The Role of Social Media as a Public Sphere in the Algerian Protests: An Analytical Study

Author(s):  
Youcef Benrazek
2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clovis Bergère

Abstract:This study explores social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter in particular, as emergent sites of youth citizenship in Guinea. These need to be understood within a longer history of youth citizenship, one that includes street corners and other informal mediations of youth politics. This counters dominant discourses both within the Guinean public sphere and in academic research that decry Guinean social media practices as lacking, or Guinean youth as frivolous or inconsequential in their online political engagements. Instead, young Guineans’ emergent digital practices need to be approached as productive political engagements. This contributes to debates about African youths by examining the role of digital technologies in shaping young Africans’ political horizons.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Wahyudi Akmaliah

The landscape of the Indonesian public sphere amidst the rise of new media has opened both opportunities and threats dealing with Islamic teaching. This condition shapes a danger for the two largest of moderate Muslim Organisations (Muhammadiyah and Nahdatul Ulama/NU), in which they do not engage a lot of this development of the digital platform. Consequently, dealing with religious issues, their voices become voiceless. By employing desk research through some relevant references and collecting information from social media, specifically Instagram and Youtube, this article examines the role of the Islamic organization of moderate Islam in the rapid of the digital platform as the new of the public sphere. The article finds that they have difference respond to dealing with the presence of the new religious authorities. In comparison, while Muhammadiyah is more accepting of them calmly, NU is more reactively in responding.Lanskap ruang publik Indonesia di tengah muncunya media sosial membuka kesempatan sekaligus ancaman terkait dengan dakwah Islam. Hal itu merupakan ancaman bagi dua organisasi besar Moderat Islam di Indonesia (Muhammadiyah dan NU), di mana mereka menjadi kelompok minoritas dalam aktivitas dakwah online. Akibatnya, berkaitan dengan issu-isu keagamaan, suara mereka menjadi tidak terdengar/didengarkan. Dengan melakukan riset studi literatur yang relevan dan informasi yang didapatkan dari akun media sosial, khususnya Instagram dan Youtube, artikel ini menjelaskan peranan organisasi Islam moderat di tengah cepatnya platform digital di ruang publik. Artikel ini menemukan bahwa Muhammadiyah dan NU memiliki respon yang berbeda terkait dengan kehadiran otoritas keagamaan baru. Sebagai perbandingan, penerimaan Muhammadiyah terhadap kehadiran mereka terlebih lebih biasa ketimbang dengan NU yang reactif.


Author(s):  
Debashis ‘Deb' Aikat

The world's largest democracy with a population of over 1.27 billion people, India is home to a burgeoning media landscape that encompasses a motley mix of traditional and contemporary media. Drawing from the theoretical framework of the networked public sphere, this extensive case study focuses on the role of social media in India's media landscape. Results indicate that new social media entities complement traditional media forms to inform, educate, connect, and entertain people from diverse social, ethnic, religious, and cultural origins. The author concludes that social media enable Indian citizens to actively deliberate issues and ideas, increase their civic engagement and citizen participation, and thus enrich India's democratic society.


Author(s):  
Tijana Milosevic

This chapter surveys social media platforms whose policies are examined in this book and gives an overview of critical research on the increasing role of private intermediaries in regulating digital environments (DeNardis, 2014), placing this information against the safe harbor provisions of the CDA and DMCA, which ensure limited liability for online intermediaries. The brief company profiles are meant to provide an overview for those readers who are not familiar with these companies and their history in relationship to bullying incidents. Following Gillespie (2010, 2015) and van Dijck (2013), the chapter examines the literature on discourses of platforms.


Author(s):  
Kenneth C. C. Yang ◽  
Yowei Kang

Weibo provides an alternative channel for many Chinese citizens to obtain non-censored news contents and share their opinions on public affairs. In this book chapter, the authors employed Jürgen Habermas's concept of public sphere to examine how Chinese Weibo users (i.e., microbloggers) make the most use of this social medium to form a public sphere to contest omnipresent state power. Habermas's analytical framework helps to better comprehend the role of social media and its interactions with other stakeholders in Chinese politics. The role of social media in shaping this less controlled sphere of political deliberation and participation was examined using a case study approach. The authors analyzed the Chinese Jasmine Revolution to discuss the interrelations among social media, civil society, state power, economic development, political process, and democratization in China. The case study identified Weibo's essential role as a device to bypass existing government censorship, to mobilize users, and to empower Chinese Internet users to engage in political activities to foster its nascent civil society.


Author(s):  
Alessandro Scuderi ◽  
Luisa Sturiale

Social networks in the public sphere support the process of innovation that aims to make the action of the municipalities more efficient and participatory. Due to their characteristics, social media seem to be able to contribute significantly to the development of e-governance and e-democracy as tools based on dialogue and on the enhancement of the contribution of users-citizens or, more generally, of users-local stakeholders. Web 4.0 and social media are progressively taking on a role of primary importance in the contemporary socio-economic context, contributing to change not only the processes and methods of communication of individuals, citizens and businesses, but also the organization and business management itself. In the new dimension of the Web 4.0 the user's behavior is not predetermined, but the user can derive and autonomously build the services, as the web is decentralized and enriched by the experiences of the users who participate in the definition and improvement of content.


Author(s):  
Kenneth C. C. Yang ◽  
Yowei Kang

Weibo provides an alternative channel for many Chinese citizens to obtain non-censored news contents and share their opinions on public affairs. In this book chapter, the authors employed Jürgen Habermas's concept of public sphere to examine how Chinese Weibo users (i.e., microbloggers) make the most use of this social medium to form a public sphere to contest omnipresent state power. Habermas's analytical framework helps to better comprehend the role of social media and its interactions with other stakeholders in Chinese politics. The role of social media in shaping this less controlled sphere of political deliberation and participation was examined using a case study approach. The authors analyzed the Chinese Jasmine Revolution to discuss the interrelations among social media, civil society, state power, economic development, political process, and democratization in China. The case study identified Weibo's essential role as a device to bypass existing government censorship, to mobilize users, and to empower Chinese Internet users to engage in political activities to foster its nascent civil society.


2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 385-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Anderson

This article argues that the technological structure of the modern world has reshaped drastically the role of political scientists as purveyors of information. Only a few decades ago, scholars were still central to the development, collection and dissemination of knowledge. But the transformation in the availability of data due to the proliferation of social media and research engines creates a new environment in which scholars can no longer claim to be the erudite carriers of hard-to-get facts. In order to play a constructive role in this quickly changing setting, political scientists need to invent a new identity for themselves as active practitioners engaged in a dynamic dialogue with students and policymakers.


Author(s):  
Tarek El-Ariss

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. Examining literature and social media, activism and politics, the book identified a techno-archaic portal, breaching the narrative of modernity. The role of the Internet as “public sphere”—a utopian framework that promised an open and nonhierarchal encounter with the other—has given way to pre-Islamic raids and sophisticated hacks, trolling and attack that come from the present and a fantasized past, and jinn-like seers and narrators of akhbār. Both the Internet and the subject of modernity are leaking, unable to contain their enlightenment and liberal narratives, or to control the gushing from a dimension that lies beyond. This leaking is not a techno-salvation, but creates the possibility of change that also involves dangerous processes and openings that risk engulfing authors and activists.


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