“Citizen Journalism” in the Syrian Uprising: Problematizing Western Narratives in a Local Context

Abstract

This article analyzes the term ‘citizen journalism’ against the backdrop of the Arab uprisings in order to show how it overlooks the local context of digital media practices. The first part examines videos emanating from Syria to illustrate how they blur the lines between acts of witnessing, reporting, and lobbying, as well as between professional and amateur productions, and civic and violent intentions. The second part highlights the genealogies of citizenship and journalism in an Arab context and cautions against assumptions about their universality. The article argues that the oscillation of Western narratives between hopes about digital media's role in democratization in the Arab World and fears about their use in terrorism circumscribe the theorization of digital media practices.

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“…This finding is consistent with the alternative media literature where scholars argue that social movement privilege amateur or native reporters in order to maintain the momentum of protests and dominate public space with information that the mainstream media would like to ignore (Atton, 2003(Atton, , 2004. The success and visibility of collective actions have been attributed to people taking the role of a citizen journalist (Khamis & Vaughn, 2011;Al-Ghazzi, 2014), which centred on two related but not mutually exclusive modes of practice: witnessing (when ordinary people document and distribute reports and images of events they encounter) and activism (the strategic media output and contribution of political activists and dissidents whether videos, images, or social media participation) (Al-Ghazzi, 2014).…”

What Is Citizen Journalism?: A Critical Analysis from the Perspective of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation

“…Thus, this pattern does not suggest a standard set of media practices in the sample. Therefore, the meaning of this finding lies in the local context of the sampled sites, as citizens practice journalism in three different situations: witnessing -when ordinary citizens document and disseminate reports and images of the events they encounteractivism, and strategic media output and contribution of political activists and dissidents whether videos, images, or social media participation (Al-Ghazzi, 2014).…”

The personalization of engagement: the symbolic construction of social media and grassroots mobilization in Canadian newspapers

“…The literature on the use of social media by ordinary citizens to document the violence and injustice during the Arab Spring or the Gezi Park protests is a case in point. However, such instances of citizen journalism cannot be divorced from their political circumstances ( Al-Ghazzi, 2014 ; Markham, 2014 ) or from their reliance on mass media in raising awareness of the protests ( Ali and Fahmy, 2013 ).…”