from localised and hidden practices of digital dissent to tangible mass street protests. Brownlee goes beyond the common dichotomy that frames new media as either a deus ex machina or a means of expression to demonstrate that, in Syria, media was a nontraditional institution that enabled resistance to digitally manifest and gestate below, within, and parallel to formal institutions of power. To refute the idea that the population of Syria was largely apathetic and apolitical prior to the uprising, Brownlee explains that social media and technology created camouflaged geographies and spaces where individuals could protest without being detected.Challenging the myth of authoritarian stability, New Media and Revolution uncovers the dynamics of grassroots resistance blossoming under the radar of ordinary politics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780228000891
Publisher:	McGill-Queens University Press
Publication date:	07/16/2020
Series:	McGill-Queen's Studies in Protest, Power, and Resistance , #1
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Billie Jeanne Brownlee is a lecturer in Middle East politics at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter.

Table of Contents

Figures and Tables vii

Acknowledgements ix

1 New Media, New Battlefields for New Revolutions 3

2 From Virtual to Tangible Civic Mobilisation 40

3 'Change within Continuity': The Lion Cub's Reforms 71

4 Empowering Publics: Satellite TV and the Internet 92

5 Media Development and Foreign Aid Assistance 124

6 The Syrian Media Landscape after 2011 162

Conclusions - Media: Weapons of the Weak or the Weapons of Mass Distraction? 188

Notes 199

References 227

Index 261

Editorial Reviews

"Some observers attribute the origins of the Arab Spring revolutions to social media, especially to YouTube (two million uploads during the Syrian conflict's first two years). Brownlee (Univ. of Exeter) demonstrates, however, that the transition from online revolution" to a real-life people's revolution in Syria resulted from a lengthy process that involved increased access, new professional standards, and privatization under Bashar al-Assad, together transforming the heavily censored "kingdom of silence." Recommended. All readers." Choice


"Brownlee's book is a welcome contribution to the scholarship on Syria, Arab media, authoritarianism, and the public sphere in the Middle East. The book approaches the subject of Syrian media — a subject that deserves greater academic attention — from a fresh, instructive angle." The Middle East Journal

From the Publisher