MESA Banner
Back to Normal? Digital Textuality, Activist Histories, or How the Arab Uprisings Will Be Forgotten
Abstract
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been at the forefront of analyses of the unfolding uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa since 2010. As the so-called “Arab Spring” enters its third year, with so many of the conflicts and grievances yet unresolved and too many revolutionary aspirations unrealized, it is especially important to consider the ways that ICTs contribute to how the uprisings will be remembered. Very little scholarship has explored the role of pervasive digital mediation in creating the texts of these revolutions, writing their histories in bytes as well as blood. This paper examines the challenges of curating a digital memory of the Arab uprisings across several countries with vastly different media ecologies: Egypt, Syria, and Bahrain. It looks at several specific “archival” projects dedicated to preserving revolutionary digital artifacts and raises a number of interrelated questions. In the information age, who writes the history of revolution? How is an increasingly active and mediated counter-revolution coming to occupy and re-appropriate digital spaces and practices? ICT use in the Middle East has rendered public space and political activism legible in new ways, and the spaces and practices of mediation themselves have become sites of contention, resistance, and counter-revolutionary retaliations. While protesters are being pushed off the streets, they are also being “deleted” from virtual platforms through the efforts of organized groups like the Syrian Electronic Army and by collective digital violence on the part of individuals, such as feloul, “remnants” of the regime in Egypt. This paper suggests that case studies of counter-revolutionary mediations demonstrate the significance of place to digital mediations, so often described as transcending space and time. The myth of infinite virtual mobility enabled by ICTs gives way to a similarly misguided myth about the infinite preservation of digital content. The last three years have revealed a powerful politics of deletion that is transforming the digital textuality of the Arab uprisings online. In these spaces, the counter-revolutionary politics “offline” are converging with the content rules and constraints of digital platforms (like Facebook and Twitter) “online” to actively reconfigure and renegotiate the living digital histories of the uprisings. This paper examines the implications of pervasive digital mediation for reading the revolutions and argues that while the ongoing revolutions are being synchronously disputed online and offline, we must also reflectively consider how the multi-media digital “texts” of the revolutions are being produced, curated, remembered, and forgotten.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
None