LAUSR

It’s perhaps hard to imagine today, but when the Arab Spring started in 2010 there was widespread excitement that new technologies such as the smartphone and new media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube were playing a crucial role in driving the popular movements demanding democracy. Fast forward five or six years and we’re far more likely to hear how those same technologies undermine democracy and even the very possibility of truth. Donatella Della Ratta’s Shooting a Revolution (2018) and Joshka Wessel’s Documenting Syria (2019) both diagnose the role of new media technologies in the Syrian revolution and war, offering different doses of optimism and pessimism. When the Syrian revolution began in 2011, Della Ratta and Wessels had already conducted lengthy periods of fieldwork in the country. Della Ratta worked on popular satellite television series (musalsalāt) from 2008–11, and Wessels shot an anthropological documentary about a small desert village in Aleppo Province from 1997–2002. Their monographs are divided into two parts, with the first dealing with the period before the 2011 revolution and older media technologies and the second addressing the role of new media technologies since 2011. This has the important benefit of historicizing the post-2011 developments in Syria, as well as understanding the place of new media technologies within a broader Syrian mediascape. Wessels favors continuity in her account, arguing that the 2011 revolution “was the outcome of an accumulation of years of indirect and silent, but strong, civil resistance against the Assad regime, expressed in a variety of arts, including cinematic documentary.” (Wessels, 6) Della Ratta, on the other hand, favors an explanation of rupture, MESA R o M E S 53 2 2019