NMIT Working Papers

Blogging, Networked Publics and the Politics of Communication: Another Free-Speech Panacea for the Middle East?

meaningfulconnections — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 23:22:10 +0000

Jon W. Anderson

Revised, keynote address for a conference on “New Horizons: Obama and the Global Media.” Department of Anthropology, Near Eastern Studies, School of Journalism
University of Arizona. Tucson, AZ – 23 January 2009

On December 10, the White House announced that President Bush would “commemorate the 60th anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights by meeting with activists who use Internet blogs and new-media technologies to promote freedom in countries with restricted media environments.” Two were from Iran and Egypt. Before celebration of blogging as free speech and ‘citizen journalism’ disappoints, like the Web in the 1990s or television in the 1950s, I want to consider how we might place a sounder social anthropology under media-minded constructions. How might such activities be grounded in what research shows about networked communication generally and specifically with globalizing media? As interest in global media turns to blogging, my concerns here are two.

One is that this analysis not fall into another Middle Eastern exceptionalism, such as has marred studies of media in the region and the Internet particularly with litanies of low numbers, restricted access, elite-only participation and not much of that – the usual registers of despair that follow hopes not realized. Never mind that they are not realized anywhere. My other concern is to ground comparison and thus, for an anthropologist, analysis in what research elsewhere and more generally shows about networked communication, global media and my subject, which is the Internet going global, or at least getting into the Middle East and the larger Muslim world.

Blogging, which is less than a decade old and little more than half that as a public phenomenon, has been hailed as a new opportunity for public communication, political activism, and a democratic public sphere from its very first appearances in the region – notably Egypt, Iran, but also Syria, Saudi Arabia, famously Iraq – just like Web portals, the Internet, and back to television in the 1950s. I have to plead guilty to new-ism, since Dale Eickelman and I framed new media in the Muslim world a decade ago in terms of new interpreters, new interpretations, new media and a new public sphere.[1] This was less a theory than a formulary for gathering and comparing developments. My interest as an anthropologist has focused more on the mechanics of these processes, and on opening up the middle ground between the overwhelming emphasis on agency-enhancement that’s dominated most work on these topics in our region,[2] on the one hand, and, at the other extreme, expansive notions from “virtual community” to the “wisdom of crowds” as general conceptions of what networked communications unleash.[3]

We all work in the shadow of the sociologist Robert Merton who gave us the concept of middle range phenomena – and their key specification in reference groups, to which I will come back – which occupy just this space between the micro and the macro. And, recently, the web-guru David Weinberger pointed to such intermediate formations as what’s missing in media constructions of participatory or citizen journalism:[4]

We’re not being atomized. We’re molecularizing, forming groups that create a local culture …[that] falls between the expertise of men in the editorial boardroom and the ‘wisdom of crowds’. It’s the wisdom of groups…

Almost. “Group” is a loosely applied term in the post-modern world, having already lost the strong-form referent of community in the modern period for a looser range from association to category. This is important, because the accumulating weight of Internet research is showing, if nothing else, that the Internet is not a strong force for forming groups or communities. Groups may migrate to the Internet, and some thrive there; but few actually form through its modalities. Instead, the strong force on the Internet is information-seeking. It is much better for information-seeking than for solidarity-seeking, always has been, and, indeed, was so designed from the beginning by engineers who invented it for their own work. This is my first point.

The social formations that thrive – that even exist – on the Internet and via the World Wide Web, which is the Internet to most people, are less communities than reference groups; and the reason is that the openness of networked communications is far less well-suited for the sort of communication that fosters community – what anthropologists know as ritual – than for the sort of communication that facilitates information-seeking, transfer, feedback. We know this from the success of Google, on the one hand, and from the notorious tendency of online discussion forums all the way back to listservs, on the other hand, to dissolve in acrimony and shouting. And, theoretically, we have known since Durkheim that organic solidarities work within a context of mechanical solidarities with their “solid frame that encloses all thought.”

While this sociology of networked communications has been coming better into view in the past few years,[5] thinking about blogging and the development of social networking sites and wikis that are collectively known as Web 2.0 is still behind the curve of routine social science research. They share certain features, among them greater interactivity than preceding Web formats such as portals; but the most important is a developer model of continuous modification of programs and “free” distribution (in contrast to corporate models) borrowed from the Free and Open Software movements. While blogs, wikis and social networking sites have precursors back to the earliest days of the Internet, and their own prehistories in 1990s pioneers, they burst into public more or less simultaneously, between 2003 when Google bought blogger.com and MySpace came on-line, and 2004, when Facebook was launched for Harvard students from a dormroom and grew within the year to all college students and a headquarters in Palo Alto. What made the difference?

These did not grow from nothing. There were pioneers in the 1990s who devised the concepts and first software and precedents back to e-mail and file archives at the beginning of the Internet. And they did not grow for nothing, although each is “free” of charge and provides “user-generated content” in contrast to corporate models of software development. That contrast is conscious,[6] and an ideological commitment of developers that resembles the Free and Open Software movements back through the 1990s to the early Internet, which was itself developed as open and pushed hard by early developers to be “free.” That is, free to use and develop, not free of commercial exploitation.

In a meticulous study of the various streams of FOSS movements,[7] Christopher Kelty elucidates the practical interaction between advocating FOSS and designing/writing the software implementing it as part of advocating it. It forms not a gift economy but what he calls a “recursive public” –

… a public that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public … a collective independent of other forms of constituted power … capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives.[8]

His key point is that joining such a public is to work on its means, and to be recognized for that. While Kelty carefully restricts his analysis to FOSS programmers, he does project the model back onto early inventors/developers of the Internet. That Internet itself is a stack of programs that provide platforms for others; so as it extends to new applications and platforms, might one cautiously extend the notion and analysis to other “developers” such as the user-contributors that are highlighted by Web 2.0, and particularly bloggers?

Modeling blogging as citizen journalism, as competing with journalism, challenging its knowledge production and amateurizing it,[9] captures only a limited comparison to media. Blogging is not only user-generated content, like wikis, but also user-distributed, like social networking sites: it is distributed through links, especially through links to other blogs, as well as links to traditional media, from which blogs often draw information that bloggers “complete” by associating or reframing it with additional, other discourse. This is not universally the case, of course. Many blogs adhere to the earlier model of personal diaries; and most blogs get no attention. How they get attention is a matter of their social organization, which is my second point.

Blogging proceeds largely as commentary that is linked both to sources of information, which are often mainstream media, and to other commentary, which is usually in the form of other blogs. They fall in the intermediate or middle zone between individual and group expression. Some are and remain personal diaries, read by no one; others zoom to popularity. Collectively, they array in Paraeto distributions, not the Gaussian bell curve. A few get most of the attention, traffic, links; most get few or none, and the drop off is steep.[10] If this is the normal outcome of an open market, then how does a blog get attention in a world of many-to-many communications? The answer is by making links, particularly with other blogs. In other words, what blogging resembles is social networking; and blogging took off when it added this facility.

Recall that solidarity-seeking is a weaker force on the Internet generally than information-seeking; so blogging turns social less as audience than as entourage: sharing is typically with friends, with people who already know each other, and migrate on-line. As notes in bottles, as it were, cast upon cyber-seas, blogging would follow Paraeto distributions, and most blogging does, with celebrity for a very few and obscurity for the very, very many.[11] So bloggers turn to linking, as programmers who made posting and commenting easy also made linking easy through “blogrolls.” By this, blogs that overall tend to fall into Paraeto distributions, more “locally” tend to cluster – call them “network neighborhoods.”

These have sometimes been characterised as “echo chambers” for reproducing tendencies noted earlier in earlier formats for like-with-like over any-to-any communication. Sociologists call this “homophily:” actors gravitate to those they are like or want to be like, a basic feature of reference group behavior. So, these network neighborhoods of linked blogs form echo chambers of mutual affirmation, a level of solidarity that sociologists of networks call “strong ties.”[12] These are the ties of kin and friends, with long-standing solidarities but with relatively low information (or high redundancy) as all members share pretty much the same information due to social locations that are pretty much the same. By comparison, “weak ties” are between acquaintances, such as friends of friends, who may share only a bit – literally, a single bit in mathematical terms – of information. The classic example is that your friends can’t help you find a job, because they have the same information; but distant acquaintances or friends of friends can, because they have other information, the bit that makes a difference. In these terms, blogs form networked publics of nodes that consolidate around strong ties (and high informational redundancy) and extend through weak ties (high differentiation) to others.

This is the social organization of the intermediate space between the individual agency and the “wisdom of crowds;” and that is my third point. Its elementary forms are strong-tie nodes of solidarity-passing and weak-tie links of information-passing that begin to resemble Pierre Bourdieu’s “social fields,” or domains of practice and actors linked in them around a limited set of activities, interests, functions.[13] By that, I mean that within nodes what happens is refinement of shared understandings – that is what all the commentary and argument is about – a process of definition or, in linguistic terms, “entextualization.”

The concept was developed by Joel Kuipers to describe communicative and social practices that unfold in domains such as medical diagnosis or divination,[14] in which highly situated, individual discourse (the complaint) is progressively recast or “entextualized” (as diagnosis) into more general, more shared and often more abstract, ultimately ritual, terms that are low in content (information in mathematical terms) but high in signaling. At one end of the process, you have to know the context, at the other end, the code supplies significance. Kuipers refers to this passage as establishing “textual authority,”[15] which seems precisely what blogging strains toward in its twin features of commentary (over reporting) and linking (over broadcasting). Entextualization confers what boyd and Ellison refer to as the properties of transparency and permanency in social networking sites that permit users to construct a profile, build a network, peruse connections;[16] and this is my fourth point.

While bloggers do not form communities (though they may bring them) on-line, they do form networks that pass interpretation into ever more shared space and terms as signals through weak ties to other nodes. Bourdieu’s concept of fields theorizes that exemplary actors in a field interact with peers outside their specialized (echo-chamber, homophilic) fields, much as our colleague, the Middle East historian Juan Cole, does with the Daily Kos, supplying “informed comment” on Middle East news to the progressive blogosphere, or certain celebrity bloggers – starting with Salam Pak and extending to Saudi Girl, Riverdance, Hoder, or Esra Abdel Fattah and others in Egypt down to Kareem Amir – have been taken up by Western observers of the Middle East from human rights activists to journalists and other commentators.

What may appear problematic as samples of public opinion, or even as information providers, may appear less problematic as something more like Kelty’s recursive public. If, that is, we can move beyond thinking of their discourse as report to something more performative: in a sense, they are developing “software,” the discursive linking, they are using. They join a process of entextualisation that converts situated, individual experience into more abstract, portable terms that can circulate outside small worlds. Quite literally, in programmers’ terms, they “port” discourse to another platform. While this extends Kelty’s concept beyond its type-site in programmers, the comparison may be grounded and not just metaphorical. There are indications that at least some have connections, even roots, in web development. Hoder, Hossein Derakhshan, perhaps Iran’s most famous blogger and self-proclaimed father of the Iranian blogosphere, who was recently arrested in Iran, is described on his Guardian.com page as “blogger, journalist, activist,”[17] but on his own website describes himself as “journalist and multimedia designer,” who started writing about the Internet and then expanded to writing about digital culture.[18] There are hints in the stories of other bloggers of similar crossovers that I have seen in the careers of Internet developers throughout the region,[19] who display marked social as well as occupational mobility (morphing identities) and in developing Internet applications engage also legal, regulatory, financial and conceptual means of that production. For example, the founder of the first pan-Arab Web portal was a medical school graduate who began writing for a computer magazine, subsequently sold his creation to a Saudi media mogul, then became a venture capitalist investing in Internet start-ups from Cairo. I do not mean to suggest that bloggers are software developers in the Kelty’s very specific sense (of writing the underlying program) but to suggest that they are a kind of developer of a kind of software, an application, so that what looks like political commentary has a denser back-story.

Two additional reasons. First, these local blogospheres often are composed of groups of friends,[20] who often write for each other, not for a general public.[21] Second, there are indications that bloggers in the region reach out to form networks, and consciously.[22] The pattern that emerges starts with blogging for friends (and some go no further), then looking for more friends, supporters, located elsewhere but like-minded in some minimal sense of finding a discoverable connection.[23] So, what are the politics of such recursive publics?

Network-building through weak ties and entextualisation together leverage the information-seeking strong force of the Internet, and specifically in blogging. For political analyses, this has limited interest as consciousness-raising, but is discounted for not including (much) mobilization, the sine qua non of political action for modernists.[24] However, passing over the process, the steps in which any-to-any communication unfolds to focus on the gross fact of its advent misses the actual politics in networked communications just as comparisons to journalism miss the real sociology of blogging and of networked communications generally.

Here, let me turn from comparing bloggers to programmers, which might be strained, to another set of social actors, also often said to be pursuing democratic agendas, voluntaristically, from the grass roots and so expected to be empowered by information technology, in the transnational NGO sector. Reflecting on information technology in this sector, and specifically on the seemingly halting emergence of a transnational civil society that many predict information technology would accelerate,[25] Jodi Dean, Geert Lovink and I hazarded a guess that the problematic character of any democratizing effect of information technology reflects its dependence on expertise and appeals to abstract values over the head of specific community values and disclaimers of representation. The participation it expands is voluntaristic and abjures representation and constituency formation: “I don’t represent anyone, just myself .” Networked communication, with its Paraeto distributions instead of the idealized many-to-many, with its clumping into network neighborhoods (of entextualized discourses) of strong ties that refine and weak ties that pass information, fosters not Habermas’s ideal public sphere of rational communication (‘speaking truth to power’) but a politics, including cultural politics, that trades on knowing how and showing up. It proceeds as assiduous management of reputations for that as qualification for participation over representation and constituency formation, and by constantly shaping and reshaping its own intellectual technology for and as that participation.[26] These are the means of production in networked communications, and blogging operationalizes these properties.

So, my own view of blogging generally and in the Middle East specifically is that we need to look beyond the paradigms not only of journalistic amour propre that register blogging as media but also of representation and constituency politics and framing the value of “information” for political action in terms of improved decision-making at the expense of attending to how information is formed and acquires authority both in general and specifically under conditions of networked communication. Information-seeking is made through extending weak ties and what they engage: know-how, stepping up, reputations for that and for shaping and reshaping the technology (in an extended sense that includes its regulatory and financial surround), which are essentially reference group phenomena. The elements for rethinking these properties, I suggest, are found in this middle range of reference group behavior and something like entextualisation that are the actual “flows” (of discourses, ideas, links) in networked communications. This universe includes a lot of personal blogging, as well as the seemingly political sort; it starts between friends, precisely where strong ties, along with informational redundancy or the echo-chamber effect, refine views then transmitted as signals through weak ties that come and go. Schematically, this could be imagined as a series of tensions, or empirically as types of data, that relate…

solidarity-seeking~ information-seeking
strong ties ~ weak ties
nodes ~ links
info-redundant ~ info-discriminant
ritual ~ signal
affirmation ~ information

and place blogging in a denser sociology, both within the Middle East and comparatively.

Let me conclude by returning to the theme of this talk. The Internet has been seen as a free-speech panacea, particularly for the Middle East, for supposed capacities to “route around” obstacles – from the state to religious authorities to state media, even the entrenched commentariat of Arab media. Routing around obstacles was originally a design concept of engineers who invented the Internet and then extended it to additional skills in lobbying for funding and regulation that, as much social as material and operational, got the Internet out of the lab and first into the academic and then into the wider world.[27] But the media-specific extension to “routing around” censorship oversimplifies the social life on and of the Internet. If anything, networked communication proceeds by linking, which is democratic but in limited way: open, but to expertise and to participation based on showing up, not on representational principles of constituency politics but typically cast as appeals to universal values and proceeding by constantly reshaping technology including intellectual technologies (know-how) of its practice. In this denser context, what appears to be agency-enhancement reduces performatively to assiduous work on the means of its own production, which starts with showing up and knowing how, depends on reputation management, and proceeds through skills in shaping these means of a kind of public. It is not a Habermasian public of rational communication, though it may be the public that Habermas was trying to describe.[28] It is more like the pattern that Kelty discerns in free software development and cautiously projects back on development of the Internet itself, which has proceeded as a “stack” of applications that become platforms for others and is similarly given away. But it is a peculiar sort of gift that conveys its properties to the giver, more like becoming the other than just tossing one’s hat into the ring. Networked communication involves a regime less of anybody communicating with anybody than of aggregating strong ties and extension through weak ties that together fill in or organize the intermediate space between individual empowerment and the wisdom of crowds. And here, speech is not “free” that proceeds through entextualization by which local experience is converted into shared meaning in a participatory, if anything but democratic, manner.

References

[1] New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere. (1999, second edition 2003). Chapter 1.

[2] E.g., Jon Alterman. New Media, New Politics (1999) for the hopeful view, and “Counting nodes and counting noses: Understanding new media in the Middle East” The Middle East Journal 54 (2001): 355-61 , for the second thoughts.

[3] Howard Rheingold is responsible for both: TheVirtual Community (1993), Smart Mobs (2003).

[4] Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (2007). Kindle ed., p. 2190

[5] Notably by Barry Wellman and his associates in, for example, Networks in the Global Village (1999), The Internet in Everyday Life (2002).

[6] See: Sara Lacy. Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0 (2008).

[7] Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (2008).

[8] Two Bits, p. 3.

[9] Hugh Hewitt. Blog: Understanding the Information Revolution that’s Changing Your World (2005); more recently in Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody (2008).

[10] Clay Shirky, “Power laws, weblogs, and inequality,” in Reformatting Politics (2006), pp. 35-42.

[11] Geert Lovink, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture (2007) takes this as a measure of washing significance from the message that makes blogging the vanity press of a nihilistic age.

[12] Mark Granovetter , “The strength of weak ties” American Journal of Sociology 78(1973): 1360-80; “The strength of weak ties: A network theory revisited” Sociological Theory 1(1984): 201-33.

[13] The Field of Cultural Production (1993).

[14] The Power in Performance: The Creation of Textual Authority in Weyewa Ritual Speech (1990).

