With the ‘return of the state’ in Syria, Assad’s ‘resilience’ is a puzzle increasingly broached in both media and academic discourses. This article seeks to turn such an approach on its head, examining the resilience not of the state, but of bottom-up Syrian popular mobilization and organization. Persistent if changing Syrian civic modes and practices are thus mediated by conflict, but also part and parcel of ongoing resistance against the authoritarian state. A survey of Syrians’ ‘revolutionary’ media landscape reveals a set of shifting emphases. Appeals soliciting global support for an uprising seeking freedom and dignity give way to lamentations over disappointed yet tenacious Syrian aspirations. The article then explores Syrian ‘democratic learning’ through a mini-case study of opposition-controlled local councils. Drawing on original interview data, it argues that these councils exhibit ‘civic resilience’ as they navigate and adopt international norms discourses to protest and resist not just Assad but also international actors, and gradually take up democratic processes including elections. Despite uncertainty with respect to its institutional dividends in Syria, ‘democratic learning’ is a promising, understudied area for further exploration in the bloody politics of the country’s uprising.

The current article addresses person deixis in the last three speeches of the ousted president of Tunisia (OPT) from the perspectives of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and cognitivepragmatics. It takes deixis to be individuated in the ‘indexical field’ by the deictic center, who fills them from within the social field at his/her discretion with ‘social roles’. The way the filling takes place is a function of social proximity to or distance from the deictic center, which manipulates the constructed categories either closer to the CENTER or to the PERIPHERY of the image schema. In particular, it is argued that the OPT as a deictic center has constructed in the first two speeches two deictic categories, which would be called ‘wandering WE’ after and a peripheral THEY, through which he tried to maintain the political status quo and blame responsibility for the events on others. However, in the last speech, the OPT constructed two indexical dyads, namely I-YOU and WE-THEY. This shift is explained as an effort on the part of OPT to reproduce social power abuse, dominance, and inequality by way of making political concessions. Despite this, the shift is not felt to have created communality and closeness with the addressees since the policy of exclusion, authority, and domination precluded these concessions from being persuasive enough for the ‘Jasmine Revolt’ in Tunisia not to resist this power and go for regime change.

As digital communication technologies have evolved over the past few decades, the convergence of network structure and accessibility with hardware and software advances has allowed individuals to interact in various, even contradictory, ways. They can explore, hide, reach out, evaluate, connect, negotiate, exchange, andcoordinate to a greater degree than ever before. Furthermore, this has translated to an ever-increasing number of users interacting with information in unprecedented ways and, due to device portability, in totally new physical locations. Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare update each other simultaneously across application platforms with near-real time photos and impressions of places; mobile exercise applications allow users to track their own movements as well as view where others in their geographic vicinity went running; Yelp users can read selective reviews from social network friends and strangers in their community on a specific restaurant; and Facebook friends can see what their peers bought, listened to, and read – from anywhere they are able to access the Internet. Most of these apps update across platforms enabling both maximum reach across a user’s social group as well as a highly selective direction of information to a subset of their social network.

Just as the rapidly evolving landscape of connectivity and communications technology is transforming the individual’s experience of the social sphere, what it means to participate in civic life is also changing, both in how people do it and how it is measured. Civic engagement includes all the ways in which individuals attend to the concerns of public life, how one learns about and participates in all of the issues and contexts beyond one’s immediate private or intimate sphere. New technologies and corresponding social practices, from social media to mobile reporting, are providing different ways to record, share, and amplify that attentiveness. Media objects or tools that impact civic life can be understood within two broad types: those designed specifically with the purpose of community engagement in mind (for instance, a digital game for local planning or an app to give feedback to city council) or generic tools that are subsequently appropriated for engaging a community (such as Twitter or Facebook’s role in the Arab Spring or London riots). Moreover, these tools can mediate any number of relationships between or among citizens, local organizations, or government institutions. Digitally mediated civic engagement runs the gamut of phenomena from organizing physical protests using social media (e.g., Occupy), to using digital tools to hack institutions (e.g., Anonymous), to using city-produced mobile applications to access and coproduce government services, to using digital platforms for deliberating. Rather than try to identify what civic media tools look like in the midst of such an array of possibilities (by focusing on in depth examples or case studies), going forward we will instead focus on how digital tools expand the context of civic life and motivations for engagement, andwhat participating in civic life looks like in a digital era.

We present this literature review as a means of exploring the intersection of theories of human behavior with the motivations for and benefits of engaging in civic life. We bring together literature from behavioral economics, sociology, psychology and communication studies to reveal how civic actors, institutions, anddecision-making processes have been traditionally understood, and how emerging media tools and practices are forcing their reconsideration.

Conventional wisdom suggests that lapses in media connectivity – for example, disruption of Internet and cell phone access – have a negative effect on political mobilization. I argue that on the contrary, sudden interruption of mass communication accelerates revolutionary mobilization and proliferates decentralized contention. Using a dynamic threshold model for participation in network collective action I demonstrate that full connectivity in a social network can hinder revolutionary action. I exploit a decision by Mubarak’s regime to disrupt the Internet and mobile communication during the 2011 Egyptian uprising to provide an empirical proof for the hypothesis. A difference-in difference inference strategy reveals the impact of media disruption on the dispersion of the protests. The evidence is corroborated using historical, anecdotal, and statistical accounts.