ABSTRACT
More than in the other Arab Spring countries, social media in Syria played a crucial part in bringing people together and mobilizing protest movements. Because of the country’s isolation, the result of decadeslong state control of communications, the internet provided a lifeline.1 When it was interrupted, Syrians were cut off from each other and “the rest of the world, as though prison gates closed back down on those who were still in Syria and as though those who had left were doubly exiled [it] felt like a kind of death” (Majed 2014: 105). Social media overcame the forty years of atomization and social death that Syrians had lived in the open-air prison that the Asad dynasty had fashioned for them. After 2011, the virtual world brought together those who were scattered around the real world. Protecting identity and location, it created community where there had been despair about the possibility of uniting. Artist-activists played a key part in holding on to that humanity beyond political differences and their preferred field of action was the virtual domain. The internet has opened up a new space for self-expression where individuals can experiment without fear of silencing. Facebook individuality, Majed writes, “tends to be free of rules of conduct pertaining to the real world [. . .] In the process, the virtual is engendered in the heart of the real even as it in turn gives birth to the real” (Majed 2014: 106-108). The internet sowed the seeds of a civic movement independent of government control and able to function anonymously across international borders.