[15] This might be likened to classification, except that Kuipers describes it as a much more creative, shared, extended, social-linguistic process than a simple act of matching – in fact, a process with recoverable steps.

[16] Social network sites: definition, history and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (2007).

[17] http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/hosseinderakhshan

[18] www.hoder.com; on Hoder’s occupational biography, see also “A dissident’s diary: Can a blogger bring change to Iran”? by Craig Taylor. University of Toronto Magazine (online: http://www.magazine.utoronto.ca/05autumn/blogger.asp)

[19] Jon W. Anderson, “Producers and Middle East Internet technology: Getting beyond ‘impacts’” The Middle East Journal 54(2000): 419-31, on IT development as a network of regulation, finance, content-development as part of the technology.

[20] Lynch, Brotherhood of the blog (2007) guardian.co.uk, Monday 5 March 2007 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/mar/05/brotherhoodoftheblog/print); George Weyman, Speaking the unspeakable: Personal blogs in Egypt. Arab Media & Society (October 2007); David Faris, Revolutions without revolutionaries. Arab Media & Society (Fall 2008).

[21] danah boyd, “Why youth (heart) social network sites: The role of networked publics in teenage social life” (2007).

[22] “Second Generation Internet Users and Political Change,” Ahmad Zaki Osman. Arab Reform Bulletin, May 2008. (http://www.carnegieendowment.org/arb/?fa=show&article=20498); Lynch, Brotherhood of the Blog.

[23] Helmi Noman, Content and usage of Arabic online forums and groups. HelmiOnline.com (http://www.helmionline.com/internet/2005/10/web_content.html).

[24] Marc Lynch, Voices of the New Arab Public (2007).

[25] “The post-democratic governmentality of network societies.” in Reformatting Politics: Information Technology and Global Civil Society. edited by Jodi Dean, Jon W. Anderson & Geert Lovink (2006).

[26] Nortje Mares refers to this as ‘issue’ politics, in which actors come and go, to distinguish it from class or interest based constituency politics. “Net work is format work: Issue networks and the sites of civil society politics,” in Reformatting Politics (2006), pp. 3-18. Also, Ned Rossiter, “Organized networks and nonrepresentative democracy,” ibid., pp. 19-34.

[27] A history of this middle phase of Internet development comparable to Janet Abbate’s on its initial phase (Inventing the Internet, 1999) has yet to be written; but Milton Mueller’s Ruling the Root (2002), and Jack Goldsmith & Tim Wu’s Who Controls the Internet (2006) are a start on governance; see also Jeffrey Hart, “The building of the Internet: Implications for the future of broadband networks” Telecommunications Policy (Nov 1992), pp. 666-689.

[28] Jodi Dean, Publicity’s Secret (2002), argues that the origin of the public sphere that Habermas identified with salons and coffee-houses might better be found in secret societies, such as the Masons, where organizational skills were developed more broadly and in addition to the discursive ones Habermas featured.

Globalization, Democracy, the Internet and Arabia

meaningfulconnections — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 08:53:12 +0000

Jon W. Anderson (Catholic University of America; CCAS Research Associate)
Revised from a talk given at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, 15 April 2007.

Democracy is the occasional necessity of deferring to the opinions of other people.
-Winston Churchill

In the 1990s, the notion of globalization as the macroscopic conception of contemporary change arrived with a primarily economic emphasis popularized through books like The Twilight of Sovereignty by Walter Wriston,[1] retired CEO of Citicorp, and a penumbra of celebrations from the management world. Through think tanks, it became the doctrine de jour for theorizing the end of the Cold War that updated belief in superiority of markets over planned economies to a more contemporary justification for expansion of open markets beyond bond-trading, where Wriston found it. Globalization seemed to predict what neoliberalism preached; so it is not surprising that searches for globalization moved into additional realms that liberalism had long privileged as drivers of socio-political change in addition to the political-economic.

Among these ‘higher order’ domains are media; and by the mid-1990s much attention had come to focus on new media, particularly of the Internet, which seemed to portend extension of globalization from political economy to cultural economy. As a site for such a shift, the Internet had some advantages over postmodernists’ extension of globalization to phenomena which were nothing if not ‘soft’, ephemeral, fashionable. The advantages of the Internet were not only that it had a material representation, but that it was about information and freeing the flow of information, a promise that political thought had long associated with participation in politics and normatively made such participation central to politics in a modern idiom.

Media are intimately associated with the rise of modernity from newspapers to broadcasting. The historian Benedict Anderson famously linked ‘print capitalism’, the first form of mechanical mass production, to recasting political community in national terms.[2] And metaphysically ever since Kant defined Enlightenment as coming out from the tutelage of another – not as self-fashioning but as self-education – the politics of popular sovereignty conceived its ideal actor in the form of the informed citizen. By the twentieth century, political thinkers invested much hope in the informing power of media, but also no little skepticism that modern media were more circus than agora. Yellow journalism soured many on the press, until liberals such as Walter Lippman recast the trade as a sort of educator-conscience for the modern bourgeoisie.[3] Broadcasting, too, passed through a cycle from initial enthusiasm to increasing reservation, beginning from the left as Adorno et al, blanched at what the right did with mass media. The peak of this line of thinking, notwithstanding some famous movies of the 1950s and 60s from The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit to Network, came in propaganda studies during World War II that sought to grasp how the ‘big lie’ worked so as to counter it.

Conceptions of information are constantly being refreshed in the politics of the day. After the peak of propaganda studies, their gloss on information as emotional suasion (which migrated into marketing) was displaced by cybernetic notions of information that passed into a growing concern in political thinking by the 1960s with decision-making. The culminating text might be Karl Deutsch’s use of a cybernetic model to provide a fuller account political decision-making.[4]

Contemporary thinking about communication as passing information that makes a difference in decisions of all sorts including, notably, consumption, is the standard theory, from politics to marketing,[5] and down to the contemporary notion that ‘content is king’ on the Internet; but it is not hegemonic. Another school of communication studies rose in Canada not from studying propaganda or from thinking about ‘rational’ communication but from studies of the fur trade by the historian and geographer, Harold Innes, whose most famous student was Marshall McLuhan, whose most famous idea was that ‘the medium is the message’.[6] Somewhat cryptically, this aphorism asserted the priority of channels, which Innes had observed tend to be laid down in each new form of communication over older ones. To Innes, what changed was the means of communication,[7] with actors getting not just more of it but additional types. Humanists like McLuhan and others of the Canadian ‘school’ emphasized this differential engagement of different types of communication over their information passing functions and proceeded to focus on the sensory aspect of what humanists would call ‘genre’ that were largely missed in message-focused theories of communication. In almost all mid-century social science, this perspective was widely tried and quickly relegated to the margins by interests in how communication, meaning media, ‘informed’ decisions of social actors and, normatively or on a policy level, how more or better information made for better or at least more informed decisions.

The view of communication drawn from information theory and focused messages and on message-passing that made a difference in recipients also was written into major research efforts to study, in order then to mobilize, communication as a force for change, and particularly a liberal force. One of these was Lerner’s Passing of Traditional Society in the Middle East.[8] This much-cited study set out to determine if the spread of mass communications in 1950s Egypt, which was part of the Nasserite state’s attempt to create a new citizenry for a new state, actually produced results anticipated. Lerner’s disappointing finding was that that mass communications, particularly broadcasting, did not spread openness, rationality and other liberal habits, not to say values. ‘Too passive’ was the judgement passed on mass communications to mass audiences.

So why did this interest that passed away into a critical cloud of disappointment over mass communications come back seemingly fresh with the Internet? Three things seem to come together. On the side of political analysis, Ithiel da Sola Pool, a member of one of the projects that spawned studies such as Lerner’s of mass communications in developing countries, developed an argument that found liberation not in mass but in networked communications. The difference was that networked communications, built on an any-to-any model of communications, increased the agency of recipients of messages. In fact, networked communications required it, because their structure was more interactive, even participatory.

Second, this was the principal idea that developers of network technology, and particularly of the Internet, emphasized when trying to conceptualise their invention and to secure support for its deployment and development. The Internet, which was conceived and built by engineers for their own work, and so incorporated their work habits, was cast as a technology for seeking information over merely receiving it; it was represented as ‘built’ by its users, a notion they extended to new users, if somewhat problematically. Working in the public sector, they sought support for that work by casting computer-based networking, originally an economic way to use cheap communications for access to expensive computers, as an inherently democratic information order and so of general benefit. With this gloss, the engineers’ tool that passed to the National Science Foundation for the benefit of all scientists then passed to the private sector for the benefit of all, particularly consumers but in principle all citizens.

This could probably have been enough, and in venues where corporate chieftains, politicians, and scientists come together from Aspen and Davos to Washington thinktanks, it may well have been enough to excite interest in the Internet. Political analysts took up the rhetoric of engineers and recontextualised it, popularized it, and hailed the Internet. The banner years were 1993-1995, with Lawrence Grossman’s Electronic Republic, Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital, Bill Gates’ The Road Ahead, all on the heels of Harold Rheingold’s The Virtual Community,[9] with think-tank symposia taking up the task of further translation to policy. A third element in this conjunction is the growth in the humanities of reader-response theories that had come to stress how, beyond the author, a reader ‘completes’ the text, such that the only meaningful sense of ‘meaning’ emerges through an extended process in which the reader is not a passive recipient but instead an active participant, if not a sort of ‘author’ herself. While the influence of humanities by comparison to that of techno-science and pop socio-political analysis is problematic, the Geist of the Zeit was open to new critical studies’ extension of criticism to the agency of readers that brought together Derridian deconstruction of texts, Foucaultian archaeologies of knowledge, and the old Frankfort School’s critical sociology of mass society and its mass communication. Only a few still spoke for authority and located it in authors.[10]

The result was that at material, social-political, and cultural levels a consensus formed and paradigm coalesced around the Internet as a new medium, democratic because more interactive than mass communication and actively participatory in a way that, the consensus had come to be, passive reception of mass media was not. Initially, reservations came only from the cultural right, defending authors and editors and other gatekeepers, although minority voices emerged on the left, echoing the old Marxist Frankfort School, that what was on the Internet was trash, too – in this case, ‘data trash’.[11]

It was into this maelstrom of optimism about the Internet as an additional engine of liberalization on the media side complementing that on the market side, where globalization had originally been identified, that Dr. Hudson and I stepped with a project to investigate whether, how, and to what extent the Internet might have a democratizing impact in the Arab world. In the background was the sneaking realization that economics had not done it, that other parts of the developing world were running with economic globalization, notably East and South Asia and, at the time, perhaps, South America, but the Middle East was at least as resistant as Africa. Yet, the Middle East appeared to be coming online and reflexively to register the Internet as a new medium that might bust open what stalled halting economic liberalization was not. The point of entrée we chose was Internet pioneers, or advocates and early adopters.

This is an extensive and at the time amorphous universe, if not a very populous one. Tiny percentages of Middle Easterners were counted ‘on-line’ in various global measures of uncertain provenance. But, we knew some. I had moved from studying Islamic websites to others with more regional, nationalist bents and actually visited the offices of the first pan-Arab web portal, Arabia On-Line, and some early Internet service providers; Dr. Hudson knew enough Arab intellectuals who were thinking about this to organize CCAS’ 1995 annual symposium on the ‘information revolution’ in the region, which revealed that views were forming, but in advance of much actual experience. The Internet was reflexively registered far more than engaged praxis. So we settled on ‘pioneers’ who were very much at the implementation end of things, advocates and early adopters’ trying to introduce the Internet; and we hypothecized that they would be introducing an extended package, or at least large parts of it, which included features that had registered as ‘democratic’ such as user direction, decentralized structure, an open information regime and, not least, the work habits and values of engineers, entrepreneurs, and media people that largely run counter to information-controlling habits of authorities.

Such a way was pointed in an argument of Anne-Marie Slaughter, at Princeton’s Wilson School of International Studies, that the “real new world order,” as she put it, would be composed not at the top nor at the bottom but in the middle through professionals and their border-crossing cultures.[12] Also, there was the classic demonstration by the political sociologist, David Knoke, of how decision-making agencies in government is enmeshed with clients and patrons outside the public sector, in corporate, professional, academic, and various quasi-public realms, whose influence is channeled more effectively through networks than through the electoral process.[13] Analysis, as it were, was going horizontal, or following empirical evidence. What evidence could we find for such influence, and would it accommodate liberalizing ones? These could occur on two levels, an ideological or normative one, in the passage of values, and at a practical one, in the extension with the Internet of governance and administrative practices that engineers had built into it, that corporate chieftains now celebrated as natural, and that new cultural theory affirmed as part of the process.

We chose Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia for a comparative study of Internet implantation, and in these different political economies we found that existing Internet culture was reflexively registered and promoted as new values. We found multiple efforts to design and install Internet structures, to extend service and to develop uses with local content as well as international reach. We also found the then-famous obstacles of limited infrastructure, narrow regulation, problematic investment, and the conundrum of low numbers as the market waited for users and users waited for content. We also found each government experimenting with the Internet on many levels, from telecoms to national websites, as well as many similar efforts by individuals. We also found strong support for the idea of the Internet as development tool and as development sector at the highest political levels – in fact, a common pattern of lodging that support institutionally one step away from the highest national authority in each country. Each had an institution, close to power and under high-level patronage, that housed Internet advocacy and became the point of contact for interested parties much as Knoke theorized, and, crucially, conducted its own ‘foreign policy’ much as Slaughter hypothecised. We found these also to be relatively open, or at least unformed, and to become sites of considerable politicking, alliance-seeking and coalition-forming around the new information technology. These are necessary but not sufficient for democratization, and are hardly regimes of democratic governmentality; but before coming to that, let me briefly sketch what we found.

The first were scientists and engineers, based in university engineering faculties, who were trained abroad in new Internet technologies and sought connections for their own work. By 1993, they had created a fledgling Egyptian Universities Network with a low bandwidth dialup connection to EARN,[14] the European counterpart of NSFNET, itself created in 1985 to take over development efforts that had outgrown the Internet’s laboratory origins. By that year, a similar connection was established at the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia, engineers at the University of Jordan had registered a top-level domain for that country,[15] and engineers in Syria had formed a professional association that pressed for installing the software core of the Internet, known as the TCP/IP protocol, for a national data network. Each encountered resistance from national telephone monopolies, which claimed exclusive control over international telecommunications and represented a different engineering culture, different protocols, notions of service, and investment in a physical base. Against this was argued that the Internet was a different engineering that would leverage more talents; but these efforts were quickly superseded.

In each of Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia a center of Internet advocacy emerged, abetted by the incapacity of existing institutions to contain it and in time supplemented by another for the new technology. These sites were protected, isolated from day-to-day responsibilities of line ministries and functional agencies, and more or less devoted to something close to cutting edge techno-science. These were sites in which techno-science as such was not or could not be locally reproduced, much less produced, staffed by engineers trained in the1960s and 1970s computer engineering the new computer science that provided a theoretical basis for software. With better ties with international counterparts than within their own countries, each was secured by high-level patronage, typically lodged just below the highest political authority. It is common for regimes in the region to keep tabs on things with potential but not of immediate concern this way. In them would be collected some of the best and brightest, and surely some of the most highly trained who, through schooling abroad and professional ties had developed networks with international counterparts and brought ideas, practices, sciences and techniques into a protected space that was also relatively quarantined:

· the Royal Scientific Society in Jordan, under the patronage of then Crown Prince Hassan, himself something of an international intellectual figure

· the Syrian Computer Society in Syria, under the patronage successively of the sons of Syrian President Hafez Al-Asad, Basel and after his death Bashar, a physician who later succeeded his father

· the IDSC in Egypt, a think tank of econometricians, management and computing experts providing policy analysis in the Egyptian Cabinet office

· the King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Center (KFSHRC) in Riyadh, which was the nation’s center for cardiac treatment and research founded by the royal family

Each had a crucial function that depended on techno-scientific expertise and then traded on it.

A example and good typesite for comparison would be the IDSC, established in the Egyptian cabinet office to provide independent analysis and policy-formulation. Staffed by PhD economists, scientists and management experts, the IDSC proved itself by devising a restructuring of Egypt’s public sector foreign debt, proving the ability of its tools to identify and gather information and then to manage it, so that for the first time the total foreign debt of public sector agencies was known and in a controllable way. From that, it gained additional tasks, including institutionalizing its tools, which included networked computing, and was able to take over efforts in the Egyptian university system to assume a leading role in design and implementation of the Internet. In other words, in a position to bypass the state teleco, they also disposed resources to develop alternative technology.

In a similar fashion, the RSS in Jordan assembled a group of computer engineers to automate and then to ‘reengineer’ public sector administration, a sort of project for upgrading soft infrastructure comparable to modernization of hard infrastructure through development projects. Their first success was automation of the social security system. Such projects envisioned a combination of internal process improvements through electronic automation and extending those to government service provision by trading not just on the prestige but on the proven abilities of IT specialists.

In Saudi Arabia, engineers ad hoc connections were wrapped into an Internet precursor, Bitnet, which was installed for telemedicine by the nation’s leading cardiac hospital, while university engineering faculties kept in the game by providing much of the technical expertise and by continuing to train personnel in the technologies of networked computing. In Syria, a professional society of computing engineers took on the task of studying and proseltysing for networked computing as a tool for Syria’s continued modernization of both information services and administration.

In each case, something between partnerships and patronage networks joined not only authorities and technical experts, but were also forged horizontally across sectors through professional and ‘old school’ ties, such as between university faculty and friends or former students employed in telecos, or met in national and international conferences. Through such common cultures and social networks, modernization of processes, including access to information and improving its communication through what amounts to automation extended in time to restructuring those processes. For that, the Internet was advanced as a general purpose tool, primarily for information retrieval in Saudi Arabia, for administrative modernization in Jordan, for decision control in Egypt, and for extending the application of computing in Syria. In each, also, technical success was used to press for extending the tool variously into public services and to the public that in time recast the Internet from a development tool to projecting it as a development sector as the overall paradigm of development shifted from modernization (which had meant catching up with industrial countries) to globalization (which meant joining the emerging political economy of freer trade) that gained popularity, even a sense of urgency, with the close of the Cold War.

