This article offers a new perspective on the extensive discussion of the role of new media in facilitating the 2011 Egyptian uprising. We seek to expand the scope of analysis by placing it within the historical context of the way in which the state has responded to new media—any new media—that has come into use in the last decades (newspapers, radio, television, satellite television, Internet and social media). Analyzing the way in which the state has addressed new media from the introduction of the printed press to the present, we discern a cyclical recurring pattern characterized by a dynamic of openness–adaptation– narrowing: at first, the state allows the new media freedom (openness), it then acts to subjugate the new media and minimize risks the regime perceives this new medium casts on him (adaptation), until finally managing to limit the new media (narrowing), and so forth. Yet, each such wave results in an expansion of the media space compared to the previous one. We suggest seeing the role of the new media in the Arab Spring and its aftermath on this continuum, as an extension of processes of state-media relations developed over the preceding decades. When first introduced, Internet and social media operated without significant intervention by the state, challenging the authoritarian regime by eroding its long-standing control over the information to which the Egyptian public was exposed. The Internet became a platform for oppositionists, creating an online public sphere in which a lively critical political discourse was produced and public opinion was formed without the initiative of the regime (the openness phase). The Egyptian regime had trouble dealing with the challenges posed by the Internet and social media, using outmoded methods, previously employed to deter the traditional media. At this juncture the Arab Spring erupted, in between the opening and the narrowing of the space allowed by the regime to the new media, at a point where it had not yet succeeded in curbing the influence of the new technology (the adaptation phase). Since then, however, the state has demonstrated adaptability. In recent years, it is evident that Egypt is moving into the phase of limiting the new media, using traditional and innovative "digital authoritarianism" methods (the narrowing phase), in accordance with the pattern of the relationship between the state and the new media we refer to.