Author: Dr. Abdelhafid Tahboun Summary: The insurgent revolts embodied in sweeping calamities of political turbulence, social disarray and r...
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Summary:
The insurgent revolts embodied in sweeping calamities of political turbulence, social disarray and revolutionary upheavals ignited during the Arab spring pro-democracy protests have marked the inaugural springtime of socio-political transition and culminated in the subversive overthrow of a myriad of autocratic Arab regimes. The central key-insight researched throughout this endeavour casts the spotlight on the operative utility and the high-yielding serviceability supplemented by new communication technologies and other multimedia platforms which provided an intractable cyberspace of civil disobedience and digital activism. Multimedia outlets and anti-regime virtual campaigns co-operated to forge a rhizomatic network and complex web of anti-totalitarian youths as emerging political dissidents indignantly enraged by periphery-exclusive policymaking systems of corporal violence, dismissive marginalization, tyrannical oppression, political disenfranchisement and economic exploitation of the socially proletarianized subaltern groups relegated to the marginal outskirts of inhibitive alienation. Theoretically reframed within the conceptual paradigm of digital anthropology, this paper elaborately reflects on how interactive platforms of mass communication have furnished the ground for the rise of cyber-activism and how the latter has audio-visually recorded footage and captured traumatizing scenes of state terrorism and police brutalities in a resolute determination to re-articulate the muted democratic demands of the “wretched of the earth” by relocating these echoed cries of survival from the marginal position of minority status and peripheral subalternate to the central locus of egalitarian social justice, freedom of activist mobilization and political involvement. By the same token, this article explores how socially mediated forms of digital disobedience have engendered a radical alteration in the Arab perceptions of political democracy and readjusted the tectonic plates of hierarchized power relations through metamorphosing them from top-bottom taxonomical structure or mono-directional flow of state-centered governmental regulations to a bottom-up civil society-led reformist approach of socio-economic overhaul.
Future Plans on the Same Topic:
Since its preliminary outbreak in Tunisia and its transnational diffusion across the MENA region, the Arab Spring has turned out to be an inexhaustibly renewable and explorable area of groundbreaking research and remarkable experiences to be learned in the disciplinary realm of political science and the logistical philosophy of state-building strategies. The socio-political implications and the subsequent economic impacts, as well as the influential repercussions it had on the European-Arab diplomatic foreign embassy and future prospects of East-West cross-cultural dialogue, become researchable issues to be scrutinized in the field of political diplomacy and interstate relations.
From a cultural and media studies perspective, the complex, albeit antagonistically conflictual relationship between digital disobedience, virtually mediated blog posts of governmental criticism and state-enacted media policies become thorny concerns of integral significance to cultural studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry whose scholarly archive I am personally interested in. Amid the rise of digital sociology as a fraternal offshoot of modern media studies, the complex interplay between political communication and how its rhetorical propaganda is circulated and pictured across diverse multimedia corporations has become a controversial problem I might attempt to explore in future research endeavours. Once investigated from a techno-culture theory perspective, state-centred media becomes the ideological apparatus whereby the elitist superstructures repackage an ideology of cultural hegemony, political control and economic reductionism disseminated through forms of mass consumption such as televised weekly programmes, marketized fashion or visual advertisement that render the popular culture as a terrain to expand the state’s commercial revenues with regard to maintaining marginalizing policies of behavioural disciplinarity and discourse governmentality that sustain the status quo and thus keep the subaltern peripheries under the supervisory invigilation of the state.
The conclusive inferences generated from this research topic can serve as precursor groundwork to excavate in depth how the revolutionary notion of digital disobedience, socially experimented during the Arab Spring social protests, could be enlarged in scope to scrutinize how cyberspace amplifies the subaltern margins create an insurgent counter-narrative of social justice, foster economic inclusivity and escalate feasible prospects of political democracy in the Arab World. The political dimensions sprung from digital disobedience will be re-examined to rethink how mass-based incorporation of media discourse can result in the emergence of an oppositional-reading model meant to critically sharpen the deconstructive capacity of Arab audiences’ media literacy skills, transforming them into a sceptical interpretive community able-minded to countermand the spurious disorientations canonized by state-serving media agencies.
Biography:
Tahboun Abdelhafid obtained his BA in Literature and Cultural Studies from the Polydisciplinary faculty of Nador in 2021. His research monograph is a deconstructive analysis of John Maxwell Coetzee's Foe (1986), in which he critically re-diagnoses the theme of Scrutinizing the Counteractive discourse of Cultural Resistance explored from a postcolonial feminist perspective. Currently, Abdelhafid Tahboun is an associate Master's researcher in the English department at the FLHS of Fez Morocco Dhar El-Mahraz. He is pursuing his MA in cultural studies: Cultures, identities, and nationhood in Morocco. Tahboun’s interests encompass literary and cultural studies, Travel Writings and issues of Gender and Diaspora. Recently, Tahboun participated in a conference held in Italy on Gender and Diversity Studies in Africa and Asia. Recently, he has published two articles. The first one is entitled ‘‘Overcoming the Myth of the Silent Woman and Double-Colonization in Ernest Hemingway’s Indian Camp’’ released by the International Journal of Language and Literary Studies. The second one is “The Rise of Cyber-Activism and Digital Disobedience during the Arab Spring Uprisings”, published by the Great Britain Journals Press: London Journal of Research in Humanities and Social Sciences.
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