The experts on which these efforts drew were among their nations’ best and brightest, who not only applied these tools, they also depended on them for international connections, whose advantages for their own work they projected to be advantages for their nations. These projections began to bear fruit by the mid-1990s as they were able to demonstrate Internet capabilities – a notable example was the 1995 MENA economic summit – and authorities began to take note, reflexively registering these as solutions at least to problems of management and possibly much more. A pair of well-connected business service companies offered the service to the public, and breathless Business Week article that year recounted the Internet coming to Jordan with on-line chats with the Minister of Information (himself a computer engineer and subsequently ambassador to the US, foreign minister and deputy prime minister).

Breakthroughs occurred with the rise of a post-independence generation that included technocrats who, even if trained in older technologies, spoke the language of engineering and applied science, and kept up through professional networks from conferences to journals. At the top, it included a new generation of rulers, coming of age when overriding national security concerns of the independence generation were shifting to national welfare. Externally, development paradigms had shifted from modernization focused on infrastructure development to globalization focused on trade, and notions of capital accumulation were giving way to newer theories of flexible accumulation such as operationalised in out-sourcing. In the post-industrial shift from manufacturing to services, the most fashionable were cast as information or ‘knowledge’ services, thinking about which rulers or those close to them were exposed to from UN conferences to the World Economic Forum at Davos. In other words, experts did not have to convince powers-that-be on their own or even just through demonstrations; at their own level, high authorities were exposed to the urgency that their counterparts and interlocutors in other fora gave them.

One result was additional actors being brought that, combined with the arrival of new leaders and new emphases, prompted a new round of institution-creating to assemble those actors and focus activities under new conditions. They started from realizations that old institutions could not contain the new technologies pressed by development agencies, by technologists, and in the global political economy emerging around flexible accumulation. In Jordan, this led to the creation of INT@J, nominally an IT business association whose foundation was funded by USAID, and a series of annual conferences focused on IT as a development sector. In Egypt, the IDSC spun off variants of its program targeting both the region as a whole and Egypt’s provincial governerates, plus a series of companies that took over successful projects from database management to building an Internet backbone. Also, these countries replaced ministries of communications with new Ministries for Communication and Information Technologies. The first minister in Egypt was former head of the IDSC and subsequently became Prime Minister, while another IDSC alum succeeded him at the MC&IT. Jordan’s was headed first by the country’s senior scientist, formerly a dean of engineering and subsequently minister of higher education, and then by a prominent IT businessman. Universities were prodded to establish new faculties for ‘information sciences’ that combined computer science from arts faculties, computer engineering from engineering faculties, and management from business faculties to train a new cadre of professionals. The region has also seen a proliferation of private colleges that teach programming and management.

Things moved more slowly in Syria and Saudi Arabia. The Syrian Computer Society developed a series of proposals for a national data network using Internet technology (TCP/IP). Their proposals were whittled down progressively from installing and operating the network within the state telecom structure to operating a network that the STE would install to operating as an Internet Service Provider for its members, essentially for the scientific and technical establishment in universities, government service and a few private businesses. The countervailing state plan was for Internet service to be supplied and administered by the STE for government agencies and for those to extend service to their suppliers, and so on eventually to the whole public. Here, the limiting factor was renegotiating the space of the state telecoms company and with other government agencies such as the ministries of information and interior. Likewise, an extended period of behind-the-scenes advocacy and negotiation ensued in Saudi Arabia as technical universities brought forward proposals and experiments for converting Bitnet to Internet protocols to expand the original telemedicine operation into an Internet initially connecting Saudi universities. Businesses pressed for connection and lobbied for eventual ISP licenses, while ministries deadlocked over control of the new technology; in the end authority over the Internet was lodged in KACST, Saudi Arabia’s national authority for scientific research and development. Physical connectivity was kept by the Saudi telco, while KACST supplied Internet connectivity to public sector agencies, including universities, and to private sector ISPs that met certain qualifications. Those were essentially that applicants had to be in the IT business, the policy goal being that ISPs should not become a new source of rent but should be leveraged to develop a wider IT business sector. In both cases policy favored the Internet as a development tool, while the development sector with its wider range of actors.

Structurally, Saudi and Syrian policies amounted to more halting steps than Jordan’s and Egypt’s embraces of IT as a development sector and subsuming Internet installation and expansion (particularly to the private sector and to private users) in that. Physical structure of the Internet reflected these policies. Instead of multiple gateways and a spider-web network of multiple routes, Saudi and Syrian Internet installations paralleled the national phone systems, while Jordan and Egypt proceeded to structures of multiple routes for Internet traffic, both within their countries and to the international Internet. Here, the ‘drag’ is only partly infrastructural; it includes policy compromises to retain a hierarchy of physical connection and service provision with marginal openings in each that would exclude use of the Internet for call-termination services (VoIP). In practice, Jordan and Egypt were slightly more liberal although substantially more open to alternative providers because, unlike Syria and Saudi Arabia, they accepted policy commitments to de-nationalize state telecos in order to qualify for admission to the World Trade Organization.

In each case, the outcome is neither merely domesticating Internet service to preexisting models nor according to new models for communication. The new technologies did not fit old institutions, because the Internet is not one technology; it is a composite, each with its own expertise and networks of experts, supporters, and history of relations with others. The outcome is instead continuous negotiation, advocacy for technologies and uses, claims for new expertises, horizontal alliance-seeking through professional and other networks (particularly through educational networks and alumni relations), recruitment of additional allies from financiers to regulators, trading on international connections and appeals to values associated with those, and abilities convincingly to conceptualise broad systemic pressures in the international system in appropriate national terms. For example, the same telephone establishments that resisted Internet engineering contained engineers who cooperated with Internet counterparts from providing protocol specifications and operating manuals the latter would need to adapt to actual physical connections for experiments. They met both through old-boy networks and through conferences, as at another level did policy-makers and implementers, both nationally and internationally, and so forth on up the line.

In each case, engineers and others had to build coalitions by articulating common, or at least complementary, interests and finding ways to work together, or at least to leverage the pressures of others for their own projects. Those projects had to be broken down in structural terms into bits to which different actors could attach and advance their interests; and no two assembled quite the same. New institutions in each country – the IDSC in Egypt, Jordan’s RSS and then INT@J, KACST in Saudi Arabia, SCS in Syria – represent in part coalescences of multiple constituencies into broader coalitions than occasional alliances, although not the end of competitions among different parts to dominate those. What we see here is not simply domestication of the Internet to national models, nor Internet models surviving intact in actual installations, but how networks work, form, grow, and are managed through continuous negotiation.

In each, additional players clamored for admission, to bring and to be part of constituencies with interests in the Internet. Over time, some dropped out, some actors moved on, notably some of the earlier players from the first phase. Among the latter were various financiers, engineers and technocrats whose roles in the first phase (of modernization) would not carry into the second (of globalization). Some dropped aside, particularly among financeers and investors who had absorbed the lessons of venture capitalism. Others moved in, such as to new regulatory positions where technical expertise mattered as much as their connections. Others moved on. IDSC computer scientists became ministers and heads of new companies that spun off successful projects. Core members of the Syrian Computer Society became ambassadors, governors, agency heads and managerial staff after their nominal president succeeded his father as President of Syria – a new technocratic elite replacing parts of the older one, itself largely trained in older forms of engineering. The founding president of INT@J became Jordan’s ambassador to the US, others moved into ministries, or out of them to found IT businesses. Movement was not only at the top: new Internet developers formed a regional labor pool in constant circulation, constant search for training, employment, investment. All of this mobility reflexively registered as new opportunities to convert expertise at an individual level through multiple networks at an institutional level such as Knoke had found around technical agencies and Slaughter hypothecised as the value (‘social capital’ in another terminology) in professional expertise.

This translates not into ‘democratization’ of an electoral sort; but it does translate into new mobilities, new measures of self-determination, and of shared decision-making that condenses in alliance-seeking and coalition-formation. And it translates into a corresponding gathering of new constituencies by rulers that goes beyond rewarding favorites. It is precisely to break the latter mold that administrative and regulatory authority over the Internet in Saudi Arabia arguably was lodged in the research establishment organized and staffed by technical specialists, scientists, and engineers, or that telecoms divestment was pressed in Egypt and Jordan. Even if at the same time rulers’ favorites were granted new concessions, all of these were partial and came with charges to extend the business. Arguably, rulers were gathering new constituencies not only internally but also to face new external conditions to which those constituencies also respond. Finally, at an individual level, there was greater occupational mobility of IT specialists on to others in new media. Minimally, we see an expanded scope of choices, if less so of decision-making, that comports with flexible accumulation’s steady displacement of Rostovian capital accumulation in the global political economy and, arguably also, comports with remix at the cultural level.

So, between democratization and more exceptionalism, a more complex middle course seems evident in looking for practices over institutional change or change in consciousness. This will probably require another turn in political thinking about communications. As thinking shifted with the end of World War II to building post-war peace and prosperity, a new and efficient idea of information was brought forward that is showing its age under the emerging regime of globalization. By comparison to modernity’s type sites of mass society, mass economy, mass culture, and the central problem of their structural-functional integration, globalization’s type sites are flexible accumulation in political economy and creolization or ‘remix’ in cultural economy. Less developed is the sociology, which has been cast as networks with, in one influential formulation, the Internet as the material base of their social morphology.[16] But the Internet does not sweep all before it; it is carried along with the rest of flexible accumulation, at one end, and flexible culture, at the other. The dynamics of net-working are exemplified in alliances and coalitions that surround institutions as nodal points more of collection than of integration conceived in structural-functional terms. The proper sociology for this is not the structural-functional sociology of mass society/culture/communications that linked behavior and belief in a teleology that has communications as their link. Interests that articulate as a network around points of agency also each articulate their own additional points, which precludes representation and stable constituencies on which representation depends normatively as an institutional feature of democracy. Something else is needed.

Our findings on Internet implantation and implementation are in line with those of studies at the user end that approach structure through content – what appears on the screen, how it gets there, who sees it and how they find it – and that suggest that the Internet is neither democratic nor anti-democratic in any comprehensive sense. Such views have been based on partial and often on programmatic perspectives that the Internet, and more generally networked communication, has outrun. Theoretical ability to reach everyone does not translate into reaching everyone in fact: in political terms, the ideal of the electronic town-meeting is chimerical. Neither does malleability of Internet translate into successful cooptation by existing institutions because this capacity is also distributed. Partly, this is because virtual communities are communities in a limited sense; at the individual level, participants come and go but may be intensely dedicated while they stay. The real question is how. Part of the answer is that assemblages of information are also unstable, and these instabilities are reflected in increasingly sophisticated technologies of selection (such as exemplified in Google searches and, often, abilities to search on web sites that have replaced earlier ‘portal’ models). The users’ Internet has persistently pushed beyond mass media models based on aggregation and integration of information; so has the structural Internet.

A better way to think about this sociologically than as enhancing choice, or as degradation into consumerism and solipsism, is to recognize that the networked communications are in some fundamental senses post-democratic. The Internet, and networked communications generally, are mediated by experts and not just engineers but at all levels from engineers who implement technologies to ISPs that deliver them to webdesigners, information contributors and end users. Entry conditions are not confined to physical access but also to knowing how, which extends through all levels (to use, to produce, to install, to implement, to design). That also translates into claims to participate (typically based on claims to expertise and universal values other than those of citizenship), and so into assiduous management of reputations for knowing how and showing up. Taken together, these conditions vitiate democratic notions of representation, much less of stable constituencies that someone might represent, as evidenced at the user end by ‘flame wars’ and by the shifting actor sets at the implementation end on which I have focused here. These features in turn assure multiple reflexivities instead of the monoculture projected in early engineers’ generalizations from their own experiences and refined by political entextualization. There is no stable balance between first movers and new comers in establishing a middle-ground reflexivity.

The Internet that opens choices does not correspondingly sustain representation, but makes it problematic. The Internet that enhances agency also privileges expertise of many sorts. The Internet that is open to all depends on who shows up. The Internet that transcends boundaries produces unstable aggregations of information, technologies, and actors. Whether in creating the Internet or in using it, analysis is faced with a sociality where access, participation and determination are based less on representation of constituencies and comprehensive ‘citizenship’ than on expertise, showing up, assiduous reputation management, multiple reflexivities, and constantly morphing ‘implementations’. These are features of network organization that correspond at the sociological level to flexible accumulation in political economy and to the ‘remix’ phenomena at the cultural level, or what I have called ‘creolization’,[17] and politically to a governmentality that is barely coming into view.[18]

While global measures register absences, what emerges in this study are activities of alliance-seeking and coalition formation around implantation and implementation of the Internet in four Arab countries. There has been a tendency to dwell on disappointing results that is close to slipping into a new exceptionalism, which, as much as initial enthusiasms, overinterprets equivocal results. From too much, and too specific, hope, mood swings to too much, and too general, despair (probably abetted by the global dot.com investment bust, but that is another story). What has instead happened includes a startling increase in several specific mobilities – of technical expertise and experts into and up through government, of tech workers around the region, of information flows and production, of investments of all sorts including constant search for training, of shared decision-making that entangles old sites in new constituencies, and additional constituencies that rulers have to take account of and secure support from. This is not electoral, or even institutional, democracy, but neither is it the opposite. It is the globalization that is manifest in political economy as flexible accumulation, in culture as ‘remix’ or creolization, and sociologically in networks that operationalize as alliances and coalitions forming around the techniques as well as technology of networked communications. IT implantation and implementation may be a key site to observe globalization in the Middle East, which otherwise seems a disappointing representative.

Notes & References

[1] Walter Wriston, The Twilight of Sovereignty. Scribners, 1992.

[2] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Verso, 1983.

[3] Walter Lippman, Public Opinion. Harcourt Brace & Co., 1922.

[4] Karl Deutsch, The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control. Free Press, 1966.

[5] See: Everett M. Rogers, A History of Communication Study. Free Press, 1994.

[6] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. McGraw-Hill, 1964.

[7] Harold Innes, The Bias of Communication. University of Toronto Press, 1951

[8] Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society in the Middle East. Free Press, 1958.

[9] Howard Rheingold. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Harper Collins, 1993; Lawrence Grossman. The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age. Viking Penguin, 1995. Nicholas Negroponte. Being Digital. New Simon & Schuster, 1995.

[10]For example, Gertrude Himmelfarb, “A Neo-Luddite Reflects on the Internet,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1 November 1996, A56); Clifford Stoll, Silicon Snake-Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway. Anchor, 1996.

[11] Arthur Koker & Michael Weinstein, Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class. Palgrave, 1994.

[12] “The Real New World Order,” Foreign Affairs 76(5): 183-97, September/October 1997.

[13] Edward O. Laumann & Kavid Knoke, The Organizational State. University of Wisconsin Press, 1987; David Knoke. Political Networks: The Structural Perspective. Cambridge University Press, 1990.

[14] Tarek Kamel. “Internet Commercialization in Egypt: A Country Study,” Proceedings of the Internet Society, June 1997; S. Mintz, The Internet as a tool for Egypt’s economic growth. An International Development Professionals Inc. Report. October, 1998.

[15] Khalid Al-Tawil, “The Internet in Saudi Arabia,” Telecommunications Policy 25.8/9: 625-633, September/October, 2001.

[16] Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Blackwell, 1996. pp. 469 ff.

[17] “New Creoles on the Information Superhighway.” Anthropology Today 11(4): 13-15, August 1995.

[18] “The Post-Democratic Governmentality of Network Societies.” In Reformatting Politics: Information Technology and Global Civil Society, edited by Jodi Dean, Jon W. Anderson and Geert Lovink. New York: Routledge, 2006. pp. xv-xxix.

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Development and Decision-Making in Arab SatelliteTV

meaningfulconnections — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 19:00:59 +0000

Naomi Sakr, University of Westminster
Edited transcript of a contribution to the workshop on New Media and the Reconstruction of Popular Culture in the Arab World, Georgetown University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. May 17, 2006

In this talk I plan to focus on decision-making in Arab satellite TV as a way of assessing some of the ways in which it is developing. As a point of entry I will start with a little anecdote about how decisions get made in one rather exceptional set of circumstances. It comes from an article written by Yasser Baraka for Middle East Times. Baraka was doing a story about private TV stations on the West Bank and he was sitting with a Palestinian family in Hebron, watching TV. The programme on the local TV channel was a documentary. But the family’s two teenage sons were not enjoying it, so the father dialled the TV station and spoke to the manager. All of a sudden the documentary went off the air, to be replaced by an action movie that was much more to his boys’ taste. To be fair, as part of the same article, the journalist also quoted the father as saying that this rather unusual form of “TV on demand” could equally work to his disadvantage. His family could be watching their favourite soap opera, and find it suddenly replaced in the middle with a football match or something else.

There are two reasons why this scenario serves as a way of contextualising decision-making in Arab television. The first is that it has nothing whatever to do with news. There is an ever-present tendency in research on Arab satellite TV to treat news and current affairs talkshows as the be-all and end-all of why satellite TV matters. The second reason is that it highlights the competition for airtime that exists among programme genres other than news. That competition exists not only in the budgeting and scheduling decisions made behind the screens, but also in the choices of viewers. In the case of the anecdote I just recounted, the competition was variously, at any given time, between documentary, drama, film, variety and sport — the things that people generally choose to watch in their leisure time viewing, whether they are on the West Bank or in Washington.

Of course, in most contexts, it’s a simple matter of zapping with your remote control to get the programme you want to watch. But the unusual situation of that family in Hebron illustrates in microcosm the different layers of competing forces that influence decision making in the television industry. For example, there are different groups of viewers — in terms of age, gender and control over access to the family TV set and “remote”. There are, as I have already mentioned, different programme genres, meaning that television managers have to decide the priorities they give to current affairs, drama, sport, movies and so on, based on their relative cost and popularity. And thirdly, who knows, there is very likely to be competition among different personalities in the television station in terms of where they take direction from and whom they wish to please.

