Report Seminar ‘Perspectives on and Prospects for Civic Engagement through Internet in Syria’

Tags: Civil Society in West Asia

With the events surrounding the ‘Twitter revolution’ in Iran last year, attention has shifted towards the meaning of new media in activist networks in authoritarian settings. The Web has become a new space for analysis and researchers are starting to map issue networks of digital activism. In the Middle East and North Africa, broadband connections are growing faster than anywhere else in the world and this development is bringing challenges and opportunities to both governments and activists in the region. Judgments of these developments vary from ‘cyber optimists’ to ‘cyber realists’ and ‘cyber pessimists’