The role of digital media.pdfVIP

Access Provided by Yale University Library at 07/10/11 8:38AM GMT The Upheavals in Egypt and Tunisia the role of digital media Philip N. Howard and Muzammil M. Hussain Philip N. Howard is associate professor of communication at the Uni- versity of Washington. He is the author of The Digital Origins of Dic- tatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam (2010). Muzammil M. Hussain is a doctoral student in communication at the University of Washington. As has often been noted in these pages, one world region has been practically untouched by the third wave of democratization: North Af- rica and the Middle East. The Arab world has lacked not only democ- racy, but even large popular movements pressing for it. In December 2010 and the first months of 2011, however, this situation changed with stunning speed. Massive and sustained public demonstrations demand- ing political reform cascaded from Tunis to Cairo, Sana‘a, Amman, and Manama. This inspired people in Casablanca, Damascus, Tripoli, and dozens of other cities to take to the streets to call for change. By May, major political casualties littered the ground: Tunisia’s Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, two of the region’s oldest dictators, were gone; the Libyan regime of Muammar Qadhafi was battling an armed rebellion that had taken over half the country and attracted NATO help; and several monarchs had sacked their cabi- nets and committed to constitutional reforms. Governments around the region had sued for peace by promising their citizens hundreds of bil- lions of dollars in new spending of various kinds. Morocco and Saudi Arabia appeared to be fending off serious domestic uprisings, but as of this writing in May 2011, the outcomes for regimes in Bahrain, Jordan, Syria, and Yemen remain far from certain. There are many ways to tell the