I use that small example to illustrate one aspect of the development that has taken place across the Arab television industry over the past decade. It’s not just a question of private channels competing with each other and government channels wondering whether or not they should try to keep up. There are other struggles going on: inside channels, among audiences and between channels and audiences. It is also important to recognise that we can’t talk about the satellite sector as though it were self-contained. Terrestrial and satellite stations are not sealed off from each other; indeed, in the West Bank, small terrestrial broadcasters retransmit material from the big satellite channels. There is traffic between the two in terms of personnel. And recent changes in regulation have resulted in the first terrestrial TV licences being awarded to private operators in places like Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia and Oman.

So, with that said, I have structured my contribution around two dimensions of development in the industry as they relate to decision-making, namely proliferation and diversification. Under the heading of proliferation, I will address such questions as whether “more channels” translates into “more players” and whether barriers to market entry are higher or lower than they were. Under the heading of diversification, I will consider issues such as whether the power to take editorial decisions is being decentralised — whether it’s percolating through the layers of media management — and whether there is a serious increase in programming about local affairs. Inevitably, my remarks will be very broad brush and very schematic.

Starting with proliferation, it has become commonplace to talk about “200″ or “250″ Arab satellite channels. Once upon a time, people used to talk in wonder about 70 channels. Now we’ve way surpassed that — to the point where it seems not to matter very much how precise the number is. Whatever number we give this week will be out of date in a few days time. The main thing to remember about this explosion in numbers is that very few stations these days are content with just one or two channels. Naturally the pay-TV operators provide a big array of channels. But I’m talking about the free-to-air stations, which now also offer bouquets of channels.

Why do the channels multiply? There are important economic advantages for a single broadcasting company in being able to spread advertising over more than one channel; show material at different times on different channels so as to get “more bang for your buck” through repeats; build up a brand and audiences to match by offering alternative schedules. The logic of economies of scope applies to operations whether they are owned in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Dubai or anywhere in the world. Here I’m talking about operators that follow a rational business model, which would exclude Egypt’s state owned channels (of which I think there are around three dozen), but it would include Egypt’s private channels. Of course the obvious example of multiplication is MBC, which started out as one channel and is now four, or five if we include Al-Arabiya. Al-Jazeera is now a network, with channels for news, sports and children’s programming. Other Al-Jazeera channels are in the pipeline but that’s another story. Dubai TV consists of four channels, including channels specialising in film and sport. Rotana, owned by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, consists of six channels devoted to music and film, plus Al-Resalah, the new Islamic channel. Dream TV in Egypt started out with the intention of operating three channels and currently runs two. Melody, also Egyptian, divided itself into Melody Arabia and Melody Hits and added Melody Film.

This is not to say that there are no small newcomers to the market. There are. We hear about composers who create their own music channels, or publishers who recycle their content in audiovisual form. But it’s useful to check who is behind such ventures to see how new or small they really are, because what has happened with this explosion in free-to-air channels turning themselves into multichannel operations is that competition actually just got a whole lot harder. Any new entrant today has to compete with players who have already built up archives of music, film and other programming. These players have signed up exclusive deals with singers and film stars, signed sponsorship and advertising deals with the big companies that are interested in multi-country markets, and established relations with different audience segments across their different channels.

That’s why most of the new channels we see appearing are essentially music channels. They basically consist of recorded music and text messages running across the screen. This requires no budget for production or acquisition. And we see more religious channels — I think there are about eight now — which consist of televised sermons and talk. That’s also cheap. Where a new channel makes a splash, like Al-Resalah, it’s because it has the budget to hire prominent people. And that kind of budget usually means it belongs to someone from a ruling or business elite.

Now, as I wrote in my abstract for this talk, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with size. If we want diversity in content, and risk-taking in introducing daring or challenging content, very often it’s the big media operators who are best placed to go down this route. From a purely economic point of view, the security that comes with size should mean that an operator can take a chance in terms of putting new faces on the screen, introducing new content, or experimenting with new programme genres. Gambles like this can prove very profitable. But the question about big media companies is whether they have the flexibility to be creative. And that depends on how decision-making is organised. Obviously this is an issue that is in no way exclusive to Arab TV stations. It applies equally to Viacom, News Corporation, Time Warner, Disney and others.

You would think, in the multichannel environment, that there would have to be diffusion of control over editorial matters. Think of all the different job titles in companies where they have multiple channels. In MBC, you have a director of channels, an overall marketing manager, a business development manager and so on. Tim Riordan, as Director of Channels, was the person who fielded questions about MBC’s ill-fated experiment with Endemol’s Big Brother format in 2004. Michel Costandi, as Business Development Manager, had to do the same recently in relation to Fox TV’s series The Simpsons, screened by MBC as Al-Shamshoun. And ART has lots of departmental heads. The head of its Sports Channel is Charles Balchin, who used to work with the BBC and Sky. The head of its international sports event division is Karim Younes. He’s the one who has had to fend off criticism about ART, a pay-TV network, buying up exclusive rights to screen the World Cup in Arab countries. Likewise, we assume that Prince Alwaleed doesn’t micro-manage the six Rotana channels or Al-Resalah. Al-Resalah has a general manager, Sheikh Tariq Sweidan, based in Kuwait, and a Cairo bureau manager, Ahmad Abu Haiba. Rotana has someone overseeing SMS traffic across the network and its individual channels have managers. I don’t propose to give a list, merely to paint a picture of the proliferation of management jobs that occurs when stations and networks expand horizontally, as they have done in the past three to four years.

So the crux of the matter is this. If, as I argued earlier, entry into the TV market is getting harder, not easier (with the result that only limited amounts of new blood get in by that route), can we look instead to the proliferation of jobs that has taken place inside the big companies, in the expectation that this phenomenon has led to diffusion of decision-making?

Graham Murdock published an essay in 1982 in which he discussed different types of control in communication industries, including shareholder power.[2] In it he drew on existing work that distinguished between two basic levels of control. On one level you have allocative control, which signifies control over the allocation of resources, including the purpose for which they are allocated. On the other you have operational control, which signifies control over the use of resources that have already been allocated, according to purposes that have already been set. I think these categories are helpful in considering decision-making in broadcasters that operate multiple channels.

Allocative control includes hiring and firing at senior positions and allocation not only of budgets, but of resources needed for satellite transmission. It’s the kind of control that can be exercised with the briefest of telephone conversations. Someone powerful behind the scenes puts in a call to the network owner. The network owner puts in a call to a manager, and the deed is done. And, with the constant possibility of this kind of influence being exerted, those with operational control act accordingly. They learn to use resources in a way that will minimise interventions from on high. What lessons have they learned?

Some lessons have been learned from the summary removal of personnel. Mohammed Jassem al-Ali was removed as director general of Al-Jazeera in 2003. Al-Jazeera’s Moscow bureau chief, Akram Khuzam, was removed last year with no official explanation after nearly ten years in the post. Hala Sirhan, the prominent presenter and talkshow host who is now with Rotana, was forced out of Dream in 2002 when the Egyptian authorities threatened to withdraw the channel’s licence because of topics covered on air. Some lessons have been learned from incidents in which material didn’t get on air. Any news reporter, documentary maker or film production company in the region can cite examples of material they weren’t allowed to use for reasons of content, not space. Al-Arabiya spent US$50,000 to make a documentary about Darfur. It was called Jihad ala al-Jiyad (Jihad on Horseback) and it should have been aired in February last year. But the president of Sudan called the king of Saudi Arabia and the film was not shown.

In Ramadan 2004 there was the example of the drama serial, Tariq ila Kabul (Road to Kabul). It had a big publicity campaign, and was being shown on three or four satellite channels. It attracted viewers because it dealt with hot topics, including the story of the so-called “Afghan Arabs”. Yet it was pulled after only eight out of 30 episodes were shown, meaning that $2m had been spent on producing the series to no avail. According to Charles Levinson, writing in the Christian Science Monitor last year, the show had received threats from Taliban supporters but was actually cancelled because of US pressure on the Qatari government, since Qatar Television had commissioned the work. The US reportedly feared that scenes of CIA agents selling heroin to fund the mujahideen would fire anti-American sentiment in the region.[3]Now MBC, the biggest station to start showing the series, is suing the production company for US$20m for breach of contract. Its claim is that the company, Amman-based Arab Telemedia Services, failed to provide it with the complete series.

No wonder then that the heads of private production companies in Syria went on record recently as saying that their companies deliberately stayed away from history and politics in the material they produced for Ramadan in 2005. No wonder also that so much of the transmission time of leading channels is devoted to material that originates outside the region. I include in this the localised production of programmes based on foreign formats. The best known of these are Superstar and Star Academy, but these two are only the tip of a very large iceberg. I am not saying there is anything wrong with reality TV or game shows. I like some of these programmes as much as anyone else. I’m simply questioning whether decision-making processes are promoting development by allowing indigenous creativity enough scope.

Contact the author: naomi@mediaprobe.co.uk

Notes

[1] Yasser Baraka, ‘”TV on demand” all the rage in West Bank’, Middle East Times, 5 May, 2005

[2] Graham Murdock, ‘Large corporations and the control of the communications industries’, in M. Gurevitch, T. Bennett, J. Curran and J. Woollacott (eds) Culture, Society and the Media (London: Routledge, 1982) pp 118-150.

[3] Charles Levinson, ‘What’s on during Ramadan? Antiterror TV’, Christian Science Monitor, 3 November, 2005

Cyberspace and the United Arab Emirates: Searching for Tunes in the Air

meaningfulconnections — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 18:46:39 +0000

Timothy N. Walters (Zayed University, Dubai, UAE) and Lynne Masel Walters (Texas A&M University)
Paper delivered at the Communication Technology and Policy Division, AEJM, August 2002

ABSTRACT: The United Arab Emirates is attempting to carve a piece of the future out its desert by erecting Internet City on the main road connecting the Emirates of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. This effort is fraught with contradictions. Emiratis are eager for the businesses and jobs that they expect to pull out of cyberspace. Yet, they are reluctant to make social and cultural changes. Policy makers are finding it difficult to deal with the competing demands of traditional religion, culture, and society on the one hand and modern freedom, information interchange and globalization on the other. How they resolve the conflict will determine whether the UAE and its sister countries on the Arabian Peninsula will join the new world or be buried in the old.

Introduction

H.H. Sheikh Mohammed Rashid Bin Al Maktoum manned a booth at Comdex 2000 in Las Vegas. The display was designed to attract techies and their businesses to Dubai Internet City. Watching His Highness promote his sand- dune-to-city marvel, one glib observer noted that the royal was trying to “pull a [Las Vegas mobster and founding father] Bugsy Siegel in the middle of the Dubai desert” by building a community based on technology, instead of one based on gambling (Gartner, 2000).

The stakes might be higher for the United Arab Emirates as it looks to the economic future, than they were for Bugsy. The UAE is small country of approximately 2.9 million, resting at the toe of the Arabian Peninsula, touched by Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Sultanate of Oman. Roughly the size of Maine, the UAE has undergone a profound transformation from an impoverished region of small desert principalities to a modern state with a high standard of living. The transition has occurred in a little more than 30 years.

The UAE has an oil-and-gas driven economy with an estimated 2000 GDP per capita of approximately $22,800 (in purchasing power parity)1 and a rank in the top portion of the Human Development Index (CIA, 2001; United Arab Emirates Yearbook; Human Development Indicators, 2001, p. 141). These figures compare favorably to neighboring countries: Bahrain, $15,900; Egypt, $3,600; India, $2,200; Iraq, $2,500; Kuwait, $15,000; Oman, $7,700; Pakistan, $2,000; Qatar, $20,300; Saudi Arabia, $10,500; Syria, $3,100 (CIA, 2001).

In the United Arab Emirates, seven rulers exercise political power over a federation established in 1971. None of the emirates has any democratically elected institutions and their rule has been both tradition bound and patriarchal (U.S. Department of State, 2001). Because political parties and elections are prohibited, the citizens of the UAE cannot change their government democratically. Citizens may express concerns directly to their rulers by traditional means including the majlis, a sort of political open house2 (International Press Institute, 2000; see also U.S. Department of State, 2001).

The seven emirate rulers constitute the Federal Supreme Council, the highest legislative and executive body. The council selects a president and a vice president from its membership and the president appoints the prime minister and cabinet. The Cabinet manages the Federation on a day-to-day basis. A consultative body, the Federal National Council, comprising advisors appointed by the emirate rulers, has no legislative authority, but questions government ministers in open sessions and makes policy recommendations to the Cabinet (U..S. Department of State, 2001).

Each emirate retains control over its own oil and mineral wealth, some parts of internal security, and some regulation of internal and external commerce. The federal government has primacy in matters of defense and foreign policy, some aspects of internal security, and, increasingly, in the supply of government services (U.S. Department of State, 2001).

The judiciary generally is independent, but political leadership can review its decisions. The legal system of the UAE is based on a constitution approved by the Federal National Council in 1996, replacing the provisional documents that had been renewed every five years since the country’s creation in 1971 (www.infoprod.co.il/uae2a.htm). Springing from tradition, the constitution, and legislation, the UAE legal system has been influenced by Islamic, Roman, and French law (www.law.emory.edu/IFL /legal/UAE.htm; see also, www.uottawa.ca. world-legal-systems/eng-common.htm). Common law principles have become important in commercial contracts, and Federal Law No. 40 modernized intellectual property law in 1992 (Dubaiinc, 2001; IPR, 2001; Abu Ghazaleh, 2002).

Today, as oil and gas revenues flow from the well head, life is lived large with the Emirati equivalent of two cars in every garage. The State supports the trappings of an easy life with low-cost education and medicine, high paying jobs, short working hours, and low-cost housing loans for nationals. Inspired by the benevolent leadership of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, who has led the country for more than 30 years, the United Arab Emirates has blossomed in the desert.

The Sheikh has taken steps to move away from its oil dependence. The federal government has invested heavily in tourism, aviation, re-export commerce, and, recently, telecommunications. In doing so, leadership has recognized that the country must make more of its human resources. Devoid of most natural resources except for petrocarbons, the UAE, particularly the Emirate of Dubai, has invested billions of Dirhams in high technology equipment and training. The great dream is that, with this investment, the desert and its people will bloom. They can create income-yielding activities and serve as pillars of the future (Walters, 2001, p. 82).

Yet even as it offers promise, IT provides significant challenges as well. The same science and technology that will propel the economy into desired realms may propel the culture onto dangerous turf. The empowerment of individuals that is a by-product of technological advancement will run up againsttraditional notions of society in the UAE and across sister Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.

Sheikh Ali Korani, director of the Ayatollah Gulpaybahane Computer Center in Qom spoke of this contradiction. He said, “Take a knife, for example. You can use it in the kitchen or you can use it to commit crimes Many things have a double nature and the {technology} is one of them,” he explained. “You can use it in different ways. The main thing is to use it for the good” (CNN Interactive, 1997). Searching for that good has led many governments to go slow, perhaps because they have understood that creating computer networks can facilitate the means for individuals who act to build a community of rights (Walters, 2001, p. 247).

The ability to develop policies that take the greatest advantage of cyberspace and do the least amount of damage to culture will determine if the desert will bloom or wither (Aizu, 1997; see also Price and Krug, 2000).

Civic society

The law does not determine by itself how free, pluralistic, or independent the media (including the internet) will be. The interaction between legal and social-cultural institutions define this relationship (Price and Krug, 2000, pps. 8-10). Laws, of course, help, but even authoritarian societies have mastered the vocabulary of free expression, or statement (and access to that statement), and have written it into their constitutions. (See International Constitutional Law, http://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/law/home.html).

The will of the people and the development of civic society have great impact on how the laws will be implemented (O’Donnell and Schmitter, 1986; Geremek, 1992; Diamond, 1994; Bryant, 1995). In civic society complex networks of economic, social, and cultural practices based on friendship, family, the market, and voluntary association influence daily life (Wapner, 1995) Such civic forces are in play in varying degrees in the UAE and sister GCC countries, where kinship and marriage count, and extended family networks wield enormous power in all aspects of life. Thus, any policy of freedom of statement becomes intertwined with family, tradition, and heritage. (See for example, Essoulami, 2001; Za’Za’, 8 January 2002)

GCC countries share many things: geography, history, culture, language, and religion – and (mostly) absolute monarchies. In these Arab/Islamic societies people serve families and families serve society; so the individual finishes last (Patai, 1983; Nawar, 2000). For most, the rule of the family is the norm. There are no political parties, and no freedoms, other than those that the ruler offers his “family,” or those that the head of the household offers his wife and children.

Across the GCC and in the UAE, families also share many common characteristics, the first of which is an abiding dedication to Islam. Muslims have experienced no need for the development of secularism, as has the West. Indeed, Islam is not a “matter of religion as Westerners understand it, “ said Mary-Jane Deeb, adjunct professor at American University. “Conservative Muslims see the West imposing an entire system of economic, political, and social values that strike at the heart of Islamic way of life. Westerners would consider most of these values secular, but to conservative Muslims almost nothing is secular. The Koran governs everything…” (Taken from Ringle, 2001). Thus in the UAE, as inother GCC states, Islam is normative. It is the sustaining force; it permeates the entire society (Patai, 1983; Lewis, 1990).

Besides Islam, other strands of a long, proud history are woven into the cloth of society. The Arabic language is one strand. It carries with it emotions, feelings, and thoughts, creating an artistic statement of sound and rhythm that Naguib Mahfouz describes as “searching for tunes in the air” (Mahfouz, 1986, p. 33). Loyalty and an emphasis on honor, both drawn from a simpler past, are other valued traits (Patai, 1983).

Legal Norms

As do many other countries, the UAE guarantees freedom of statement in its written constitution. Article 30 protects “freedom of opinion and expressing it verbally, in writing or by other means of statement shall be guaranteed within the limits of the law” (Human Rights Watch, June 1999, at www.hrw.org/ advocacy /internet/mena/uae.htm). Article 31 guarantees “freedom of communication by post, telegraph, or other means of communication and (that) the secrecy thereof shall be guaranteed in accordance with the law” (Human Rights Watch, June 1999, http://www.hrw.org/advocacy/internet/mena/uae.htm).

