The Arab Spring| Local Knowledge and the Revolutions: A Framework for Social Media Information Flow

Abstract

The essentialism implicit in Western discourses about the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) plays to assumptions that there is limited possibility of indigenous democratic construction in the region. Our study analyzes the importance of local/indigenous knowledge in Tunisia and in Egypt, the specific, local contexts that have shaped the revolutions in both nations, and how social media and communication technologies were used to engage in social change. It also interrogates how change elsewhere in the region may emerge in very different ways than has been the case in Tunisia and Egypt.