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For much of the Western media, seduced by the story of a ‘Facebook revolution’ led by computer-savy youth, Amina rapidly became the brave face of Syrian protest, hailed as the prototypical ‘new hero’ of this social-media revolution. The blog had gained a popular following in the midst of the pro-democracy protests in the Middle East, particularly so after a post about Amina’s father bravely confronting Syrian security forces to defend his daughter’s sexuality and political choices. The blog in question was ‘A Gay Girl in A Damascus,’ and its author identified as Amina Araf, an American Syrian lesbian.
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In June of this year, a partial corrective to the narrative of digital transparency came from the blogosphere itself, with the unveiling of a cyberhoax involving Tom MacMaster, a graduate student from Scotland who had masqueraded as a queer blogger from Syria. Largely missing was a sense of the interpretive communities that these tools and documents produced – and, in turn, the lack of hermeneutic closure that often attended their circulation.
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Largely banished from popular discussion was a sense of the ways in which the digital documents emanating from Tahrir square, for example (photographs, videos, etc.), were often the subject of considerable negotiation and contention were implicated in the production of selective truth claims were themselves subject to aesthetic codes and norms which rendered some political documents intelligible and others unintelligible. What was often missing from these popular conversations and structures of feeling was a sense of the highly mediated nature of the digital sphere itself – mediation which belied the prevailing notion of the evidentiary. In turn, many of us geographically distant from the events in the Middle East were seduced by the al-Jazeera live-stream as we reveled in the virtual ‘being-there’ that new technologies seemed to make possible. Pictures shot by mobile phone were offered to us as strictly evidentiary forms, documents that unproblematically chronicle the political field. More often than not, we were instructed by the mainstream Western media, as well as by many academic commentators, to read digital tools as transparent conduits for political ends, even if not always successful ones. Yet what both the digital democracy narrative and its corrective tended to share was a certain myopia around digital media – its workings, circuits, and effects. Somewhat belatedly, correctives to this narrative began to circulate and take hold some scholars historicized the protest movements as a means of disputing the story of social media’s centrality, while others sought to temper the celebration of grassroots digitality by reminding us of the flexible nature of these technologies, including the ways they have been employed by dictators and police states as PR platforms, tools for tracking and monitoring political dissidents, and means of counter-insurgency more generally. Initially, many commentators placed the credit for these uprisings at the feet of social networking – even proposing that Facebook and Twitter, and the mobile technologies that enable them, were somehow naturally suited to the political projects of insurgent social movements (a variant of what is known as the ‘digital democracy’ proposition). In the wake of the popular revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, much ink was spilled about the political power of digital media as a tool of grassroots mobilizing.