But it is Article 7 of the Constitution that gives an idea of how “accordance with the law” is defined in the UAE; this article declares Islam the official state religion and that Islamic shari’a shall be a principal source of legislation (Legal Profiles, Islamic Family Law http://www.law. emory.edu/?IF L/legal/UAE.htm). Shari’a is derived from principles of the Koran, explicated by Ijma, or rules that develop through debate and the resultant consensus of religious leaders (Kabbani, nd).

While controls exist, the media in the United Arab Emirates are relatively free, particularly when compared with other GCC states (U.S. Department of State, 2001). Federal Law 15 of 1988 requires that all publications be licensed with the ministry of education and delineates acceptable subjects of reporting. Journalists censor themselves on sensitive subjects such as the ruling family, Islam, and national security, government policy, religion, and relations with neighboring states. The information minister, a son of Sheikh Zayed, has been quoted as telling the media to “criticize freely,” though there is no evidence that journalists have complied, particularly with respect to Emirati rulers and their extended families (Al Bakry, 2001; Human Rights Watch, June 1999; Owais and Matthew, 2000).

Reporters have established boundaries themselves, practicing self censorship akin to prior restraint. “Freedom without responsibility may invite chaos,” Ayesha Ibrahim Sultan, head of the UAE journalist’s union has said. “Freedom and responsibility have to go hand in hand. If we separate them and allow total freedom, it will lead to chaos…” (Rahman, 2001). Freedom, then, is not absolute, it is limited because certain social aspects, including the morals and values guiding a society, must be considered (Rahman, 2001).

In establishing boundaries to communication, the UAE is no different than other societies. Under international law, governments can restrict information to protect certain interests such as national security, public order or health or morals in what amounts to prior restraint (Human Rights Watch, 1999).

The differences about what constitutes a threat to national security, public order or health or morals rests, as late Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court Potter Stewart might have said, in the eyes of the beholder. Up and down the GCC, stakeholders are considering what limits should be. In a 1998 editorial, Abu Dhabi-based Al Ittihad urged people to adopt a modern cultural concept of freedom while practicing responsible decisions in real life. The paper called for the formulation of an Arab concept of freedom (UAE Editorials, 1998.)

As it relates to cyberspace, that formulation is the subject of vigorous debate. Some social forces have voiced hostility to the Internet or to its availability to the public at large. Legislators in Kuwait and elsewhere have denounced the Internet as a threat to local culture, morals, or religious sensibilities (Human Rights Watch, 1999). Other GCC governments and their supporters have sounded these same themes to justify a go-slow, paternalistic approach to allowing public access to the Internet.

That viewpoint includes the Saudis. Saleh Abdulrahman al-’Adhel, the head of the King Abdul-Aziz City for Science and Technology, reportedly stated that the Internet presents “an important service in relaying and distributing information but also has a negative side that conflicts with our faith and our Arab Muslim traditions” (Associated Press, 12 May 1997). Worries about material considered offensive delayed Internet access in Saudi Arabia, where foreign publications are strictly controlled and censored. State telecom monopolies capable of blocking Net access to politically, socially, or culturally sensitive information help to keep a lid on the problem (Reuters, 1998; see also, Lee 2001; Associated Press, 12 May 1997; Trabelsi, 1998).

The UAE, sensing an economic opportunity, has been more liberal than GCC sister states Saudi Arabia or Kuwait (Wheeler, 2000; see also Dubai Press Club, 2000). On 10 May 2001, General Sheikh Mohammed, Crown Prince of Dubai and UAE Minister of Defense speaking in rather de Tocquevillean terms at the launch of Dubai Media City said that:

I guarantee freedom of statement to all of you…. Let us do so responsibly, objectively and with accountability and in the spirit of the social and cultural context in which we live.

This freedom will allow and encourage the Arab media to return home, to broadcast and publish once again from Arab land, and contribute to this new regional media industry.

Always remember, the human mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original size. It only grows larger. Media has the power to effect change and evolve (Gulf News, 11 May 2001; for more information also see, Wheeler, 21 January 2001).

The Federal National Council has echoed this sentiment, has offered its support and has stressed the need to support efforts to develop policies and statement as provided by the constitution (Dawood, 11 January 2001).

Regulatory Policies

Despite the advent of globalization, a uniform regulatory standard may be impossible with respect to cyberspace because, like the UAE, each country has specific cultural and legal imperatives driving the regulatory process (Ang, 1997). (Whittle, 16 May 1996; see also, Sussmann, 2000).

“Every culture has the right to express itself, said Milagros De Corral, UNESCO’s deputy assistant director speaking in Abu Dhabi on 23 April 2001 before the second International Summit on Internet and Multimedia (Wired, 2001). But when it comes to cultural content, the problem is that the moment you change a character … you can erode something” (Wired, 2001).

Like the Roman god Janus, the debate over eroding values has twin faces. Decentralization of information is one. Deployment of information and communications technology facilitates decentralization of power, creating distributed information potentially available to all, including women who live a cloistered existence in many GCC states. (Women account for 36 percent of Internet subscribers, 2001; Sussmann, 2000). The second of the twins, globalization, raises the specter of homogenized values. Because of these concerns, GCC governments, feeling threatened by the democratization of access to information, have cautiously approached the spread of the technology (Dahan, nd).

Many policy makers around the world argue that curbs on freedom of statement on the internet are needed to protect children from harmful content, preserve religious values, safeguard local cultures, protect national security, thwart terrorists, and silence racists (Balmer, 2002). GCC States agree. They generally believe that community standards inherent in Islam, and the society into which Islam is inexorably woven, must be protected. Thus they look toward a paternalistic system, passionately arguing against access to certain classes of information.

In the GCC, few officials will admit that blocking unwelcome political information is among their objectives in imposing controls on the Internet. In the Gulf countries. As scholars Grey E. Burkhart and Seymour E. Goodman have noted, pornography is “almost always first mentioned” when it comes to what the Internet “may do to national, cultural and religious values.” Among other issues of concern were proselytizing by other religions, the portrayal of un-Islamic information (such as the use of alcohol and drugs), and western norms (particularly as they relate to the role of women) and culture (Burkhart and Goodman, 1998 taken from Kettmann, 24 April 2001).

Among GCC States, Saudi Arabia has gone furthest in defining the scope of the material it wishes to keep off the Internet. Its Council of Ministers decreed that service providers to refrain from “carrying out any activities violating the social, cultural, political, media, economic, and religious values of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” (Burkhart and Goodman, 1998).

Officials of other countries and corporate representatives of ISPs in the region have also addressed the question of protecting cultural values. A representative of Teleyemen, Yemen’s monopoly ISP, told Human Rights Watch that the Teleyemen was under “a general requirement” to “limit access to information which is considered to be undesirable in terms of causing offence against social, religious, or cultural standards.” Like Saudi Arabia, Yemen filters what users can access through the use of a proxy server and “censorware” (Human Rights Watch, June 1999; Goodman and Burkhart, 1998; Nawar, 2000). And, the Qatar ambassador to the United Nations has written in 1984-esque language that “the high-level moralities in preventing the indecent and corrupt material will undoubtedly nourish morality at the human level. Prohibition, in this respect, therefore, is not deprivation but enrichment; not suppression but discipline, and not limitation but expansion” (Quoted in Sussmann, 2000).

The United Arab Emirates is among those who so protect its citizenry. The UAE filters and blocks based on content and also has the capacity for electronic eavesdropping (Human Rights Watch, June 1999; see also, Bell, 2001). UAE dial-up users who employ the local telephone service do not access the Internet directly. They dial in to a proxy server of Etisalat, the government telephone monopoly and single ISP in the country. The proxy denies access to web sites if the URL requested is on a list of banned sites, or if a content check of the site by the proxy server turns up objectionable material 4 (See Human Rights Watch, June 1999; see also 2000 World Press Freedom Review). Terms and conditions of usage permit Etisalat to terminate services if a consumer uses the service for a “criminal activity or unlawful purpose such as but not limited to vice, gambling or obscenity or for carrying out any activity which is contrary to the social, cultural, political, economical or religious values of the UAE” (Etisalat, 2002).

If you go somewhere Etisalat believes you should not venture, the following message pops up.

Emirates Internet denies access to this site.

For more information on Emirates Internet services click here

When you click here, the message takes you to the “Emirates Internet & Multimedia” homepage. It does not explain why the site was blocked.

UAE Government officials say the sole purpose of its blocking policy is to eliminate pornographic sites. A senior official in the Ministry of Information and Culture told Human Rights Watch in a telephone interview on June 10, 1998:

There is no restriction on the political, social, economic side. Politically, in the U.A.E., we do not hold value for censorship, especially political or censorship of ideas: we don’t believe in that. You can access on the Internet any material, from Israel or anywhere. The whole idea [of the proxy system] was to block X-rated materials. You can see the first pages [of sexually explicit sites], but not whatever is after that. (Human Rights Watch, 1999).

The Etisalat staff reviews web sites, sometimes responding to complaints or tips from users, using broad guidelines focusing on the “sexually explicit” to root out objectionable sites. Apparently the system was set up to response to concerns fears of abuse by young people. A committee at Etisalat examines the site, verifies the pornographic content, and then blocks it (Human Rights Watch, June 1999).

The official added that, although Etisalat attempts to block sites, the proxy filtering system was not foolproof. “You can get to porno,” he said, “because you can always just dial a foreign server. We try our best to limit x-rated material, but you can never really build a wall” (Human Rights Watch, June 1999).

This official was correct. For those with the technical means and money (many of them the young people Etisalat sought to protect), blocking is ineffective. The Web-savvy can circumvent it; the petro rich can dial around it, reaching an ISP outside the country (Campagna, 2000). For those who can afford the best, Star Duo offers a fast satellite Internet service (“several hundred times faster” than the typical local ISP) for the Middle East with a footprint including most of the Arabian Peninsula. Such service is pricey. The hardware including dish and receiver and sundries retails at $2,635; 2Gb of download costs $254 per month (see Star Duo, www.star-duo).

UAE authorities maintain that they do not track individual users’ online activities. Nonetheless, they retain the technical capability to do so if they choose, an ability facilitated because all dial-in users are channeled through a proxy server operated by this public utility (Human Rights Watch, June 1999). When a Gulf News staffer complained to Etisalat that some of his e-mail was not getting through the proxy system, he was told that yes, indeed, the message had left at a specific time to a specific individual. And Lloyd’s Bank-Dubai refuses to create on-line banking for its customers because of Etisalat-related security issues.

If pornography is an Internet-related direct threat that some GCC believe might diminish Islamic society, another more insidious threat is the ascendancy of English on that media. Viewed through the lens of Islam, this dominance could be interpreted as a sign of Western imperialism (Patai, 1983). This fear is not without some validity. Noting the potential for damage, UNESCO issued a warning in 2000 regarding the possible disappearance of half of 6,000 existing world languages 5 (Human Rights Watch, 1999). GCC Arabic speakers do not intend that the language of the prophet will be one of them. At the January 19, 2002, meeting of the Session of the Islamic Commission for Economic, Cultural and Social Affairs in Jeddah The Secretary General of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) Dr. Abdelouahed Belkeziz called for rectifying the “cultural warfare” being practiced against Islam. (See http://www.oic-oci.org/.)

Internet and the news

Because total censorship is virtually impossible once citizens have the means, skill, and opportunity to go on line, the Internet will be a catalyst for change for those so empowered. That is because the Internet evaporates distance while combining text, speech, and pictures in a compelling convergence of communication that potentiates real-time, far flung, unfiltered information gathering (Pool, 1990, p. 8). Such a threat will necessarily compel introspection on how the Arab world can resist the perceived “evils” of globalization on the one hand while modernizing on the other (Kettmann, 2001).

Government intervention and press restrictions had led some Arab news organizations to move their headquarters from states on the Arabia Peninsula to other, more media friendly countries. But even as this Diaspora developed, many who could afford it (and were so inclined) in the UAE and sister GCC states cast their eyes skywards, relying on satellite television containing foreign channels for alternative information. The increasing number of Internet users has complicated the task of control as a new generation explores the world at large.

Control is difficult in these circumstances. A Reuters report on 20 September 2000, quoted Mohammed Al-Abbar, director general of Dubai’s Economic Department, as saying that the increase of satellite access and Internet usage makes censorship more difficult to achieve in the country.

“In today’s world censorship doesn’t exist,” he said. “We can pick up hundreds of channels here plus the internet. The world is changing. We are already a global city, traveling the world, and we know exactly what is happening around the world and we cannot hope to stop, nor would we want to stop, whatever is happening. So censorship is no longer an issue {for the media}. We want the same freedom to operate as if a channel was in London, Atlanta or wherever” (Reuters, 20 November 2000).

Fear that democratizing Internet access can undermine the state chokehold on information has been a significant factor in slowing Internet growth (Dahan, nd; see also Committee To Protect Journalists www.cpj.org/countrystatus; Reporters sans Frontières, www.rsf.fr; Human Rights Watch, www.hrw.org; and the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices; www.state.gov///www/global/ human_rights/hrp_ reports_mainhp.html). Despite this purposive foot dragging, the Internet has begun spreading. Pro-Internet forces in government and in the business, academic, and research communities, wishing to keep current and globally competitive, have pushed for easier access to online data and communications (Human Rights Watch, 1999; Human Rights Watch, June 1999; Dahan, 2001; United Nations, 2001).

Country	Number of subscribers	Estimated Number of users per account	Number of internet users	Population
Bahrain	35,000	3	105,000	645,341
Kuwait	55,000	3	165,000	2,041,961
Oman	28,000	3	84,000	2,622,198
Qatar	25,000	3	75,000	769,152
Saudi Arabia	190,000	3	575,000	22,757,092
United Arab Emirates	220,000	3	660,000	2,900,000

sources: DIT Group, www.ditnet.co.ae; Dahan, nd; World Development Indicators, 2001; http://www.nua.ie/ surveys/how_ many_online/m_east.html. * December 2000. All other internet user figures March 2001.

Today, every GCC country has some form of international connectivity. Citizens of many member countries reach the Internet via a national monopoly Internet Service Providers (ISP). About 1,664,000 persons are “online” in a combined population of about 31,735,754 in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Cybercafés, which are particularly prevalent in the UAE, afford the Emirati public Internet access for an hourly fee starting from about $1.75 to $1.90 an hour in Dubai.6

Most GCC countries allowing Internet access have tolerated freer statement online than is permitted in the local news media. Kuwait has permitted relatively unfettered online speech for the thousands of users in each country, even as they enforce press laws against print periodicals that publish “objectionable” material (Human Rights Watch, 1999; Human Rights Watch, June 1999; see also, Anderson and Eickelman, 1999). The Digital Freedom Network has made censored materials available online (Human Rights Watch, June 1999; see also (http://www.dfn. org/). The World Wide Web, with its online newspapers and radio and TV webcasting, has enhanced the potential diversity of news available to people with the means, inclination, and the training (Human Rights Watch, 1999).

Conferences on the information revolution top the list of events covered in the region as the Arab press seeks to fulfill its craving for Internet news. (See for example, A Comprehensive Guide to Middle East Web Sites, http://MiddleEast Directory.com.) In January 2002, newspapers in Egypt tub thumped for an exposition in Cairo described as the “Middle East’s biggest telecom” show; others of these exhibitions from the same tradeshow company were scheduled to follow quickly in Morocco and Iran (CommsMEA, 2002, or see the web site at http://www.itp.net/corporate/current/97478918465888.htm).

GCC governments have attempted to shape the Internet to spread positive news through public information as well as prevent the spread of negative information through regulatory policies. Every GCC government has launched at least one web site to get its voice heard amidst the clutter of alternative information sources in cyberspace. (See http://www.ain-al-yaqeen.com/issues/20011026/ feat9en.htm.) Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates web cast state radio and/or television.

Transition through self-censorship

Access to information also has been limited by indirect phenomena. These have included the affordability of computer equipment and of Internet and phone connections; the condition of telecommunications infrastructure, including the number of telephone lines per capital and available bandwidth; and educational attainment including computer literacy7 (See for example, World Bank, 2002 or United Nations, 2001). In many countries, like the UAE, with rapid internet growth, the government has encouraged advancement by building “backbone” telecommunications networks, providing initial funding; creating regulations and technical standards; and encouraging private investment through enterprise zones and tax incentives.

There are many implications of affirmative policies for the political economy. These include weighing competing demands for scarce state resources, fear of losing control over information, and a desire to protect monopoly profits of state telecommunications companies (Human Rights Watch, June 1999). The local prices of computer equipment or services also deter Internet use in some countries of the region. Those prices may reflect government attitudes toward popularizing Internet use, insofar as the government sets, taxes or subsidizes those prices. Free market advocates believe that internet and telephone costs are probably more expensive than they might be if there were more competition in the region (Human Rights Watch, June 1999; Cost of technology harms business, 2002).

Country	Estimated Costs for 30 hours monthly	Internet speed and access rating
Bahrain	$42.18	4.1
Kuwait	$32.79	5.7
Oman	$19.99	4.1
Qatar	$49.34	5.7
Saudi Arabia	$69.24	4.1
United Arab Emirates	$17.88	5.7

Dial-up service at maximum modem speed. Costs equal telephone tariff plus cost for 30 hours of monthly usage from ISP. This excludes initial ISP hookup charge (see http://www.middleeastdirectory.com/me-isps.htm). Data Development Group, World Bank. Internet speed and access measures the lease-line or dial-up access to the Internet. A rating of 1 means that speed is slow and access expensive; a rating of 7 means speed is fast and access as inexpensive in the world. See individual country tables developed by The World Bank Group, http://www.worldbank.org/data/ countrydata/ictglance.htm.

Network bottlenecks have also played a role. One inconsistency of the global economy is the skewed distribution of information technology. But the disparity may be most striking when it comes to communications bandwidth. the basic information carrying capacity of a network to transmit phone calls and bits of data (Anderson, 1997; Romero, 2001; see also Dodge and Kitchin, 2001). Generally speaking, the Middle East and the GCC are bandwidth impaired. This impairment means that multimedia is slow, if not impossible, to download (For example, see Dodge and Kitchin, pps. 23-24, 27, 32). (Star duo, a satellite Internet-based service, estimates the average download speed of a typical Middle Eastern ISP at an 8Kbps average). The emergence of information haves and have-nots is a pressing concern for all governments. Government could help diffuse information if public policy levels the playing field (Walters, 2001).

