Research Information System
in: Academic Studies in Social Sciences and Humanities, İbrahim Serbestoğlu,Hakan Tan, Editor, Livre de Lyon, Lyon, pp.187-205, 2024
Political movements demand that the foundations of the political structure
be shaken and consequently replaced. These movements gain meaning
and significance to the extent that people make efforts to transform
existing political relations. It is not possible for actions that are not aimed at
transforming political relations, in other words those that do not problematise the
established political relations and their positions, but instead ascribe themselves
to a political movement, to initiate a revolutionary or reformist transformation.
The Arab Spring is an example of this. With the support of social media, Arab
Spring activists assumed that they had fostered global cooperation for their
actions. This, in turn, intensified their opposition to the existing political order.
However, their reliance on social media led them to a misconception that a more
democratic system could be readily achieved through online platforms. This
study argues that the Arab movement could not have been transformed into a
spring, or at least the question of whose spring the movement represents remains
open for theoretical discussion. The theoretical framework of the study is based
on Innis’s contextual approach to communication and his central concept of
communication bias.