ALiGN Media Lab Director and Founder, Merlyna Lim, just publishes “Sticks and Stones, Clicks and Phones: Contextualizing the Role of Digital Media in the Politics of Transformation” [PDF].
This piece is a chapter of edited volume titled Digital Media and the Politics of Transformation in the Arab World and Asia (Springer, 2018) edited by
Below is the summary of Lim’s contribution, based on the excerpt from the Introduction (p. 5):
Merlyna Lim, in her comprehensive study on protest movements worldwide, shows the complexities of the politics of transformation. Her contribution presents the perfect opening by calling to go “beyond the revolutionary moment” and instead study social change that underlies the unfolding transformational projects. Drawing on a rich empirical body, she shows how digital media are part of different stages in protest movements. Taking into consideration the global-local nexus, she traces similar characteristics and mechanisms in digital media activism in Arab and Asian countries while at the same time presenting regional differences entailing regional contagion effects, the urban middle class population and digital connectivity.