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Facebook Use and The Tunisian Revolution: A Media Literacy Perspective
Abstract
The Tunisian revolution took the whole world by surprise. Politicians, analysts and journalists alike all thought that the early events were small social protests that would soon be controlled by the regime and its police. However, the events turned out to be the very first revolution of its kind in the region, with a contagious impact that already proved bigger than anybody expected, spreading to Egypt and causing the fall of Mubarak, and bursting allover the Arab world as in Yemen, Algeria, Jordan (all have started moving even before Egypt), and beyond. Given the absence of precedent and the exclusion of international media by the regime, the Tunisian revolution was not televised, but was heavily Facebooked. Tunisian youth used Facebook to communicate, report the recent news and updates from different regions in Tunisia, analyze the president’s actions and speeches, and organize and plan their action. This sheds light on the Tunisian youth social skills and media literacy levels. Social networking sites depend heavily on the participation of their users (Veltri and Elgarah, 2009) , which means that the benefits of SN increases through the users' active participation and socialization. However, participatory culture as Jenkins (2006) called it, depends as well on the levels of media literacies (Livingstone, 2004), which “involve social skills developed through collaboration and networking” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 4). Therefore, it is indispensable to examine the media literacies and social skills of the Tunisian youth in order to understand the outcome of the revolution. The use of Facebook during the Tunisian revolution calls for a general investigation of the use of social networking sites for social change. The current research looks at this issue from a media literacy and media social skills perspective in an attempt to understand the predispositions that led to the efficient use of Facebook for the Tunisian political and social change.
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
None