Blogs&bullets

Acá unos politólogos norteamericanos discuten con la idea de las revoluciones árabes como "hijas directas" de "los medios 2.0". Se llama Blogs and Bullets II: New media and conflict after the arab spring. Y es el dos, porque el uno decía esto. 


Algunas conclusiones:


■ New media outlets that use bit.ly are more likely to spread information outside the region than inside it. This could be significant if it led to a boomerang effect that brought international pressure to bear on autocratic regimes or helped reduce a regime’s tendency to crack down violently on protests. Clearly, however, this is not always the case, as the examples of Bahrain and Syria illustrate. But even where international pressure fails, the increased and transformed attention has reshaped how the world views these cases.


■ New media—at least those which used bit.ly linkages—did not appear to play a significant role in either in-country collective action or regional diffusion. This does not mean that social media—or digital media generally—were unimportant. Nor does it preclude the possibility that other new media technologies were significant in these contexts or even that different Twitter or link data would show different results. But it does mean that at least in terms of media that use bit.ly links (especially Twitter), our data do not find strong support for these claims of new media impact on Arab Spring political protests. 


■ It is increasingly difficult to separate new media from old media. In the Arab Spring, the two reinforced each other. While Al-Jazeera and other satellite television channels leaned heavily on Twitter and other online sources, new media often referred back to those same television networks.