Treatments of new media, and particularly of the Internet, in the Middle East frequently stall around a restricted view of communication as message-passing, variable reception by individuals, and averaging them as ‘audience’ or, in political terms, as ‘public’ opinion that inconclusively support interpretations as technologies both of freedom and of futility. But individual data (and models of actors) capture little of how communication is more than message and impact – how it is situated, strategic, its linguistic pragmatics – and so how new media form in and as specifically public spheres, their social settings and dynamics. This paper draws on the example of Dale Eickelman’s seminal study of how modern education linked new ‘intellectual technologies’ to networks spread by mass education to take another look at the spread of new media and the publics they form. It aligns their settings in communities of practice, the strength of weak ties that extend them and the emergence of ‘textual authority’ that are cast either as informal or do not enter at all in common comparisons to mass media and likewise the freedom in new media; it briefly traces how these features of settings, networks linking them and entextualization create literally public spheres, drawing on data about Internet use (and users) surrounding the Kefaya and Arab Spring movements in Egypt that featured in the Internet’s latest iteration as social media.