Thesis (Ph.D.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Economics and Political Science - Department of Political Science

The thesis is a comparative analysis concerning the use of the nontraditional media (i.e. social media) by social movements (SM), focusing specifically on the impact of these social networks (SN) (face book as a tool) in the Mediterranean sphere, particularly in Egypt and Spain as case studies, on social movements; (their ability to mobilize and establish a social base). By the beginning of the year 2011, various uprisings started to take place in the mediterranean region in general and the Arab world in specific starting in Tunisia, then Egypt (January 2011) , next in Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, Syria,{u2026}etc. During such events, the social Networks were said to have played an important role in the crystallization and increasing the impact in the virtual world, in addition it was emphasized that it enabled social movements to mobilize political participation. In other words, social networks were a tool used to achieve three pairs of phenomena: Awareness-advocacy (AA), organization/ mobilization (OM), and action/ reaction (AR). The introduced research pursued is to develop a comparative analysis of the factors, actors, variables and relationships involved by social movements in order to describe and explain how they were incubated, triggered, developed and concluded by social networks. The main question of study is: How the ubiquitous communication through social networks contributed to the occurrence of the three pairs of the abovementioned phenomena, and how this communication-in turn-had an impact on social movements in both countries.

Issued also as CD