ABSTRACT
It is a topic of lasting interest for social movement scholars and political scientists alike whether the ubiquitous media environment in which citizens now operate has an imprint on the scope and quality of their appetite for civic engagement (Bimber, 2003; Jenkins, 2006; Coleman and Blumler, 2009). In particular, there has been continued querying of social media usage as an avenue for renewed political socialization. A “mobilization effect” leading to a swell in the number of participants in activism and specifically in physical instances of participation such as demonstrations continues to be disputed (Fisher and Boekkooi, 2010; van Laer, 2010). Moreover, much skepticism has been voiced about the enabling role social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, have had in the not so distant popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East (see Morozov, 2011). Fresh ethnographic evidence suggests that in a highly censored media environment, those platforms served a key twofold initial purpose: to distribute viral appeals to participation as well as to provide participants with an effective coordination tool, i.e., Twitter (Gerbaudo, 2012).
