The Arab Spring may not have achieved much in terms of democratising the region, but it has surely altered the language and idiom in which the Arab world is perceived and commented upon. Most crucially, the portrayal of the Arab world as an internally undifferentiated monolith is now passé.
Nowadays, we hardly see that previously omnipresent word that formed the pivotal axis around which much of media discourse on the Middle East revolved for long decades: the Arab Street. As against the absence of a western street, Indian street or south east Asian street, the Arab street (that used to 'erupt in fury') always stood out in media parlance as a code name for an entire people supposedly devoid of agency and selfhood.
In much of (particularly Western) media discourse on the region, the specifics of individual countries and other detail mattered only so long as they served as corroborative facts in the reinforcement of a warped and stereotypical construction of the Arabs.
The most interesting result of such a reductionist narrative was that the legion of Middle East specialists around the globe collectively failed to predict that the moment of reckoning for some of modern history's most villainous dictators was so very imminent. It is actually mind-boggling that these Middle East specialists were as much surprised by the sudden implosions in half a dozen countries in the region as the common folks were. In fact, some of these specialists kept arguing for a long time that the perpetuation of the status quo was better for the protection of the interests of Western governments in the region.
A telling example of this trend was an essay titled "Can Democracy Stop Terrorism?" in the September/ October 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs’by F. Gregory Gause III. In the essay, he warned America against encouraging democracy in the Arab world, arguing that the authoritarian regimes in the region allied to the West were better positioned to ensure stability and a less turbulent future for the region. Gause III seemed completely oblivious to the plain fact that the turbulence endemic to most Arab countries and the bitter animosity people generally felt against the western powers were a direct result of their role in the perpetuation of the status quo.
To be fair to him, He wrote a partly apologetic and partly analytical essay in the same magazine in its July-August 2011 issue under the title "Why Middle East Studies Missed the Arab Spring: The Myth of Authoritarian Stability". After tracing the successes and failures of the Arab Spring to the nature of the armed forces, economic reforms and a new form of pan-Arabism, he said: "Academic specialists on Arab politics, such as myself, have quite a bit of rethinking to do. That is both intellectually exciting and frightening. Explaining the stability of Arab authoritarians was an important analytic task, but it led some of us to underestimate the forces for change that were bubbling below and at times above the surface of Arab politics."