Another factor inhibiting Internet growth in the region is the continuing dominance of English-language materials. Part of the problem is that there is friction is caused by frayed ego connected with use of indigenous language. But the largest impediment is not knowing a second language. While the volume of material in Arabic is growing and the Arabic software available for browsing the Web is improving, the many users who do not read English remain at a distinct disadvantage in their ability to access online resources (Human Rights Watch, 1999; see also, Trabelsi, 2001).

The UAE, particularly the Emirate of Dubai, has attempted to draw technologically based business to its dunes, creating enterprise zones built on the duty-free model. Media City and Internet City, built from scratch in the urban sprawl north of the Dubai on the road to Abu Dhabi, have had some success drawing media businesses and internet related business to their gleaming glass buildings. In late January 2002, Dubai Media City listed 58 partners in 7 different business categories (Broadcasting, Communication, Music, New Media, Publishing, Production, and Post Production) on its campus, including well-know concerns such as Aranet. Asianet, e-Promoseven, the largest communications company in the Arab world; Lowe Lintas Partners Middle East North Africa; Reuters; Saudi Research and Publishing Company; and Sony Broadcast & Professional. In late January 2002, Dubai Internet City had about 255 members including industry giants such as Oracle, Microsoft, and VeriSign.

Technology and the drive to a new economy

Attracting business with incentives to Dubai’s sand dunes of dreams is only one part of the puzzle. Another is creating business models that work for far-flung enterprises, such as e-business, traditional media, and trade free distribution centers. It is especially difficult to fit the puzzle pieces together within regulatory frameworks and the context of Islamic society.

One up-and-running business model with some chance of success, at least among the computer literati, is the government-to-consumer service space. At the beginning of 2001 Dubai launched www.dubai.ae, a cyber gateway providing access to data and services for business and consumers alike. Sites developed by the Dubai Police, Dubai Municipality, the Department of Economic Development, and the Department of Health and Medical Services are among the government services now on line. A customer can pay water and electricity bills on line, check on (and pay) traffic fines, and arrange visas (Janardhan, 22 January 2002; see also, Introducing cyber lifestyle, 27 October 2001).

Although e-government sites provide efficient, less expensive customer service, these sites are not the economic engines that will create high-paying white color jobs necessary for Emirati citizens. Creation of these knowledge-based career paths will be an entirely different matter.

The Arab Advisors Group (www.arabadvisors.com), a new economy research and consulting company, concluded that the potential for Internet ventures existed in GCC countries. It also cautioned against over optimism (DITnet, 24 January 2001). The group suggested that not all technology models would succeed in the Arab world and that online ventures should concentrate on aggregating groups across the region, rather than concentrating upon individual countries (DITnet, 24 January 2001).

If aggregating is to occur and technology is to be the driving force, conflicts between the new economy and its values, and Islamic society and its values, must be resolved, So, too, must intellectual property issues (patents, trademarks, copyright, and employee agreements) be addressed (Arab Legal Systems in Transition, 6 April 2001). Because information is a primary ingredient of the thoughts, ideas, and opinions driving technologically inclined economies, the tension between the private sector need for profit and public social responsibility in an Islamic society must be resolved (Nawar, 2000).

Internet companies face obstacles that other businesses have not had to face. Nations might subject international Internet content to national laws. However, doing this could stifle e-business development, particularly if fines, asset seizures, imprisonment, and even death, are possible penalties (Hughes, 2001, p. 35). Because of the multiplicity of laws in the region, materials on the Internet, while perfectly legal in the country of origin, could innocently violate civil and criminal laws in one of the countries (Hughes, 2001, p. 37). Faced with such “chilling” choices, many businesses would withdraw from the playing field.

Country	Internet effects on business	Highly skilled IT job market	Government online services	Laws relating to ICT use
Bahrain	3.6	4.8	3.6	3.8
Kuwait	4.1	6.1	5.1	5.3
Oman	3.6	4.8	3.6	3.8
Qatar	4.1	6.1	5.1	5.3
Saudi Arabia	3.6	4.8	3.6	3.8
United Arab Emirates	4.1	6.1	5.1	5.3
United States	4.1	6.1	5.1	5.3

Internet effects on business measures the extent that the Internet has improved firms abilities to coordinate with customers and suppliers to reduce inventory costs. Highly skilled IT job market means the availability of highly skills technology workers in industry. Government online services measures the availability of on-line government services. Laws relating to ICT use measures the efficacy of laws relating to electronic commerce, digital signatures, and consumer protection. The scores range from 1 (the worst) to 7 (the best). See individual country tables developed by The World Bank Group, http://www.worldbank.org/data countrydata/ictglance.htm.

Not even the wariest GCC government today wishes to be seen as anti-Internet. Thus many countries up and down (and around) the Peninsula are working on their own IT initiatives. Bahrain is, Egypt is, Jordan is, and so too is Kuwait (Kuwait plans a Technology Village, 2002; Liberalization much be country-specific, 2002; Bahrain studying telecom deregulation, 2002). But even the most liberal along the Arabian penninsula are concerned about technology’s effects.

At home in the UAE, Internet growth is mostly connected to commercial activity rather than to political or educational institutions because community leaders believe that the internet and the businesses that it spawns roll on the wave of the future (Anderson and Eickelman, 1999). Yet, Arabs must take “a technological leap” if they are to catch up with the IT advances of industrial nations, noted Raafat Rawdan, chair of the Egyptian Council of Ministers’ Information and Decision Support Center. “There’s no time to lose. E-commerce in the Arab world amounts to around $40 million – that is just 0.01 percent of the world total,” concluded Khaled Abu Ismail, head of the General Union of Arab Chambers of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture (Middle East News Online, 18 December 2001) Ihsan Bu-Hulaiga, a member of Saudi Arabia’s Shura (Consultative) Council, said Arab nations should “take a strategic view of IT” (Middle East News Online, 18 December 2001). Elias Ghantous, secretary general of the General Union of Arab Chambers of Commerce, noted however that the Arab world “would not be starting from scratch. Most Arab countries have become aware of the importance of a digital economy” (Middle East News Online, 18 December 2001).

The direction that the UAE will take for this new economy lands on a different point on the compass. By purchasing the latest technology, the UAE and sister GCC states have leapfrogged the relatively long periods of incubation experienced elsewhere. Nonetheless, purchase of foreign equipment and expertise is one thing. Development of local equipment and expertise is quite another. It will require a close look at raft of issues, not the least of which is Intellectual Property (copyright, patents, and trademarks), the grist of the knowledge-based economy mill.

Some observers believe that GCC countries must adapt their public policies if they are to fully benefit from the knowledge economy. If human capital is the key to the future, protecting that future requires protecting that knowledge (Smith, 2001). Much must be done. Up and down and across Peninsula, all nations, except for Kuwait, have a copyright law. While these laws define protected classes of works, separable bundles of rights and privileges of authors, moral rights, fair use, registration procedures, and punishment for infringing the law, many legal specifics vary from country to country. Terms of copyright differ, as do registration processes and punishment. In some countries, punishment includes criminal penalties.

Trademark law, too, is in a state of flux and needs updating and uniformity along with copyright and trademark regulations if the GCC countries want to aggregate into a uniform marketplace (Hassan, 2001). Countries like Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia have restrictions preventing registration of pork and alcoholic products. Kuwait, Oman, and the UAE are signatories to WTO standards. Qatar is not. GCC countries have different registration processes that differ in several key areas, including the process of publication and time limits to oppose registration. In Saudi Arabia people who have their pictures taken retain some rights over use of their images.

The Internet and the products that fuel its growth are viewed as the wave of the future (Anderson, 1997). Some believe that the Internet offers opportunity in which people in this area can be competitive on price, quality, and access (Anderson, 1997). Indeed, the UAE is among the world’s 20 most connected countries and is also a leader in the Arab world in information technology investment (Gulf News, 9 May 2001; see also World Bank, 2001; United Nations, 2001 World Development Indicators). Internet & Multimedia, the Internet arm of Etisalat, touts an exhilarating growth rate since the service began in 1995 (http://www. emirates.net.ae). 8 Besides home hookups, the country has numerous Cybercafés, government ministries maintain web sites, local governments have begun an online drive to make services more efficient, and the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research has identified the communication revolution as a principal target area for research. (See www.ecssr.ac.ae; see also, Human Rights Watch, 1999; see also, various issues of the Gulf News.)

To attract media enterprises, the UAE has begun minimizing media restrictions. In November of 2001, H.H. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and United Arab Emirates Defense Minister, announced that the UAE wanted to guarantee international news organizations the freedom needed to conduct their work without restrictions and limitations (Reuters, 2001). He also said that Arab media organizations, that left the country because of governmental restrictions, would be able to “return home, to broadcast and publish once again from Arab land….” Al Maktoum, however, also emphasized that in having this freedom, media organizations would be held accountable for their reporting (Reuters, 7 November 2000; see also, Trabelsi, 2001). Apparently his words have worked. MBC has scheduled a move from London to Dubai in June of 2002.

Sheikh Mohammed had made his remarks at a conference marking the creation of the new Dubai Media City (DMC), which began with an initial funding of $817 million. Currently being completed on the outskirts of Dubai, the DMC has been described as “a media hub for the region” and a global communications link (Kettmann, 2001). In addition to the initial round, the emirate of Dubai has invested additional funds, amounting to billions of dollars in the Dubai Internet City and Dubai Media City, a free zone for media and IT concerns. Arab banks, with assets exceeding $552 billion, are expected to pump even more money into closing the “digital divide” (Trabelsi, 2001).

According to the master plan, DMC was designed to benefit news and media organizations functioning from the site. DMC and news organizations on its grounds were not subject to many government restrictions or intervention. As a sop to potentially squeamish foreign investors, the DMC has its own printing, publishing and licensing rules and can allow complete foreign ownership so that organizations can be self-reliant and independent of political pressure. Both domestic and international media organizations located in the DMC were to have a 50 year-tax exemption and access to equipment and other facilities available at DMC. The great hope was that others would join Microsoft and Oracle and MasterCard on site (Reuters, 20 September 2000).

Next to the DMC are two other projects in the free zone area: the Dubai Internet City (DIC) and the Dubai Idea Oasis (DIO).9 The DIC was the region’s first information technology zone and has been viewed by Sheikh Mohammed as a project that would benefit Dubai’s economy. In September 2001, an estimated 95 per cent of the DIC area had already taken. According to chief executive, Ahmed bin Bayat around 500 companies would be relocating to DIC by 2002, many of which will be moving from Europe to Dubai (2000 World Press Freedom Review, 2001).

Idea Oasis was designed to work with private sector companies to create an environment in which start-ups could access the necessary advisory services and venture capital that have been crucial to the success of start-ups in the Silicon Valley. No private company would be permitted to own more than a 7 percent stake in Idea Oasis. Although the government of Dubai has taken the initiative in creating Idea Oasis, preliminary plans called for privatized in approximately two years with an ambitious public offering presumably on the Dubai Financial Market (Issa, 2001).

The main aim of DMC, DIC, and DIO is to create a clustered economy comprising educators, incubator companies, logistic companies, multimedia businesses, telecommunication companies, remote service providers, software developers, and venture capitalists, in one place. The hope is to create a critical mass for the new economy (Arabiata, 2002). Arab officials and experts recognize the urgency of narrowing the digital gap between Arab nations and their industrialized counterparts. The digital gap that separates many GCC countries from industrial nations is huge and could widen if governments do not take proper steps.

Governments in the area should be talking about market-building. Markets are the tools to enfranchise people. Previously governments employed people themselves in essentially make work jobs, but these economies are outdated. Area governments must create a framework to help out while making more productive use of available resources (Holloway and Dolan, 2002). (See http://www. arabadvisors. com/pressquotation.htm.) GCC countries are full of the “young and the potentially restless” with many people looking for work in economies that, on the whole, are at a standstill. The pressure of demographics suggest that something must be done quickly because the region’s labor force is growing by 3 to 4 percent yearly, the fastest growth rate in the world. In some places, living conditions have stagnated giving rise to potential political problems (Holloway and Dolan, 2002).

Thus the private sector must move quickly to combine responsiveness to old values with the need for intelligent growth. Where that growth might come from is a potentially vexing and explosive problem. Good jobs that pay well are an imperative because all the UAE children of this generation have known is the good life; many are unprepared to enter the job market; and some would seriously object to entering the workforce at the low end of the pay scale. Employing Nationals is a stated government goal in the UAE. While this necessitates the entry of women into the labor pool, women are also imbued with the “duty” of having children to provide the army of workers to replace the foreign workers forced from their jobs. The delicate balance of these dual policies will create stresses for a whole generation of young women as they struggle to combine motherhood with career.

These are among the many contradictions that must be resolved by policy-makers in the United Arab Emirates and the other modern Islamic states as they search for tunes in the air. The tunes they find must be neither the traditional Arabic melodies, nor the electronic hum of computers, but rather a hybrid composition weaving together the two strands of traditional culture and modern technology. If they fail to find this compromise, Sheikh Mohammed Rashid Bin Al Maktoum and his descendents may witness the sand reclaim their technological cities and the dessert reclaim their people

Notes

1 Purchasing power parity allows for comparison of economic data without using exchange rates. PPP are estimates derived from the relative price in different countries and reflect the rate at which currencies can be converted to purchase equivalent goods and services. Michelle A. Vachris and James Thomas, International price comparisons based on purchasing power party, Monthly Labor Review, October, 122(10):3-12.

2 The Indian Ocean Rim Network describes the history and the role of the majlis in Emriati society thusly

The ruler of an emirate, the sheikh, was the leader of the most powerful, though not necessarily the most populous, tribe, while each individual tribe, and often its various sub-sections, also generally had a chief or sheikh. Such rulers and chiefs maintained their authority only insofar as they were able to retain the loyalty and support of their people, in essence a form of direct democracy, though without the paraphernalia of western forms of suffrage. Part of that democracy was the unwritten but strong principle that the people should have free access to their sheikh, and that he should hold a frequent and open majlis, or council, in which his fellow tribesmen could voice their opinions

…, a fascinating aspect of life in the UAE today, and one that is essential to an understanding of its political system, is the way in which the institutions of the majlis has continued to maintain its relevance. In large emirates, not only the ruler, but also a number of other senior members of his family, continue to hold open majlises (or majalis), in which participants may raise for a son or daughter to go abroad, to more weighty subjects such as the impact of large-scale foreign immigration upon society or complaints about perceived flaws in the practices of various ministries and departments.

In smaller emirates, the majlis of the ruler himself, or of the crown prince or deputy ruler, remain the main focus. The Ruler of Fujairah, for example, holds an open majlis at least once a week (daily during the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan), which may be attended by both citizens and expatriates. To these majlises come traditionally minded tribesmen who may have waited several months for the opportunity to discuss with their ruler directly, rather than choose to pursue their requests or complaints through a modern government structure.

In modern society, of course, as President Sheikh Zayed himself has commented, it is naturally easier for a ruler to go to meet his people than for them to come to meet him. Sheikh Zayed frequently travels within the UAE, providing opportunities for him to meet with citizens away from the formal surroundings of an office or palace. During his regular inspection tours of projects, he also takes pains to ensure that citizens living nearby are guaranteed easy access to him.

Just as the modern institutions have developed in response to public need and demand, however, so the traditional forms of tribal administration have adapted. With many relatively routine matters now being dealt with by the modern institutions, so the traditional ones, like the majlis, have been able to focus on more complex issues rather than on the routine matters with which they were once heavily involved.

In the majlises, for example, it is possible to hear detailed, and often heated, discussions between sheikhs and other citizens on questions such as the policy that should be adopted towards the evolution of the machinery of government, or the nature or relations with neighbouring countries. On matters more directly affecting the individual, such as the highly relevant topic of unemployment among young UAE graduates, debates often tend to begin in the majlises, where discussion can be fast and furious, before a consensus approach evolves that is subsequently reflected in changes in government policy (taken from http://www.iornet.org/newiornet/uae2.htm).

3 Platform for Internet Content Selection. See www.w3.org/pub/WWW/PICS.

4 Etislat, the state ISP monopoly, says this about their system. “A proxy server is basically a server with huge amount of disk space for web-caching. The concept is simple-when a web page is requested, it is saved to the disk of the Proxy Sever. If the same web page is requested again, the disk copy is used. In a proxy server set up, users request pages from a local server instead of direct from the source. The local server gets the page, saves it on the disk and forwards it to the user. Subsequent requests from other users of the cache get the saved copy, which is much faster and does not consume Internet bandwidth. It is used to filter sites which are not allowed to view according to UAE rules and regulations” (http://cc.emirates.net.ae/).

5 One 1997 survey of languages on the Web indicate that materials in English account for more than 80 percent of content. See, for example, “Web Languages Hit Parade,” June 1997 (http://babel.alis.com:8080/ palmares.en.html), compiled by the Babel Team, a joint initiative of Alis Technologies and the Internet Society. Arabic material accounts for only a tiny fraction of the remainder. See “Expert Calls for Promotion of Arabic on Internet,” Xinhua news agency, December 30, 1998. Taken from Human Rights Watch, 1999.

6 See for example, Backpackers Café, http://www.backpackerscafe.com/midleeast.html; CyberCafe’s, http://www.indranet.com/potpourri/links/cybercafe.html; World of Internetcafes.de, http://www.worldofinternetcafes.de/index.html. The latter lists Kuwait with 4, Oman with 2, Qatar, with 2, Saudi Arabia, 4; the UAE, with 5; and Yemen, with 3.

7 Bandwidth is the amount of data that can flow over a network in a fixed amount of time. Low bandwidth creates a bottleneck in data flow. The more graphics, animation, and sound, the greater the bandwidth demands. See Anderson, 1997.)

