Twittering the ¿Arabspring? An Empirical Content Analysis of Tweets
(Sprache: Englisch)
This study examines tweet content from key periods of the uprisings in Egypt and Syria of 2011 and 2012, generally known as the Arab Spring . Some authors and the mainstream media have suggested that these uprisings were significantly influenced and...
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This study examines tweet content from key periods of the uprisings in Egypt and Syria of 2011 and 2012, generally known as the Arab Spring . Some authors and the mainstream media have suggested that these uprisings were significantly influenced and organised by Twitter and subsequently referred to them as Twitter Revolution . Other authors have strongly opposed this idea and attributed it to self-deception in the light of marvellous inventions of the Western World. They have suggested Twitter was predominantly used as an information-sharing network. In an effort to contribute data to this debate, this study analyses tweet content from three different observation periods; two tweet datasets were collected from other academics and a third one was crawled from the Twitter API; this process made use of the crawling tool cURL and the database software mongoDB.The combined tweet dataset contained about 1.9 million tweets out of which a sample of 1945 tweets was drawn. This sample was then evaluated in a quantitative content analysis according to a coding manual. These codes were entered into the statistical analysis software SPSS, in which they were also processed.
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Text sample:Chapter 2.2, Twitter Revolution or Revolution by the People?:
The on-going key debate on whether or not social media can play an important role in revolutionary events and its organisational capabilities in general has been going on for years. This debate is most certainly not restricted to the recent uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya or Syria; the term Twitter Revolution has been attributed to the civil unrest in Moldova in 2009 and the violent demonstrations after the allegedly forged elections of 2009 in Iran. This part of the literature review aims to do the entire debate justice.
Up until the uprisings in the course of the Arab Spring, the Middle East was the only region on the planet where democracy was basically non-existent with not a single democracy among 16 Arab countries (Diamond 2003: 9 and Ajami, 2012: 1). Did Arabs simply not have a desire for democracy? Survey data seems to suggest otherwise: In Arab countries just as many Muslims as non-Muslims support democracy (ibid: 9) and Islam appears to have little influence on political views (ibid: 10). A 2010 survey conducted by the Pew Research Centre s Global Attitudes Survey found that a clear plurality of 59% of all Egyptians Muslims found democracy more desirable than all other system of government (Kavanaugh et al. 2011: 5) a fact clearly backed up by millions of people marching in the streets of Benghazi, Cairo or Damascus calling out for democracy.
So what role did the Internet play here? Evgeny Morozov holds the opinion that it is just wishful thinking on the part of people he calls cyber-utopians hoping for a new and improved Radio Free Europe that will peacefully bring down dictators at the fingertips of bloggers (2011: xii). He adds that these bloggers were mainly Americans who greatly overestimated the role of technology (2009: 10). Further he argues that it is naive to believe that social media favour an oppressed population over a totalitarian regime that usually does not
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shy away from the most vicious atrocities let alone have any regard for the rule of law (ibid: xiii). Morozov moreover recognises the fact that dictators have become quite good at using social media for their own propaganda purposes and against its users (as I will demonstrate in section 2.4) as cheap surveillance tools (ibid: xiv). He concludes that installing a democratic government requires more than many cyber-utopians believe and that rioting crowds in Teheran 2009 are not much different from crowds in Berlin 1989 (ibid: 5); he infers that a Twitter revolution would theoretically only be possible in a state where rulers are completely oblivious to social media and have no hand in them, which is obviously a utopia (2009: 12).
Sabadello in his 2009 paper agrees with Morozov that terms such as Twitter Revolution not seldom come from cyber utopians minds hoping for a better world spurred by technology. According to him, these are precarious generalisations and should be avoided. Social media should rather be considered new tools in an old fight available to both sides.
According to Iosifidis, the twittersphere is an ideal space[ ] for initiating public debate and social change (2011: 4) and to direct joint action. He further argues that Twitter s capability of overcoming suppression of free media and general censorship by authoritarian regimes is undeniable (ibid: 7). He refers to Splichal s (2009) account of the Moldovan uprisings in which demonstrators allegedly used social networking website tools like Twitter, LiveJournal and Facebook (Iosifidis 2011: 7) to spur and direct the demonstrations as well as the above mentioned uprisings in Iran. Splichal himself admits that the impact of Twitter in these events may have been heavily overstated (Splichal 2009: 404). No empirical evidence is given for any of these arguments. Contrary to this, the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) has gathered quite specific data to back up their claim that the p
Sabadello in his 2009 paper agrees with Morozov that terms such as Twitter Revolution not seldom come from cyber utopians minds hoping for a better world spurred by technology. According to him, these are precarious generalisations and should be avoided. Social media should rather be considered new tools in an old fight available to both sides.
According to Iosifidis, the twittersphere is an ideal space[ ] for initiating public debate and social change (2011: 4) and to direct joint action. He further argues that Twitter s capability of overcoming suppression of free media and general censorship by authoritarian regimes is undeniable (ibid: 7). He refers to Splichal s (2009) account of the Moldovan uprisings in which demonstrators allegedly used social networking website tools like Twitter, LiveJournal and Facebook (Iosifidis 2011: 7) to spur and direct the demonstrations as well as the above mentioned uprisings in Iran. Splichal himself admits that the impact of Twitter in these events may have been heavily overstated (Splichal 2009: 404). No empirical evidence is given for any of these arguments. Contrary to this, the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) has gathered quite specific data to back up their claim that the p
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Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Johannes Sieben
- 2014, Erstauflage, 76 Seiten, 15 Abbildungen, Maße: 15,5 x 22 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: Anchor Academic Publishing
- ISBN-10: 3954891069
- ISBN-13: 9783954891061
Sprache:
Englisch
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