Disappointingly thin on research, though I believe Bayat's premise was rather amorphous and didn't really lend itself to concrete support anyway. Nearly the entire book reads like Wikipedia articles. Don't get me wrong, I love Wikipedia for information and shallow, lay-person analysis/explanation. But I don't expect an academic book to parrot the site AND not provide anything additional with respect to facts, ideas, insights, or theories. Comparing and contrasting the 1979 Iranian Revolution with the 2011 Arab Spring cannot be done without a lengthy exploration of how Iran got to where it was socially and politically by 1979, and without doing the same for Egypt by 2011. There are so many factors that led to both revolutions, much in the same way that the 2023 Israeli ethnic cleansing of Occupied Palestine cannot be understood without knowing how Israel came to be a state ex nihilo in 1948. Aside from the deep, dark histories, I am no believer that social media and revolution go together in any meaningful way at all. Social media is a passive way to experience the world, a technology that convinces its users that clicks, reposts, likes, and networking/sharing will actually result in overthrowing the (mostly neo-liberal) capitalists that sold you the technology in the first place. Those in power are most assuredly not going to provide you with anything that will allow you to usurp their stranglehold on wealth and power. I don't doubt Egyptians and Tunisians, and many, many other peoples are suffering greatly and have no problem protesting as they have little or nothing to lose anyway. What value is a life when it is lived under such violent oppression anyway? And I include the USofA in this "peoples suffering greatly", even is the suffering is less pronounced than in most any other country in the world. Americans are just being oppressed with better toys to distract them from their actual miseries. I think most revolutions are destined to fail because there is such a small group of people with nearly all the power, and they either rule nations (US, Israel, Britain, Germany, China, Japan...) or run corporations, so they can either use their military power (to make up "wars", assassinate rivals, build up insurgency networks, overthrow democracies, etc.) or their monetary power (crush competition, steal profits and underpay workers, avoid taxation, etc.) to control the strength of the revolts. For example: the US government let the Occupy Movement scream for a while, but it sure wasn't going to allow it to topple the Wall Street Capitalists, was it? True revolution requires the ultimate sacrifice: death. And there just aren't that many people willing to die to overthrow the power structures. Standing in the street, yelling, chanting, and burning cars/flags/effigies and the like looks startling, but it accomplishes little to nothing besides the requisite crackdown by the ruling elites who can and will label the protestors as "extremists" or "leftists" or "violent". The Arab Spring morphed into Arab Winter almost immediately. Why? Because those in power, in Egypt AND in the West (US and Europe), know how far to let things go before they pull back and snuff out revolt.
We MUST remove all the systems, structures, and people who control the world as it stands now. Nothing else will change the current course of species extinction. That is why we are doomed, because almost no one wants to do the work, they just want to watch, comment, post videos, and wait for someone else to act.
Bayat says we could look at the Arab Spring as a prolonged revolution, and where it will end up is to be decided. The time for waiting is well over, and unless we act, and very quickly, there will be nothing left to live for anyway, no new spring.