The Internet as a Catalyst for Social Movements

Over the last few years protest movements such as the Arab Spring, the Spanish Indignados movement, and the Occupy protests, have cascaded through the Middle East and the rest of the world.1 All of these were portrayed as ‘Internet Revolutions’, or at least as having been accelerated by the communicative capabilities of the Internet (Hamdy 1The Arab Spring is also named ‘Arab Uprisings’ by some to indicate it is a continuing movement. Here we will use the term ‘Arab Spring’, both because the focus here is on the early phases of movements (their ‘spring’), and because it is the more widely used term in the English academic literature.