Islamic Awareness and the Role of Communicational Technologies

Document Type : Research Paper

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Abstract

In late 2010, giant metamorphoses occurred in the northern regions of Africa and in the Middle-East, which influenced the international milieu to a great extent. The shifts mainly happened in countries which are Muslim-dominated and have religious beliefs. After the revolution of Tunisians and its diffusion to other Arabic and Islamic countries, the phenomenon of Arabic revolutions and the Islamic awareness, like a domino, challenged the monarchical regime in the Middle-East seriously. This made the ruling regimes more lenient towards some political liberties, freedom of speech, public positioning, and the like to strategically deceive their own citizens. This is while the monarchical regimes and the regional dictators have tried to disrupt the free information flow, to dominate mass and communication media and to banish information from the public. On the contrary, the protesting people received the news by international and social media and transferred information using social networks such as facebook, email and other virtual networks. As media have been highly influential in Arabic societies’ uprising, these revolutions were named under the title of facebook or twitter revolutions. The present paper aims at investigating the role of media in the Middle-East’s recent revolutions and Western media’s positioning against such democratic revolutions, and utilizes a descriptive-analytic method to do so.

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