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Blogging Toward Utopia
The growth of Internet usage in the Middle East and North Africa is among the world’s fastest: between 2000 and 2007 usage increased almost 500 percent, more than twice the rate of increase in the rest of the world. Just as elsewhere, this has led to Middle Eastern cyber-optimism - among the users of digital tools and Internet watchers alike. It is a widely-held hope that the coming of Web 2.0 can move closed societies towarddemocratic values and governance.New Media in Syria
What is the role of the new media in this context of bought criticism? Hopes that increased globalization and advanced media technology bring about political liberalization have all but vanished. We now know that authoritarian regimes are more resilient and that economic liberalization and technological modernization are not necessarily coupled with democratic reform. The new media, especially the Internet, blogs and Twitter, have indeed created a counter public, a space where state hegemony...Iran: Public Dissent in the Age of the New Media
Some three months after the controversial presidential election in Iran on 12 June 2009, the country is still far from back to normal. After a period of relative silence, thousands of protestors used the symbolic Quds day, usually a day of rallies in support of the Islamic Republic, to protest the election fraud and the violence that followed it.
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