Media and the Public Sphere: An Arab Spring Study

This work is the result of research on media and the public sphere and aims to understand the phenomena caused by the evolution of the new media and the use of social media in the uprisings of the Middle East, which have occurred since December 2010, called Arab Spring. We seek to investigate the role of communication and information technologies in the constitution of a virtualized and internationalized public sphere. We also aim to identify the relationship between this sphere and the media, and to explain the use of social media as tools of deterritorialized political action. To this end, our methodology includes the bibliographic survey of studies already carried out on the subject, and of themes related to Political Science and Social Communication. As main references, we work with Habermas (1984) and (2003), Lévy (1998 - 2010), Castells (2000), Santaela (2012) and Briggs & Burke (2003). Keywords: Public sphere. Media. New information technologies. Arab Spring. Cultural Studies.