Dismemberment of the Arab World: A Digital Counter-Utopia

7 May 2015. From 18:30 | Conference | English | IEMed, Barcelona

The world was ready for the riots in the Arab world of 2011 organized in part thanks to social media and the internet. But the cyber-optimism exported to the world from the United States soon confirmed that the liberating power of digital tools was not enough to establish democracies. In parallel to the repression in the street, the powers that be began to deliver a war in the digital arena as well.

But why was the scope of political activism on social media so overestimated during the Arab Spring? And how has the utopian idea that changes would come through mobilization and the ability to increase social interaction on the Internet lost strength?

In the conference “The Arab Spring: an Internet Dystopia”, González-Quijano points out that he does not see social networks and the Internet as a central role in those revolutionary processes but he does grant them a fundamental role for the political awakening of Arab societies to take place then and in that way. In fact, he believes that the new forms of digital communication have not changed the way of doing politics, but at least they have changed the way that society now discusses and shares politics.Yves Gonzalez-Quijano is professor of modern and contemporary Arabic literature, Université Lumière Lyon 2 and researcher at GREMMO – Research and Study Group on the Mediterranean and the Middle East.