8 Etisalat has an Internet timeline available at http://www.emirates.net.ae.

9 Establishing these is LAW NO. (1) OF 2000 OF DUBAI TECHNOLOGY, ELECTRONIC COMMERCE & MEDIA FREE ZONE. See http://www.dubaiinternetcity.com /pages/diclaw/ diclaw.asp?mcode=239&level=1.

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Introducing cyber lifestyle. (27 October 2001). Gulf News, Special Report, Section 1, p. 3.

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Issa, N. (2001). Dubai Technology, E-Commerce and Media Free Zone. http://www.eworldreports.com/viewarticle.asp?ArticleID=364.

Janardhan, M. S. (22 January 2002). United Arab Emirates e-government service gets Glowing reviews. Digital Freedom Network, from Inter Press Service.

Kabbani, Shaykh Hisham Muhammad. (nd). Questions on IJMA’ (Consensus), Taqlid (Following Qualified Opinion), and Ikhtilaf Al-Fuqaha’ (Differences of the Jurists). As-Sunna Foundation of America. http://www.sunnah.org/fiqh/ijma.htm.

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The authors may be contacted via email to tnwalters@yahoo.com and lynne-walters@tamu.edu

New Media and U.S. Foreign Policy

meaningfulconnections — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 18:35:27 +0000

William A. Rugh
Based on remarks delivered at workshop on New Media and the Reconstruction of Popular Culture in the Arab World. Georgetown University Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies. May 17, 2006.

During the course of the past 15 years, major changes have taken place in Arab media, principally with the emergence of Arab satellite television. Prior to 1990, almost all Arab radio and television channels were government monopolies, and most print media were under various forms of direct and indirect government influence. Arab journalists observed written laws, most of which contained provisions allowing state control of media content one way or another. They also observed unwritten taboos, and many practiced self-censorship. For many Arabs, the only alternatives to media dominated by their governments were foreign broadcasters such as the BBC, VOA & Radio Monte Carlo. The most important exception was found in Lebanon, where the political system fostered newspapers representing a variety of different views. But the electronic media tended to be very uniform and controlled in each country. [1]

That situation began to change in the early 1990s as Arab satellite television stations were established, first in Europe, which aimed at a pan-Arab viewing audience. Prior to that, a few daily newspapers such as al Hayat and al Sharq al Awsat had been established in Europe that catered to a pan-Arab readership, and they were somewhat less beholden to individual Arab governments than most Arab dailies. But real changes in the direction of greater Arab media independence from government restrictions came with Arab satellite television.

One motivation for the sponsors of the first satellite TV stations was a concern that television news coverage and commentary provided during the Gulf crisis of 1990-91 by CNN, that many Arabs watched, carried a Western bias and failed to present the Arab view sufficiently. CNN was attractive to Arab audiences because of its rapid and extensive news coverage, but many Arabs found it lacking in sensitivity to issues and events of importance to them. The first Arab satellite television channels to be established carried a substantial amount of entertainment along with some news and current events. But it was the arrival in 1996 of a new channel named al Jazeera Television that clearly a new era in Arab media began.

Although al Jazeera was sponsored and funded by the Government of Qatar, from the beginning it began treating news and commentary in a way that was different from other Arab TV stations. Al Jazeera quickly became popular becs of to three unique features. First, it specialized in news and current affairs 24/7, as the first Arab channel to do so. (ANN and al Arabiya followed later). Secondly, its reporters covered stories on the spot that had previously been covered only from a distance if at all by Arab media. Thus al Jazeera correspondents began reporting from inside Israel, breaking a taboo based on the political boycott of Israel observed for decades by Arab governments. Al Jazeera also opened a bureau in Afghanistan when the Taliban regime invited foreign media companies to do so. The other foreign media declined the Taliban invitation, so the al Jazeera reporters in Afghanistan developed unique contacts and access with the Taliban regime that turned out to be very valuable in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Third, al Jazeera started a series of discussion, debate and call-in programs that tackled previously taboo subjects. One sign of the revolutionary nature of these discussion programs was that at one time or another, they antagonized every Arab government, leading to retaliation against al Jazeera by expelling its reporters or closing its bureau. [2]

As al Jazeera ran afoul of Arab governments, it built a strong pubic following and became the number one TV channel in popularity among Arab viewers. By 2003 it had lost its lead in some markets due to the emergence of other new Arab satellite TV channels such as al Arabiya, al Manar, and Abu Dhabi that copied its style to some extent, but still remained a leading player among Arab media.

The other major development in Arab media during the past decade or so has been the dramatic growth of the Internet, including not only email but websites, chat rooms and blogs. Use of the cellular phone also spread rapidly. The expansion of all of these new technical means of communication in several directions has substantially raised the amount of information flowing around the globe, giving more people access to information than they ever had before. This is certainly true in the Arab world, where the cell phone and satellite television in particular have become ubiquitous.

American Reactions

Although American diplomats working in the Arab world were aware of these changes in the Arab media scene as they occurred, senior U.S. Government officials paid little attention to them as they developed during the 1990s. This was in part because with the end of the cold war, America’s overall public diplomacy effort was cut back, and Washington paid less attention to what the foreign press was saying. Public diplomacy funding and staffing declined during the 1990s. Then in 1999 Congress passed legislation which further weakened it. That legislation abolished the U.S. Information Agency and put the Voice of America under the autonomous Broadcasting Board of Governors, insulating it from effective State Department policy supervision. [3] Another reason Washington ignored al Jazeera was that its programming at first did not seem to be a problem for the United States. In fact, some of the early criticism of al Jazeera by Arab governments focused on the station’s broadcasts of interviews with Israeli officials, constituting an action that those governments considered a violation of the Arab boycott of Israel; Washington did not object to the erosion of that boycott.

But the attack on America on 9/11 focused the attention of Washington officials focused on Arab satellite television. They did so because shortly after 9/11, al Jazeera began broadcasting statements by bin Ladin that made Washington officials suddenly aware of that station. Because the al Jazeera bureau had been in Afghanistan for some time, at first it received bin Ladin’s recorded statements as exclusives, and they were repeated worldwide on many TV channels with the al Jazeera logo in the corner. The shock of Americans at the 9/11 attack and their anger at bin Laden for perpetrating it, spilled over onto al Jazeera for carrying his face and his words.

Within weeks of 9/11, therefore, U.S. officials were trying to put pressure on the Government of Qatar to force al Jazeera to stop giving bin Ladin any publicity. In October 2001,U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell personally complained to the ruler of Qatar, Shaikh Hamid bin Khalifa, that al Jazeera was helping al Qaida by broadcasting Usama’s messages. But Shaikh Hamad refused to comply with Powell’s request, responding that it was a private TV station. This was technically true, but ignored the fact that it received essential funding from the Qatari government, which Shaikh Hamad could probably have used to affect programming if he had wanted to do so.

The taped messages from bin Ladin continued to be broadcast, to the annoyance of Washington officials. In April 2004 Colin Powell complained to the Qatari foreign minister that al Jazeera was inciting violence against Iraqis and US troops. [4] On July 14, 2004, Secretary Powell said “Al Jazeera does such a horrible job of presenting the news” and “takes every opportunity to slant the news”.[5] American officials in Doha continued to complain to the Qatari government but to no effect.

The Internet also attracted Washington’s attention as the Global War on Terror began, in particular because terrorist organizations like al Qaida began to devote their attention to it. Aside from placing occasional taped statements on television, terrorists found they did not have much success persuading the regular mainstream Arab media to carry their messages. They therefore began to rely heavily on special use internet websites and chat rooms, as well as email. Ayman al Zawahari and others see al Jazeera and other Arab satellite channels as hostile territory.[6]

Focus on Iraq

The US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the subsequent occupation of that country by US and allied forces, created a new situation for the United States with respect to Arab media, for two important reasons. First, since the U.S. government was the senior partner in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that was responsible for all aspects of governance in Iraq from March 2003 until June 2004, it had to make decisions directly affecting Iraqi media. Control of Iraqi media brought with it new responsibilities and the world was watching how the US handled them. Secondly, because it was primarily responsible for the invasion and occupation, the U.S. found itself with a major public diplomacy issue that would help define the U.S, image in the region and beyond.

The first issue – how to deal with the Iraqi media now that it controlled Iraq – presented a dilemma for the US government because on the one hand Washington felt some obligation to support freedom of the press that is a basic American tenet, but on the other hand, there was a natural desire to help shape Iraqi media in the post-Saddam era in a direction that was friendly to American interests. The American leadership in the CPA attempted to achieve both objectives. During the period when the U.S. was fully in charge in Iraq, between March 2003 and June 2004, the CPA established al Iraqiya Television and al Sabah daily newspaper, which were favored with U.S. government funding and access to information, in order to create media outlets that would be supportive of American views.

In order simultaneously to support freedom of the press, the CPA did allow the emergence of a broad array of all sorts of Iraqi-controlled media, which promptly sprang up all over the country. At the same time, the CPA did take action against some of the new Iraqi newspapers that it did not approve of. For example the CPA closed down al Hawza newspaper on March 28, 2004, causing a strongly negative Iraqi popular reaction. The CPA also tried to bring American ideas of regulation to Iraq by establishing an Iraqi media regulating body, the ICMC, modeled on the American Federal Communications Commission.

As for the second issue, the United States faced a new public diplomacy challenge raised by American invasion and occupation of Iraq because of the widespread Arab and other criticism of that decision. The US government watched as Arab and other media found fault with the invasion itself, and then after the fall of Saddam’s regime, increasingly criticized the occupation.

American official attention focused once again intently on Arab satellite television channels, in particular on al Jazeera. Washington officials quickly came to the conclusion that al Jazeera was presenting news and commentary on Iraq that Washington officials believed was deliberately biased against American interests. Al Jazeera’s news coverage of events in Iraq was indeed different from the reporting of American journalists “embedded” with US forces who naturally covered the story from the American angle rather than the Iraqi angle, showing the suffering of Iraqi civilians rather than the heroism and suffering of American soldiers. Moreover, Arab commentators in media throughout the region strongly criticized U.S. policy in Iraq, and few defended it. American officials declined to appear on these talk shows, regarding them as stacked against American interests. There were some voices on these talk shows explaining the American point of view, but they were in a minority. [7]The absence of a consistent defense of American policy in Iraq meant that the overall impact was a negative one for American interests. But it was the news programs that American officials focused on and found most objectionable.

American authorities also took direct action against al Jazeera. During the period of direct U.S. occupation of Iraq, from March 2003 until June 2004, the Iraqi Governing Council shut down al Jazeera for broadcasting messages from Saddam Hussain, charging that they were provoking violence against the government and the Americans. The Governing Council had been appointed by the American administrator, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, so it was widely believed in Iraq and elsewhere that Washington had requested the action against the TV channel. On April 27, 2004, when the Foreign Minister of Qatar, Shaikh Hamad bin Jasim, visited Washington DC, Secretary Powell complained to him that al Jazeera was inciting violence in Iraq. [8] Then in August 2004, after Iraq had become sovereign, the Iraqi government shut al Jazeera down again for incitement of violence. The Iraqi government was still considered to be under substantial influence of the Americans, so its action gave the impression that Americans were acting against their professed support for press freedom.

The Qatari government however refused to rein in al Jazeera despite these actions against it.

U.S.-sponsored Broadcasting

After 9/11, as a response to the new Arab media, the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) decided to establish two new international broadcasting stations. In 2002, the BBG created Radio Sawa, an Arabic language service. The BBG decided at the same time to abolish the VOA Arabic Service, which had started during World War II and had established itself as a credible source of news and information in the Arab world, although its signal was not audible everywhere. VOA Arabic had offered a broad range of serious programming of interest to many different types of audience, and included considerable time devoted to news and public affairs material. [9] Radio Sawa, in contrast, consisted almost entirely of popular music aimed at a youth audience, with only a limited amount of news. The BBG made arrangements with several Arab governments to allow it to broadcast on local FM stations, extending the U.S. radio broadcasting reach, but the new format seemed to be of interest to young people and few adults paid attention to it.

Then on February 14, 2004, less than a year after the invasion of Iraq, the BBG started al Hurra Television, an Arabic channel intended to reach Arab audiences in competition with al Jazeera and others. Arab viewers were not impressed with al Hurra. Many of them found the programs uninteresting and not competitive with the Arab-owned satellite television. They were surprised that the United States was unable to put on a more interesting TV program for Arab audiences.

BBG officials and their supporters argued that Radio Sawa and al Hurra Television were successful. In February 2003 BBG Chairman Ken Tomlinson said, for example, that Secretary Powell’s speech on Iraq before the UN Security Council in the fall of 2002 would not have gotten fair coverage, but he was wrong because al Jazeera always covers such events live. [10] BBG also claimed that the Arab-controlled Arabic TV stations were highly restricted and that the new US-controlled al Hurra, which means “Freedom”, would bring more freedom of speech to the Arabic media scene.

Tomlinson also declared: “The concept of ‘debate shows’ has reached the Arab world today, but topics and parameters on these debate shows, this is what we are trying to expand.”[11] But this claim is also incorrect, as Marc Lynch has demonstrated. [12] Several Arab TV channels, led by al Jazeera, have promoted rather free discussion of many previously taboo subjects, and have generally allowed expression on all sides of an issue. Al Jazeera has given a platform to both Israeli and Palestinian leaders, secularists and Islamicists, and critics of essentially every Arab government. Al Hurra talk shows have not presented such a broad array of views.

Private American commentators, many of whom have not actually watched al Jazeera, also have expressed negative views of its programming, reinforcing the American popular view. For example, the highly regarded New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that the US ouster of Saddam “triggered the first conversations in the Arab world about reform”, but as Shibley Telhami has pointed out, this is not so.[13] And Marc Lynch has also demonstrated Friedman was wrong, citing programs on torture in Arab prisons, Arab brain drain, crisis in Arab education, sham presidential elections, women’s rights, the failure of Arab democracy, states of emergency, corruption. [14]

From the beginning, al Jazeera talk shows included guests with a very wide range of opinions. They included strong critics of Arab governments, corruption, lack of reform, etc. In 2002-03, they reflected widespread opposition to war that much of the American domestic media ignored, but allowed pro-war Americans like Douglas Feith, Danielle Pletka, and Patrick Clawson to speak out. In 2003-2006 it reported regularly on the Iraqi humanitarian cost of war which the US media have given little attention to.

In effect, al Jazeera and several other Arab TV channels reflected Arab public opinion in its diversity. On balance, United States policy has received considerably more negative than positive comment on Arab TV, but that generally reflects Arab public opinion.

As for Radio Sawa, its only positive achievement seems to be that it has increased the reach of U.S. government radio broadcasting in Arabic to more Arab audiences than VOA had, by means of the series of agreements that the BBG concluded to gain access to local FM frequencies. The major problem for VOA Arabic over the years was that its medium wave signal was not audible in many parts of the Arab world. V OA Arabic did have a good short wave signal but as a rule Arab audiences no longer listen to short wave, so this was ineffectual. And because of the technical problem of a lack of medium wave frequencies for VOA Arabic, which was only partially solved after Desert Storm with transmitters in Kuwait, the medium wave signal remained unheard by many Arab audiences. Radio Sawa took over all of the VOA Arabic frequencies, and added FM in some places, giving Radio Sawa some increased access to Arab audiences. But because the establishment of Radio Sawa meant that VOA Arabic went off the air, the net effect of the change was negative, because Radio Sawa’s program was much less appealing to a broad spectrum of listeners and had less serious content than VOA Arabic had. The BBG does not sponsor studies comparing Radio Sawa to Arab-owned radio stations, but independent and informal monitoring and anecdotal information clearly indicate that the content of Radio Sawa is not interesting to large numbers of Arab listeners who used to tune in to VOA Arabic broadcasts.[15]

Al Hurra and Radio Sawa have failed because of their program content. Independent public opinion polls show that only 1% of Arab viewers regard al Hurra as their first choice among TV stations. Nevertheless the Bush administration continues to support it and in 2006 asked Congress to increase its budget by 13%.[16] It is however likely that Radio Sawa and al Hurra Television will survive because Congress wants to “do something” about what it sees as Arab media hostility. Members of Congress generally are unaware of the fact that these new channels are ineffectual, because there is no independent oversight, and members themselves have no ability to monitor the content of these programs. Officials and employees of the BBG have persuaded key members of Congress that these channels are a success, and that as led to repeated funding which is likely to continue.

The Pentagon’s Involvement

The U.S. Department of Defense has become involved in these matters, primarily as a result of the war on terror and the occupation of Iraq.

Pentagon officials were fully in charge of the planning and execution of the invasion of Iraq, deliberately excluding the State Department even from planning for the postwar occupation. [17]

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld added his voice to Washington’s criticism of al Jazeera. In April 2004, he accused al Jazeera of “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable reporting”, for example because he said it falsely accused U.S. forces of attacking civilians.[18] Later, as problems in Iraq continued, Rumsfeld made a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations on February 17, 2006, in which he laid out what he regarded as a major Arab media problem for the Pentagon and the U.S. government. He started by quoting al Qaida deputy Ayman al Zawahari as saying “More than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media. We are in a media battle in a race for the hearts and minds of Muslims”. Rumsfeld’s concluded: “Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today’s media age, but for the most part we, our country, our government, has not adopted.” He said, “The growing number of media outlets in many parts of the world have relatively immature standards and practices that all too often serve to inflame and distort, rather than to explain and inform. And while Qaeda and extremist movements have utilized this forum for many years and have successfully further poisoned the Muslim’s public view of the West, we in the government have barely begin to compete in reaching their audiences.” He said, “The standard U.S. Government public affairs operation was designed primarily to respond to individual requests for information. It …still operates for the most part on an eight-hour, five- or six-day week basis, while the world events and our enemies are operating 24/7 across every time zone. That’s an unacceptable dangerous deficiency.[19]

Rumsfeld’s comments indicate that he clearly does not have a solution to the Arab media problem that he described. Moreover, he seemed to be focusing primarily on television, despite the fact that the terrorists’ primary focus was on the Internet.

