• Jyotirmaya Patnaik deposited Social Media and the Arab Spring in the group Group logo of Electronic LiteratureElectronic Literature on Humanities Commons 1 year, 8 months ago

    This paper discusses the effect of social media on the occurrence of ‘Arab Spring’. In the
    Arab world no country could claim to be truly democratic and most were autocratic coupled
    with desertification (68.4 per cent of the total land area), phenomenal rise in population and
    scarcity of water. Moreover, about 60 per cent of the population is under 25 years and this
    group belonging to lower- middle class with high education, self- constructed status, wider
    world views and global dreams forced them to raise their voice and change the autocratic
    set up. But, in the absence of effective social media since the year 2000 made it possible to
    raise their voice unitedly through facebook, twitter and blogs culminating to the ouster of
    Hosne Mubarak in Egypt. The ‘top to down’ approach adopted by the Western social
    scientists, thus proved wrong and ‘bottom to top’ approach through social media brought
    the dramatic changes in Arab nations.