Introduction

The ‘Arab Spring’ has been represented in the mainstream media as a ‘social media revolution’; the hyperbole of headlines claims a seismic shift away from traditional news correspondence and towards an era of citizen journalism and social media reporting. Beginning in Tunisia in 2010, the Arab Spring protests spread to Egypt, Libya, Syria and many other areas of the Middle East, toppling governments and/or calling for democratic political change to otherwise authoritarian government regimes. Perhaps one of the more interesting aspects of these protests is the use of social media and alternate digital media technologies to both co-ordinate action by protesters and to report upon the events. Activists, protesters and traditional and mainstream journalists were seemingly innovative in their interactions, digitally sharing each other’s eyewitness accounts of events through interview, reportage, image and video online. This edited collection seeks to both theoretically and empirically consider the social, political and cultural ramifications of these interactions and their meaning in a digital media age.