Kaleidoscope 5.2, Eleanor Ryan, “Review of Democracy’s Fourth Wave?”
Philip N. Howard and Muzammil M. Hussain, Democracy's
Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring (OUP, 2013)
ELEANOR RYAN
The strength and prevalence of democratization movements during the ‘Arab Spring’
naturally begs the question, as posed by Howard and Hussain, ‘what has made possible the rapid
mobilization and collective protest action we have witnessed recently (4)?’ Even to the casual
observer a relationship is apparent between new technology and new digital media, and the wave
of popular dissent that has been building in the Arab world since 2010 and before. In Democracy's
Fourth Wave? Howard and Hussain creatively draw upon concepts and methods from across the
social and political sciences to scrutinize this relationship so as to determine what, if any, patterns
of causality may be uncovered between digital media and these popular uprisings and indeed to
what extent, if at all, these patterns of causality manifest similarly across the region. The book is
an exploration of what might be learnt if we accept that ‘mobile phone cameras became small,
personal weapons against authoritarian rule (41),’ and place that observation not at the periphery,
but at the heart of our analyses of the Arab Spring.
Howard and Hussain take the twenty-three Arab countries in North Africa and the Middle
East as their focus, justifying the inclusion of these countries in the comparative set on the basis
of their shared, common or similar languages, media systems, low democratization rates, rapid
rates of technology diffusion and high levels of state censorship (10-12). Furthermore they show
that modular political phenomena link this comparative set, namely in the imitation occurring
between ruling elites across these countries and the ways in which information and strategies are
shared across the region by democratization movements (11).
Howard and Hussain’s pursuit of the manifestations and consequences of new digital media
use is ambitious in its scope. In but 125 pages they seek to comment on the history and trajectory
of political activism and dissent in the region and the involvement of digital media in this activism
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Kaleidoscope 5.2, Eleanor Ryan, “Review of Democracy’s Fourth Wave?”
and dissent; the responses of authoritarian regimes which included digital censorship; Al Jazeera’s
role in the Arab Spring through its regional presence and evolving digital media strategies;
women; diaspora; Western responses; the Muslim Brotherhood and much more besides. To this
end they draw upon diverse datasets, most of which have been generated by the authors. These
datasets present various phenomena from the percentage of Tunisian blog posts on politics made
around the time of the popular uprising that include the keywords ‘Ben Ali’ ‘Economy’ ‘Islam’ and
‘Revolution’ (13), to the number of tweets originating in the region that used hashtags for
neighbouring countries (54).
The authors use these diverse datasets to inform their ‘cross-case, event-driven analysis’
(10), from which they produce a number of interesting typologies, and reach a number of
conclusions. A simple yet useful contribution that this book makes is a five phase model of the
‘digital media and the Arab Spring’ (26) comprising the ‘preparation phase,’ ‘ignition phase,’ ‘street
protests,’ ‘international buy-in,’ and finally the ‘climax phase’ (ibid). Students of digital media in the
context of Egyptian politics may also find the classification of Egyptian viral videos according to
type of content - ‘raw protest and mobilization footage; citizen commentary; political punditry;
and “soundtracks for the revolution” (62)’ - to be expedient in relation to their own work; indeed
this typology may be productively applied in other regional case studies.
Arguably the core contribution that Democracy's Fourth Wave? makes to political and social
scientific scholarship on the Arab Spring is as follows:
Weighing multiple political, economic, and cultural conditions, we argue that information
infrastructure- especially mobile phone use- consistently appears as one of the key ingredients
in parsimonious models behind regime fragility and social movement success. Internet use is
relevant in some solution sets, but by causal logic it is actually the absence of internet use that
explains low levels of success (104).
The authors employ fuzzy set logic which ‘offers general knowledge through the strategy of
looking for shared causal conditions across multiple instances of the same outcome (107)’ to make
their argument. Chosen for its ability to develop ‘theory grounded in the observed, real-world
experience of democratization in the Arab-Muslim communities of the developing world (ibid)’,
fuzzy set logic allows Howard and Hussain, by their own estimations, to offer a ‘transportable
framework that may describe the staging of contemporary, digitally mediated social change’ (124).
The great strength of Democracy's Fourth Wave? is of course its timeliness, and the almost
self-evident importance of its subject matter. As Howard and Hussain explain, ‘[o]ne of the most
important reasons for seriously considering the role of information technology during the Arab
Spring is that activists and civic leaders themselves say it had a significant impact on their
organizational effectiveness’ (2013: 34).
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Kaleidoscope 5.2, Eleanor Ryan, “Review of Democracy’s Fourth Wave?”
For many social and political scientists it will be the extent to which Howard and Hussain’s
work is attuned to emic understandings of digital media’s role and significance, and the stress the
authors put on the crucial ‘everydayness’ of digital media, that most impresses:
It may seem that digital media use in times of political crisis is new. But for the residents of
Tunis, Cairo, and other capitals, it is the everydayness of mobile phones that makes the
technology a proximate cause of revolution (27).
However, the ambitious scope of the work - though clearly a necessary condition of fuzzy
set logic - sets the authors up somewhat for a fall. To cite but one example of topical overreach,
although gender politics and digital media in the region have undoubtedly become fascinatingly
intertwined, the attempt to tackle this relationship in only a few pages does the topic somewhat
of a disservice (48, 62-3, 105). More troubling are the many summary assertions about political
and social life in the Arab world that litter Democracy's Fourth Wave? which, while on first reading
appear to be insightful and are clearly
important to the work’s overall argument, on closer
inspection can be shown to lack supporting evidence. A clear example of such practice can be
found in the statement that ‘[f]or the most part, public opinion in countries with large Muslim
communities has been a construction of ruling elites and state agencies (64).’ Failing to provide
references or data to support this bold assertion, the authors render it meaningless in and of
itself. Worse still, analysis built upon such unsubstantiated assertions is inescapably compromised.
Yet, insofar as they succeed in generating useful typologies and even a transportable
framework for description of digitally mediated social change, Howard and Hussain take us one
step further along the road to deeper understanding of the digitally inflected political upheaval of
the Arab Spring and beyond. The US teeters on the brink of military intervention in Syria,
triggered in part by mobile phone videos transmitted globally through the internet. Once again
the need for creative examination of the causal relationship between digital media evolution and
political revolution in the Arab world - as demonstrated in Democracy's Fourth Wave? - is
underscored.
Eleanor Ryan
Department of Anthropology
Durham University
[email protected]
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