Mutable Selves and Digital Reflexivities: Social Media for Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa

Abstract

To examine how social media restrict and recreate messages within current interactionist scripts in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), this study applies a framework of digital reflexivity highlighting stages of information flow. It applies the symbolic interaction concept of emotional events to analyze the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi and the role of social media in disseminating Bouazizi’s act as one catalyst of the MENA citizen uprisings. The role of social media in the “Arab Spring” merits investigation because social media provide opportunities to examine shifting identities, interactions, and actions of citizen activists in the MENA uprisings. This study is important and timely because little symbolic interactionist scholarship exists on MENA identities and social movements, or on crowd interaction and activism outside the West. The nuanced nature of MENA political activism and complex processes of the development of activists’ “mutable” selves (Zurcher, 1977) are fluid and resistant to symbolically defined social roles, interactionist scripts and reflexivity, and public communication practices in a MENA under political and social transition.

Citation

Lengel, L. and Newsom, V.A. (2014), "Mutable Selves and Digital Reflexivities: Social Media for Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa", Symbolic Interaction and New Social Media (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 43), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 85-119. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0163-239620140000043015