The rapid success of Tunisia’s recent revolution, ignited by the suicide-protest of an unemployed youth in the country’s marginalized interior and culminating in the flight of President Ben Ali after a mere 28 days, has led international observers to hail it as the world’s first “Facebook Revolution”. Indeed, the digital images of protests organized in response to Mohamed Bou’azizi’s suicide, captured on video and posted on Facebook before being picked up by international news outlets, transformed this local tragedy into a transnational media “event.” Rather than further extoll the democratic potential of new media for organizing opposition in “information-shy” authoritarian regimes like Ben Ali’s Tunisia, this paper will examine the forms of national imagination made available through new media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, with particular emphasis on the role of affect in stoking the collective effervescence of a revolutionary youth movement. At once transnational and intimately local, the auto-affective nature and speed of information-sharing on the Internet provided an incitement to participatory action in Tunisia akin to the systemic circulation of a nervous impulse. Whereas Tunisians have long kept abreast of scandals surrounding the Ben Ali regime through the oral exchange of rumors and trans-national relays of information generated by NGOs and opposition figures abroad, the “immediation” of home-made videos by amateur journalists provided a material substantiation of that knowledge. Although such documentation provided a vital communication link between the capital and the provinces, making the suffering of interior cities like Thala and Kasserine knowable in urban centers like Tunis, the emotional valence of its visual style was often in excess of the information it sought to convey. Through the spectacle of eviscerated bodies in local clinics, guided visits through the plundered opulence of the ruling family’s villas, and exposure of the manipulation of the security situation made at the regime’s behest, Tunisians self-narrated the material evidence of a kleptocratic regime. This paper will both situate new media within longer-standing communication networks in Tunisia, and explore how its participatory nature served to galvanize public feelings during the 2011 revolution.