Focusing on the role of social media as a tool for both framing and offline organizing, Felix Tusa compares the Iranian election protests of 2009 with those of the Egyptian revolution of 2011. Unlike Egyptian netizens, Iranians engaged in far less framing and over-relied on social media for organizational purposes, thus partially contributing to the failure of their movement.

Amy Kallander delves into the world of Tunisia’s educated and upper-middle class bloggers to reveal a more nuanced picture of their role in the Tunisian revolution. Reviewing the country’s unique history of Internet activism and government censorship, she finds that their impact was not only more limited than western media accounts claimed, but in many ways, more interesting.

Well before social media’s celebrated role in the uprisings of the Arab Spring, Mohamed Ben Moussa argues, the Internet was shaping collective action and political advocacy in Muslim-majority societies in important ways. Looking at Moroccan social movements’ framing of the 2009 Gaza war online, Ben Moussa details how the use of the Internet shapes their structure, boundaries and mobilization capacity.

In one of the first studies of Egypt’s Rassd News Network (RNN), Yomna Elsayed explores how this Facebook-based citizen journalism network became the most influential news source during the revolution. Placing RNN in the context of alternative media launched on social networks, she explores the reasons for its success as well as the challenges that it faces.

In a study of three Palestinian newspapers, Miriam Berger identifies both internal and external pressures that profoundly limit the autonomy and development of Palestinian print journalism. In-depth interviews with Palestinian journalists and a focus on their work conditions reveal untold stories about the obstacles and red lines faced on a daily basis.

Noah Rayman performs a quantitative textual analysis of pre- and post-revolution news coverage in the Egyptian independent newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm. He finds that the extent of the paper’s post-revolutionary political coverage and social engagement indicate that Egyptian society and media is progressing on the path to democratization, despite the fact that qualitative analysis paints a less optimistic picture.

Rasha Allam reports on the efforts of Kamel Labidi, former head of the National Authority for the Reform of Media and Communication, to enact media reform in Tunisia. Two months after Labidi spoke about his work at the American University in Cairo (May 9, 2012), he and his commission resigned, citing a lack of political will for media reform and obstruction from the newly elected Ennahda-led government.

Ramy Aly reviews and critiques this volume of articles edited by Tariq Sabry, calling it the most coherent attempt yet to “create a reflexive disciplinary self-consciousness” for the nascent field of Arab cultural studies. The book’s strength, he writes, lies in its “unapologetic diagnosis of the weaknesses” of current Arab media, communication and literary studies and its proposals for a way out of this disciplinary impasse.

Daoud Kuttab explores the resistance to community radio in the Arab world despite the opening up of media sectors following the Arab uprisings. He calls on the region’s newly elected leaders to welcome the developmental potential of community-based radio and to create the necessary regulatory framework for radio broadcasting.

Reviewing the role of new media in the Arab uprisings, Wiebke Lamer considers both its potential and its limitations in undermining authoritarian regimes. She concludes that over the long term, new media’s greatest impact may be in strengthening civil society and facilitating non-state actors.