Mapping the Arabic blogosphere: politics and dissent online

Abstract

This study explores the structure and content of the Arabic blogosphere using link analysis, term frequency analysis, and human coding of individual blogs. We identified a base network of approximately 35,000 Arabic-language blogs, mapped the 6000 mostconnected blogs, and hand coded over 3000. The study is a baseline assessment of the networked public sphere in the Arabic-speaking world, which mainly clusters nationally. We found the most politically active areas of the network to be clusters of bloggers in Egypt, Kuwait, Syria, and the Levant, as well as an 'English Bridge' group. Differences among these indicate variability in how online practices are embedded in local political contexts. Bloggers are focused mainly on domestic political issues; concern for Palestine is the one issue that unites the entire network. Bloggers link preferentially to the top Web 2.0 sites (e.g. YouTube and Wikipedia), followed by pan-Arab mainstream media sources, such as Al Jazeera.

A global public sphere of compassion? #JeSuisCharlie and #JeNeSuisPasCharlie on Twitter and their language boundaries

“…In these studies, geographical distance between users intertwined with several other factors, including national boundaries and language differences [Takhteyev et al, 2012]. But here, unlike in previous research on traditional media, language partly turns from an obstacle to a helper when scholars discover the role of cross-language users -both on global blogging platforms like Global Voices [Hale, 2012] and in the blogosphere on the whole [Herring et al, 2007;Etling et al, 2010], as bloggers posting in two languages bridge not only topic-based communities but also national segments of the global blogospheres.…”

Openness and Restraint: Structure, Discourse, and Contention in Saudi Twitter

“…This methodological approach to this study follows similar efforts in the past to map online networks that correspond to particular geographic areas. 27 The principal objective of this study is to describe accurately Twitter activity in Saudi Arabia within the context of active censorship of political speech online and off and restrictions on media, civil society activism, and political action. To help make order of this rich, complex, and diverse media landscape, we employ social network mapping techniques that generate network maps of Twitter accounts based on the follow relationships between users.…”

Exploring the Cuban blogosphere: Discourse networks and informal politics

“…The Cuban capital city of Havana hosts over two-thirds of them and while their professional background is rather varied, onefourth of them define themselves as writers or journalists. Hence, the Cuban blogosphere, similarly to the Arabic one (Etling et al 2010), shows a significant gender divide with a prevalence of male bloggers. Cuban bloggers are slightly older than their colleagues in both the mobilized Arab world and in the US.…”

“…Yet, despite the abovementioned tactics of online dissent management, in most authoritarian regimes, and especially in those where uprisings have occurred in the past decade, blogospheres have emerged as feasible communication structures for online civic agency via sparse and interactional informal political debate (Chowdhury, 2008;Etling et al, 2010;Henken, 2011;Radsch, 2008;Rahimi, 2011;Zhuo, 2009). …”

“…In March 2011, the Cuban television program Razones de Cuba aired the series "Cyberwar," focused on US cyber security policies and cyber espionage tactics Social movement and media literatures have focused on several examples of blogospheres in authoritarian contexts, e.g., Iran (Kelly and Etling, 2007), Burma (Chowdhury, 2008), Arabic countries (Etling et al, 2010). Those studies investigate the extent to which blogging may have contributed to the emergence of new forms of informal political debate and participation, where offline public sphere dynamics were constrained by state-centered censorship and/or instances of social unrest.…”