"From Tehran to Tahrir Square to Gezi Park-to mention only three key sites of protest made prominent in 2013-social media has been lauded as one of the key factors enabling popular uprisings and social movements. This has provided further hype for new or digital media, which were already being touted as a tool for social change, liberation, and the representation of marginalized or oppressed voices. In this essay, I argue not against new media per se but against technological determinism and fetishism. I argue that the transformative or repressive potential of different media changes dramatically across different sites of research and depends on the sociopolitical realities of the region being studied, including factors such as censorship, access, and infrastructure. Drawing on my research in Afghanistan, Iran, and Tajikistan, among other neighboring countries, I show the striking differences in the degree of effectiveness and ineffectiveness of different media in bringing about social change in those respective countries as well as regionally. Comparatively speaking, I focus on television and social media's catalytic role in stirring popular uprisings and the subsequent backlash and attack on those media. I also examine the gendered dimensions and dangers of media use and activism. In the case of Afghanistan, I consider the impact of international and transnational funding of media and human rights efforts. I conclude that in order for international interventions into local social movements to succeed, international experts in development, human rights, and media must take the lead from local residents and contexts, technologically and culturally, and work collaboratively with them." (Abstract)

"High-level media personnel and wealthy media owners, who are often prominent public figures such as politicians, warlords and drug lords, religious leaders, and businessmen, hire bodyguards and live behind gated mansion fortresses while low-level television personalities and reporters are subjected to threats, physical attacks, and death for providing people with programming that they want to watch and that gives them a platform to raise their voices. These low-level employees—not the owners of television stations—take on the risks associated with developing media indepen dence by exposing warlords’ abuses of power, by critiquing foreign powers and the national government, and by airing diverse televisual representa tions of lifestyles, cultures, and gender and sexuality. Their secular, nation alist, and reformist agendas are sometimes at odds with both the owners of the television stations they work for and the foreign governments that are the patrons of the stations. The International Security Assistance Force, NATO, and American forces try to protect telecommunication towers from the Taliban by either placing them within the compound walls of their military bases or having soldiers guard them. It is time to also protect the flesh-and-blood people who run the one institution with the most democratic potential. Television owners, the Afghan government, and the international community must be held accountable for the safety of Afghan journalists, presenters, singers, and actresses. This is not only a problem of personal safety; the future of independent media in Afghanistan depends on it. Currently, self censorship is becoming more and more prevalent among media makers. The past decade has seen a Foucauldian turn to self-discipline as a means of appeasing elites. Once the venues for mass communication and mediation are controlled and censored by direct force and by fear and intimidation, cultural debates will cease." (Conclusions, pages 884-885)