New Media and Revolution: Resistance and Dissent in Pre-uprising Syria by Billie Jeanne Brownlee (review)

While the Arab world—often grasped through the non-neutral geopolitical categorization of the Middle East—has been widely under-represented in the field of film and media studies, it tends to acquire greater visibility in times of crisis or political upheaval. Following the Arab uprisings in the early 2010s, a surge in scholarship contributed to solidifying the emerging field of Arab film and media studies. Malu Halasa, Zaher Omareen, and Nawara Mahfoud's edited collection Syria Speaks (2014), Marwan M. Kraidy's The Naked Blogger of Cairo (2016), Donatella Della Ratta's Shooting a Revolution (2018), Alisa Lebow's digital project Filming Revolution (2018), Kay Dickinson's Arab Film and Video Manifestos (2018), and Della Ratta, Dickinson, and Sune Haugbolle's edited collection The Arab Archive (2020) have all brilliantly examined how Arab media histories and cultures and their entanglements with revolutions raise questions about the politics of media.

Billie Jeanne Brownlee's New Media and Revolution: Resistance and Dissent in Pre-uprising Syria (2020) takes part in this conversation from a perspective that is distinct in two regards: first, by combining insights from political science and media studies; second, by looking at the prehistory of new media during the decade that preceded Syria's revolution-turned-proxy war rather than the uprisings per se. If we critically examine New Media and Revolution's two main contributions together, it can help us understand the benefits and limitations of transdisciplinary studies while reasserting the necessity of an approach to film and media studies that is in-depth and politically engaged.

Against the techno-determinist narrative that dominated in the early years of the uprisings, Brownlee reasserts that new media, understood capaciously as satellite TV, blogs, news websites, Facebook, and YouTube, functioned as a means rather than a cause of upheaval. By implementing a shift in the periodization of the Syrian revolution, the book examines the "infra-politics" of media practices and the emergence of a "contentious culture" since 2000 (9). The regime's transition from Hafez al-Assad to his son Bashar in 2000 led to a contradictory media landscape. New policies were implemented to privatize new media infrastructures (especially the Internet and satellite TV), which were then left under relatively light supervision to gain legitimacy on the international stage. At the same time, the regime kept tight control over traditional media outlets and political dissent. This loophole, for Brownlee, is what allowed the emergence of new forms of popular interaction with communication technologies. Virtual spaces both became the space of struggle itself and increased the opportunities for the development of horizontal and collective networks of communication that the oppressive regime had made impossible in person (chapter 2).

The relation of new media to social change took a very specific shape that departs from Western models of social movement. Brownlee first examines the formation of a new popular (yet supervised) civic culture of participation through incremental changes in the traditional media (chapter 3). Such changes were even more visible in satellite TV and social media, which introduced international narratives that contradicted the regime's news outlets and allowed the emergence of new journalistic practices. Importantly, these more open virtual spaces became areas of experimentation and maturation for new forms of communication and new subjectivities (chapter 4). However, many of these experiments were informed by both formal and less formal foreign investments in Syria's media development, which supported structures of journalistic professionalization that carried a hidden agenda of democratization (chapter 5). The book concludes with an examination of how this shift in media practices had a strong influence when it came to sparking the uprisings (chapter 6).

The book's interdisciplinary combination of political economy, social movement theory, and media studies convincingly argues that various traditional and new media function interdependently as an ecology that is capable of conditioning new practices and subjectivities. The ecological model not only avoids exceptionalizing narratives around satellite TV...