People create, consume, and share content online in increasingly complex ways, often including multiple news, entertainment, and social media platforms. This article explores methods for tracing political media content across overlapping communication infrastructures. Using the 2011 Occupy Movement protests and 2013 consumer boycotts as cases, we illustrate methods for creating integrated datasets of political event-related social media content by (1) using fixed URLs to link posts across platforms (URL-based integration) and (2) using semiautomated text clustering to identify similar posts across social networking services (thematic integration). These approaches help to reveal biases in the way that we characterize political communication practices that may occur when we focus on a single platform in isolation.

Many observers have argued that social media such as Facebook and Twitter will help opposition activists coordinate and overcome authoritarian regimes; others believe that such tools will have little impact. Evidence from the “Arab Spring” is inconclusive, with advocates for each position finding support in the events in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere. When does social media help political movements succeed? Motivated by an experience serving as a “campaign manager” for a colleague’s bid to become the Washington Posfs “Next Great Pundit,” I argue that relying on Internet-based social networking tools (such as Facebook and Twitter) may lead campaigns to perform more poorly when the regime is able to change the election’s rules in mid-campaign. Consequently, researchers observing only the messages broadcast by social media will miss the true coordination taking place, which happens through channels unobservable to the regime. Examples from Middle Eastern politics Suggest that real-world political activists recognize these distinctions and adjust their messaging accordingly.

This article will address two major related issues regarding Arab culture as an integral part of the globalization ethos. In order to expand the conceptual parameters of globalization and cultural studies, the exclusivity of political and economic globalization will be interrogated in favor of a more diverse, humanitarian definition of the term. At the heart of this argument, inflected by interdisciplinarity and the literature and theory of postcolonial studies, is tolerance, respect, and recognition of difference and for the marginalized voices of the “other.” The theoretical framework challenges the stereotyping, homogenization, and misrepresentation of Arabs, colonialist ideas that have been carried over into the practice of globalism and the marginalization of Arab history and culture within world heritage. It is my hope to correct the negative perceptions about the Arab people, mainstream misperceptions of politicians, the media, and public discourse. The article will underscore the diversity and complexity of the identity and history of people in the Middle East and North Africa. Although in the West Arabs are usually synonymous with Muslims, a discussion of Islam and/or Islamophobia will not be addressed in this article. The first part will elaborate on the historical context of the creation of the modern Arab world. Next, various definitions of the main domains of globalism and their correlation to the contemporary Arab world will be summarized. Integrated into both sections are two major issues: the creative resistance that has accompanied the founding of the modern Arab world and the impact of globalization on Arab society, concepts that have played out in the containment of this region.

Authoritarian regimes learned to fear the rise of the internet because it spurred an online community who encouraged information sharing relatively free from government oversight. However, the West—the creator of the internet—is retreating from openness in cyberspace because of strong arguments made by defense specialists about cyber vulnerabilities and because of cyber meddling by foreign actors, most clearly the Russian Government. This article argues that combatting the rise of authoritarianism, particularly in Russia, requires embracing the strategic advantages openness provides for democracy. The article outlines the ordeal of “cyber rebellions” across the globe and closes with a discussion about the dangers of bowing to pressure to create borders in cyberspace, pointing out that inspiring a retreat from openness is precisely the intent of the authoritarian regimes who most fear it.

Despite an unprecedented level of interest in the popular culture associated with the Arab reform and revolutionary movements that began in December 2010, American news media have provided only a superficial, and at times misguided, depiction of the music performed during the protests, as well as its larger sociocultural use and function. This depiction has focused almost entirely on hip hop at the expense of nationalist, political, classical, and folk song repertories indigenous to Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria. In this article I argue that this misinformed, partial, and superficial depiction of the protests, centered around hip hop and social media, has strategically shaped the ways in which the uprisings have been framed within the American public imaginary, attempted to control the direction and outcome of the uprisings in the streets, and further served to impose a neo-Orientalist discourse of American hegemony over forces of reform and democratization in the Arab Middle East.

This paper explores the role of communications technology in the U.S.-Cuban relationship. It argues that the idea that anti-government dissidents will use the Internet, cell phones, and social media to foment a popular uprising on the island, modelled after the ‘Arab Spring’ is flawed because it fails to take into account the uniqueness of the Cuban situation. The paper then explores how it has become possible for this idea to have gained such traction in certain discourses in the United States. In doing so, the paper considers the history of paternalism and imperial hubris that has dominated U.S. policy toward Cuba, with an emphasis on the relationship during the Castro era. The paper demonstrates that current U.S. policy rests on fallacious assumptions about Cuba, the Cuban state and the relationship between the Cuban state and the Cuban people. The belief in a ‘Cuban Spring’ and in the idea that the United States could engender revolution in Cuba via communications technology is part of this larger narrative.