scholarly journals The Game-based Metaphorical Representations of the Arab Spring Revolutions in Journalistic Political Discourse

2019 ◽  
pp. 70-88
Author(s):  
Waheed Mohammed Altohami

This paper explores how the Arab Spring Revolutions (ASRs) are metaphorically represented in journalistic discourse in a way that highlights or hides specific ideologies related to the political events and actors associated with the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions over three years (2011-2013). Drawing on Charteris-Black's (2004) corpus-based approach of Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA), the main political events and actors represented metaphorically in the corpus data have been identified, explained and interpreted at different levels of semantic, pragmatic and cognitive analysis. The present study has reached three major findings. First, various source domains were manipulated to report different facets of the ASRs, while the source domain of games was the most dominant. Second, the corpus proved to be textually coherent based on the conceptual key THE ARAB SPRING REVOLUTIONS ARE GAMES which was built around the image schema of competition. Finally, gamification involved three basic scenarios: the first is a general frame of a game; the second clusters games into individual versus team games, and bodily-oriented versus mentally-oriented games; the final scenario represents games as a war. All ideologically-based conceptual metaphors constructed within the frame of gamification are typically Western. Arab Spring Revolutions (ASRs), conceptual metaphor, Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA), game, ideology, corpus

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Muhannad Al Janabi Al Janabi

Since late 2010 and early 2011, the Arab region has witnessed mass protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Bahrain and other countries that have been referred to in the political, media and other literature as the Arab Spring. These movements have had a profound effect on the stability of the regimes Which took place against it, as leaders took off and contributed to radical reforms in party structures and public freedoms and the transfer of power, but it also contributed to the occurrence of many countries in an internal spiral, which led to the erosion of the state from the inside until it became a prominent feature of the Arab) as is the case in Syria, Libya, Yemen and Iraq.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-32

This article is a literature study that aims to trace the literature to be able to understand the concepts of religion and leadership of Sunni vs. Shiite which has often been the subject of discussion among world academics. The problems that arise among Sunnis and Shiites are not only present on the political side, but also on the concepts of religion and leadership which also become polemic. Like the Arab Spring incident which resulted in the collapse of the power of Muammar Qadafy in Libya and Ben Ali in Tunisia, Sunni and Shia relations were also colored by differences. The conclusion of this article then shows that both Sunni and Shi'a agree that the existence of a Khilafah / Imamat government is an obligation in the lives of Muslims. Regarding the form of khilafah or government, Sunni scholars tend to be represented by Imam al-Mawardi, al-Ghazali and Ibn Kholdun tend to be accommodating towards the models of government that are carried out in the principles of deliberation both kingdom and democracy. In the Shi'ite leadership doctrine, leadership is absolute and the legal requirements of one's faith and leadership is limited to imams who are descendants of Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, but while waiting for the presence of the "supernatural" imams, the enforcement of Islamic government is absolutely carried out by the Mullahs.


Author(s):  
Daniel Toscano López

This chapter seeks to show how the society of the digital swarm we live in has changed the way individuals behave to the point that we have become Homo digitalis. These changes occur with information privatization, meaning that not only are we passive consumers, but we are also producers and issuers of digital communication. The overarching argument of this reflection is the disappearance of the “reality principle” in the political, economic, and social spheres. This text highlights that the loss of the reality principle is the effect of microblogging as a digital practice, the uses of which can either impoverish the space of people's experience to undermine the public space or achieve the mobilization of citizens against of the censorship of the traditional means of communication by authoritarian political regimes, such as the case of the Arab Spring in 2011.


2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harel Chorev

This essay argues that social media played an important role in the Arab Spring and contributed to a change in the political culture of some of those countries that have gone through regime-change through 2011-2012. The article further posits that the contribution of social media was mainly instrumental, not causal, and that the main reasons behind the Arab Spring were problems generated by regional, local and global trends, affecting each country differently.  


2019 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 223-246
Author(s):  
María Muelas Gil

Metaphor has been studied as a pervasive and intrinsic discourse tool over the last decades in many different types of discourse (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Semino 2008, Kövecses 2010, etc.). Considering the strong effect it has on the discourse participants and how it can persuade them towards one side, action, or thought (Charteris-Black 2004, Silaski 2012), it is necessary to study it when the timeframe and the discourse where it is used are ideologically loaded. Based on recent studies on metaphor in economics (Alejo 2010, Herrera-Soler and White 2012, Soares da Silva et al. 2017), metaphor in the press (Koller 2004/2008) and metaphor and ideology (Goatly 2007, Silaski 2012), this article presents a corpus-based study of metaphor in reports of economic affairs in the English and Spanish press during the pre-election week of 2015. The corpus (about 160,000 words) consists of reports published by six newspapers that support different political spheres (left, centre and right): The Guardian, The Independent and The Telegraph in English, and Público, El País and ABC in Spanish. From a Critical Metaphor Analysis perspective (Charteris-Black 2004), the study starts from the hypothesis that the political stand of each newspaper might condition the metaphors. Indeed, metaphors pointing at certain side of political spheres appear in all the sub-corpora of the study, but in distinctive ways, as will be shown. In any case, critical factors such as cognitive and cultural reasons beyond the political stand of the media in question need to be acknowledged as well, which conveys further and more comprehensive analyses.


2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 811-819
Author(s):  
Badrul Mohamed ◽  
Mohammad Agus Yusoff ◽  
Zawiyah Mohd Zain ◽  
Dori Efendi

Social media has phenomenally replaced the traditional media. Blogs have transformed news reporting; YouTube has reinvented talent sourcing; and the trinity (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) have revolutionary changed the rules of the game of regime change. Enabling commoners to be producers and its interactiveness are the two most important characteristics that grant the ordinary citizens to be extra-ordinary. From Tinseltown to Alexandria, the roles of social media has been unstoppably growing. The world political events in the recent times, particularly the Arab Spring have shown a strong correlation between social media and democratization. Malaysias political experience in recent years, in particular the 12th General Election (GE-12) in 2008 is comparable to the Arab Spring in view of the alluring role of social media and its gladiatorial impacts in politics. The failure of Barisan Nasional (BN or National Front, the only ruling party since independence) to retain its customary two-third majority in GE-12 is a proof of peoples growing desire to enjoy democracy that among others offer free and fair elections, good-governance, and social justice which are dissimilar to existing communalism and strong government. At a glance, GE-13 in 2013 produced similar results as GE-12 which displayed fortification of democracy among citizens. In contrast, further analyses toward the details of GE-13 surfaced the revival of communalism and autoritarinism which have shown signs of decay in GE-12. Thus, this article explores the conflictual roles of social media which (has been functioning as an ideal public sphere) when the ruling party together with the state machinery invade the sphere of social media to satisfy their political agenda. This investigation showcases the anarchic sphere in social media is not only capable in catalyzing democratization, but also undermining democracy by propagating political Balkanization that propels disjointed feelings among multi-racial citizens.


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