My Introduction uses four communication events from the summers of 2004 (Cairo) and 2010 (Kuwait) to signify the emergence of a new (more contentious) Arab public (Lynch 2006, Murphy 2009). To contextualise these events in the wider discourses and meanings of emerging Arab Internet cultures, this chapter provides the back-story with which to understand why these communication events were such transformational moments.

With Internet use becoming a more ubiquitous part of everyday life in the Middle East, a wide community of interdisciplinary scholars seeks explanations for the technology's longer-term implications (Lynch 2012, Seib 2012, Howard and Hussain 2013, Lacroix 2011, Faris 2013, Fekete and Warf 2013). Few if any of the existing studies, however, provide an ethnographically grounded history of Internet diffusion at the grass roots, among non-activists. Throughout this chapter we will consider representations of new media disruptions in everyday contexts as a way to decipher the history, meaning and implication of emerging Arab new media practices. Four overlapping tropes of communication and change frame this history: fear, need, resistance and revolution.

The main argument of this chapter is that the wider the diffusion and the more concentrated uses of the Internet become, the more overt the impacts are on citizen agency and power relations broadly defined. The implications of new communication practices are often subtle alterations of everyday norms, but nonetheless are potentially transformative of power relations where they matter most, in citizens’ daily lives.