Pentagon representatives have however tried to fix what they see as an unfair media situation in Iraq. They hired an American private Company, the Lincoln Group, to write news stories and place them in Iraqi media by paying the editor to use them, and by keeping secret the fact that the U.S. Government was the sponsor of the story. This practice was revealed in a Los Angeles Times story on November 30, 2005, that said the Lincoln group had a $6 million contract to conduct secret media activities. American public reaction was negative. A USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll in Dec 2005 found 72% of the American public was opposed DOD planting stories in the media. The Pentagon nevertheless clearly intends to stay involved in media relations. The press reported that the Joint Psychological Operations Support Element had undertaken a 5-year $300 million PR program aimed at the press.[20] In reaction to the initial negative American press stories, the Pentagon announced that it had started an investigation of it, and the White House and Congress also indicated their disapproval by asking for details of the program. Yet indications are that the Lincoln effort continued, quietly.

Secretary Rumsfeld has not denounced the practice of paying for secret placement in foreign media, but there are several problems with it. First, it creates the precedent of payment for placement which undermines normal placement activities of State Department Public Affairs officers. Secondly, it drives the price up when he practice becomes known, as it inevitably does. Third, it undermines the principle of a free press that we espouse, inviting the accusation that Americans follow a double standard.

What are the Pentagon’s plans for the future? In his February 2006 speech, Secretary Rumsfeld indicated that although he does not know what the solution is to the problem of Arab media as he defined it, he expects the Pentagon to remain involved in trying to deal with it. DOD has very substantial financial and manpower resources that can be devoted to the issue, so if Rumsfeld the President want the Pentagon to continue to play a key role, it will do so.

The Belated Effort at State

Although the State Department has since 1999 been the U.S. government agency officially charged with carrying out the functions of public diplomacy, including managing relations with Arab and other foreign media, its effort did not expand at first after 9/11 despite the attention many members of Congress and others paid to the problem of Arab media. The end of the Cold War had led to a decline in public diplomacy funding and staffing, and the 1999 USIA-State merger had failed to create the more effective public diplomacy performance that its advocates had expected. After 9/11, the White House still showed little interest in energizing public diplomacy for another four years, until late 2005 when President Bush appointed his long time trusted advisor Karen Hughes to be Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department.

As soon as Karen Hughes took over her new responsibilities, it became clear that she at least recognized problems she faced. [21] In less than one year in that position, she has made some positive changes.

First, she encouraged U.S. government officials to appear on al Jazeera and other Arab satellite television programs, reversing a defacto boycott that had been in effect since 9/11. She appeared on al Jazeera herself and then made a highly publicized visit to that station’s headquarters in Qatar. In making these approaches to Arab satellite television, she showed that she recognized the importance of that medium in reaching Arab audiences, and she tacitly acknowledges that it is more productive to work with it rather than trying to demonize it and boycott it.

Secondly, in early 2006, Karen Hughes established a Rapid Reaction Unit at the State Department to monitor foreign media on a 24/7 basis and report on it quickly to senior policy makers in the government. The function of monitoring foreign media is one that for decades USIA had managed, using field officers in embassies all over the world, and staffs in Washington to process the reports. This function fell into neglect after the end of the Cold War. The RRU is separate from and parallel to the similar operations at DOD and CIA, but there is some coordination between these three agencies. State’s RRU receives the Rendon reports on foreign media that the Pentagon produces, and personnel from the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) also work with RRU staff. [22]

Third, Karen Hughes has encouraged an effort by the public diplomacy staff in the State Department’s Near East Bureau in Washington to reach out to Arab media by carrying out an aggressive program of newspaper interviews and appearances on Arab television, as well as on al Hurra and Radio Sawa. This new Arab Media Outreach program has had some success in raising the profile of American officials in Arab media, and using them as a platform for the presentation of American views.

Fourth, Karen Hughes herself has traveled several times to the Arab world where she has engaged in discussions with a variety of people, and then reported back to President Bush on key elements in foreign opinion on America and its policies.

Fifth, Karen Hughes and her deputy Dina Powell have increased the programming Arab journalists as exchange visitors. They created a “Murrow Journalism Fellowship” program that in April 2006 brought 130 to the United States, half of them from the Arab world, where they learned about American journalism and other aspects of American life. They have also supported the increase in foreign language study for Americans including Arabic

Finally, the State Department also has made an effort to make use of the Internet, creating a web site based in Washington, and web sites at individual embassies around the world, including in the Arab countries. Also, some enterprising embassy public affairs officers have used text messaging and other new communication techniques to reach their target audiences with policy statements and official analyses.[23]

Problems remain

There are several problems that remain in the U.S. government’s handling of the new Arab media.

First of all, by most accounts, the newly created broadcasting stations, Radio Sawa and al Hurra Television, have failed in their stated purpose to provide credible competition for the new Arab media. The problem is not that they are sponsored by the U.S. Government, since Arab audiences are used to listening to government-sponsored radio and watching government-sponsored television, and they are interested in these media while taking the sponsor’s bias into account. The central problem for Radio Sawa and al Hurra Television is than neither one provides the content that is of a high standard and level of interest to appeal to an Arab audience bombarded every day with many media choices. Unless the content of these US-sponsored stations improves, the millions of dollars spent on them every year will continue to be wasted.

Secondly, recent developments have left the U.S. government’s handling of the new media in the Arab world in an uncoordinated and haphazard fashion. The 1999 legislation that abolished USIA and in effect made the Broadcasting Board of governors independent of any policy guidance from the State Department, created two quite separate government agencies – the BBG and State - that both try to deal with the new Arab media but independently of each other. In addition, the fact that the Pentagon has taken the lead in the war and occupation of Iraq, and that the Secretary of Defense has both the funding and the determination to make DOD active in dealing with Arab media, have created a situation in which the Pentagon and the State Department are conducting separate and parallel efforts with regard to these media. Adding to the confusion, the CIA continues to monitor Arab media as it has done for decades through FBIS. There is some interchange and communication along these separate agencies, but little real coordination. The comments of the Secretary of Defense on these matters reveal little inclination to give up the key role his Department has assumed since 9/11 in dealing with Arab media.

Third, there remains some reluctance on the part of U.S. officials to deal directly with some of the new Arab media such as al Jazeera. The efforts of Karen Hughes to reverse the de facto boycott of certain Arab television channels has been a useful step in the right direction, but many U.S. officials still regard the new Arab media as the enemy to be boycotted, and that is a counter-productive attitude. Moreover, laws passed by Congress prohibiting American citizens from any contact with organizations designated by the U.S. Government as terrorist, also inhibit effective dealing with the new Arab media. For example since the Al Manar Television in Lebanon is owned and operated by Hizbollah, and Hizbollah is considered by the U.S. government (but not by the Lebanese government) as a terrorist organization, American officials and private citizens are not allowed to appear on al Manar. This TV station has consistently slanted its news and commentary in an anti-American direction, but because of U.S. law, Americans cannot present American views on it even if they are invited to do so. We deny ourselves the opportunity to present our views on this important channel of the new Arab media.

Finally, behind these bureaucratic problems is one of the attitude of the U.S. government including those at the top. Marc Lynch in his excellent book has it right when he says that President Bush has treated the Arab public sphere “either as an enemy to be defeated (in a “war of ideas”) or as an object to be manipulated (via public relations).” As Lynch says, “Between the harsh attacks on the Arab satellite stations and its decision to launch an Arabic language satellite station (al Hurra) in order to have its own (controllable) voice in the Arab arena, American policy has seemed designed to marginalize and weaken the Arab public sphere as an effective political voice. But these policies have largely failed.” Instead, Lynch says, the US should “enter more directly into the Arab public sphere and engage with it in a real dialogue, relying on reasoned argument rather than power.” He points out that the Arabs are opinionated, “well-informed and proud of their identity” and they tend to be offended by American propaganda and highly suspicious of American motives.” He adds: “By treating them as enemies the United States risks not only losing a powerful ally for change, but also pushes these influential voices into a hostile camp. [24]

Remedies

The new Arab media are a fact of life that the U.S. Government finds in some respects unfriendly but they cannot be wished away or forced to disappear by ignoring them. There are, however, some steps that could be taken to improve the way the U.S. government deals with the new Arab media. Following are briefly stated suggestions, that require no great elaboration because the rationale for them should have emerged from the above discussion.

First, the VOA Arabic service should be revived.

Secondly, the program content of Radio Sawa and al Hurra Television should be substantially improved, or these stations should be abolished. Improvement could best be started by the appointment of an independent panel of outside experts, made up of native speakers of Arabic who know broadcasting and know both America and the Arab world, who would review program content and make suggested changes.

Third, the public diplomacy budget of the State department should be substantially increased, and its mandate to take the lead in public diplomacy matters should be reconfirmed. At the same time, the DOD effort to deal with Arab media should be fully coordinated with the State Department, and parts of it transferred to State as appropriate.

Finally, as a general proposition, support should be given the efforts of Undersecretary Karen Hughes, because in less than one year she has managed to shift the emphasis of the Bush administration from unilateralism to dialogue, from boycott of the new Arab media to engagement. Only by treating the new Arab media with respect and trying to make use of it to engage Arab audiences in a discussion of matters of mutual interest, will the United States be able to deal with them successfully.

Notes & References

[1] For details, see William A. Rugh, Arab Mass Media, Praeger/Greenwood, 2004

[2] Arab Mass Media, chapters 10 and 11

[3] William A. Rugh, American Encounters with Arabs: the “soft power” of U.S. Public Diplomacy in the Middle East, Westport, CT: Praeger/Greenwood, 2006, pp.144-46

[4] Arab Mass Media, pp.233-34

[5] Quoted by Marc Lynch, “America and the Arab Media Environment”, in William A. Rugh, Ed., Engaging the Arab and Islamic Worlds Through Public Diplomacy, Washington DC: Public Diplomacy Council, 2004, p.98

[6] Abu Aardvark 2/17/06

[7] This author and other Americans were invited to appear often on al Jazeera and other Arab satellite channels in the months following 9/11, because their editors wanted to include an American point of view in their discussion programs.

[8] American Encounters with Arabs, p.178

[9] For details, see Alan Heil Jr., “The History of VOA Arabic”, in Engaging the Arab and Islamic Worlds, pp.49-68

[10] Lynch in Engaging the Arab and Islamic Worlds, pp.97-98

[11] Ken Tomlinson, testimony before the SFRC, 108^th congress, 2^nd session, 4/29/2004, quoted by Lynch, in William Rugh, Engaging the Arab and Islamic Worlds, p.92

[12] Marc Lynch, Voices of the New Arab Public, NY: Columbia University Press, 2006

[13] Shibley Telhami, The Stakes, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002. p.95

[14] Marc Lynch, in William Rugh, Ed., Engaging the Arab and Islamic Worlds

[15] Information from various informed observers

[16] AbuAardvark,com website 2/14/06, citing a Zogby poll.

[17] Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: the Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, New York: Pantheon, 2006, pp.147-48 and 159

[18] LAT and Washington Times, 4/28/04, and William A. Rugh in Global Media Journal, fall 2004

[19] Donald Rumsfeld speech to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), New York, 2/17/2006

[20] USA Today 3/23/06

[21] See her HIRC testimony 11/10/05, her CFR speech 5/10/06, and her NPR interview 3/28/06

[22] Interview with RRU director, May 2006

[23] For example, the PAO at the U.S. embassy in Cairo set up a system by which he uses text messaging to alert key target audience members when a significant new policy statement has come out of Washington.

[24] Marc Lynch, Voices, p.250-51

Convergence, Next Phase of the Information Revolution

meaningfulconnections — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 18:32:20 +0000

Jon W. Anderson, Catholic University of America

Revised version of a contribution to the workshop on New Media and the Reconstruction of Popular Culture in the Arab World. Georgetown University Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies. May 17, 2006

Excitement over the revolutionary potentials of new media and information technologies in the Middle East that accompanied the advent of the Internet, satellite television and mobile phones in the 1990s focused on them as alternatives. New technologies, alternative channels, and indications of alternative political and other discourses breaking into the public suggested transformation of a public sphere, in the main organized institutionally, not only with new voices but also new people. The boundary-busting potentials of NMIT were seen first in terms of alternatives by those who welcomed them and by those with reservations. Indeed, reservations – moral, cultural, political anxieties over new information and communications technologies and new media – seemed to confirm their status primarily as alternatives.

Time and experience have outrun this paradigm, however. Many new actors turned out to have roots in old establishments. Often it was the cadet generations of elites who brought the new technologies. Governments proved adept at deploying the underlying technologies to their own ends. Much content seemed trivial, or little more than demonstration projects, while old models of information, such as of journalism, translated all to well to new media.[1] Similarly, cell phones became extensions of the Arab family or the Internet of Arab publishers; early experiments such as Arabia Online were absorbed into media conglomerates; by the millennium established religious figures had their sermons, lessons, and outreach on the Internet for the populations it drew and aggregated. Alongside Al-Jazeera Satellite Channel were many more offering entertainment from old movies to the most recent popstars. Beirut’s old book exhibition hall may have been turned into an Internet café, but Lebanon’s main new Internet media were headed by scions of old publishing families or by religious broadcasters.[2] Plus ca change?

Yes, new media and information technologies afford individual alternatives; but they also become foci of alliances as actors sort and piece together technologies and applications, creating new configurations of tools, tasks, and arrangements that did not exist before,[3] and which transcend mere cooptation, on the one hand, as much as mere diffusion, on the other hand. The ‘alternatives’ model is not enough.

Alternatives models are insufficient because they isolate actors as individuals from the larger story of how micro-processes of networked communication are working through today’s macro-processes of globalization. This is a story of informational and technological mobility, of shifting reflexivities that intensify and remix cultural and other practices, of highly unstable assemblages and contingent effects, and – considered politically – a displacement of politics framed by nation states in terms of massing constituencies and consensus.[5] Instead of moving old politics to a freer domain, knowing how (expertise), showing up (self activation), burnishing of reputations, as well as ideologies of multistakeholderism and subsidiarity come to the fore of the politics of networked communication, or communication in a regime of networks rather than a regime of groups operationalised as constituencies and consensus.

To render more of the sociology and politics of this process, I’ve found it analytically useful to think of three interrelated layers

Demographics

New Media

Information Technologies

composing the larger whole. This is not a progression from the material to the ethereal. IT is more than hardware: it includes software, its developers and their educational and other support networks, financiers, regulators, and ties with multiple ‘user’ communities.[4] So do the media, which mix telecos, broadcasters, ‘content’ suppliers, their brokers and market researchers, financiers and regulators. Likewise, demographics covers multiple aspects of populations from numbers to class characteristics, career patterns to lifestyle choices, and how people use (and produce) information that enters this ‘stack’. Each layer could be broken down further, and each is – importantly – itself an extensive network: they have horizontal and vertical relations and, moreover, those are dynamic.

We are only beginning to understand this new regime. An early macro approach was Castells’ concept of a dialectic of self, or identity, and proliferating networks through which it is expressed and thus variously magnified and migrated.[6] Another, represented in this workshop, is a turn from ‘information’ instrumentally conceived and ranging from news to more didactic forms, including religion,[7] to expression, particularly the burgeoning entertainment side of new media in the Middle East.

Some of the attention that initially focused on new media has shifted to entertainment as a site of politics – specifically democratic politics – and brought along the model of alternatives. Star Search from Future TV, with its pan-Arab song contest that some saw as modeled on American Idol, but which also has precursors in the annual European song contests,[8] was hailed with the same accolades earlier lavished on Al-Jazeera and on the Internet. The enthusiastic voting for winners via phone and the Internet was proof of yearning for and capability of democracy in the region comparable, in one version, to the Federalist Papers,[9] presumably for reframing pan-Arabism as an electoral space. Millions of ‘votes’ poured into what was hailed as the first ‘pan-Arab election’. But even discounting the hype, the exaggeration, and effervescence, there is something decidedly odd about such views.

In the first place, such infotainment is widely derided in the West as a degradation of agora to circus, as it were. Yet, here, its mirror image was hailed – circus as agora. How can what is bad in the West be good for Arabs, be regarded as a sort of opening of politics? More exceptionalism?

Second, the assessment rests on the liberal habit of blurring commercial and political popularities around the notion of free individual choice, the “sovereign consumer.” This construction analytically isolates individuals from structural and practical settings of their actions and frames IT and new media primarily in terms of agency enhacement. Even if this highlights agency, and the agency-enhancing features of IT, and even if all, or only some, of the voters in Star Search were obliquely sending a message to their rulers, as Al-Jazeera watchers are said to be doing, or just grasping the opportunity to express opinion, this is still cultural politics in a field of consumption. And, third, that is a realm that is truly transnational when it comes to music (and other expression, notably religion) in the Arab world, and so at least partly beyond the bounds of citizenship.

Locally, Star Search was absorbed into cultural politics. Star Search’s local/regional critics included old liberals, for whom politics is serious business and who make it their business to take politics seriously. What if the renaissance is rock-and-roll? Among other culture managers weighing in, religious traditionalists looked askance from perspectives in which music is suspect and entertainment a diversion from what they view as serious business. So, we have elections that resemble nothing so much as commercial choice, in a realm that is popular but also commercial, or in structural terms part of a continuum that includes serious literature (hence the liberal critique) and pop culture but also folklore, religion and commerce; structurally viewed, such actions could have occurred anywhere along it.

But these are not separate systems. The homonymous assessments of Star Search (as moral harbinger, moral crisis, or just a diversion) demonstrate connections. But what kind? Stepping back for a moment, framing Star Search – and, by extension, other forms of entertainment in the Arab world – as politics by other means or proofs of democratic capability or another iteration of pan-Arabism infiltrating politics from a cultural realm may miss structural features of this mixing and morphing of the political and cultural, expressive and instrumental, that converge in this spectacle.

Over a generation ago, Ithiel da Sola Pool looked at early networked communication and saw a series of convergences of

- computing and communications
- different channels into a single channel
- different kinds of data into a single stream
- work and leisure into a single activity

that we have come to know in the Internet, mobile telephony and satellite television.[10] This concept of ‘convergence’ carries some baggage in the social sciences, and not least in Pool’s, where there is a direct line from Max Weber to Pool’s colleague W.W. Rostow, who famously cast modernization as a convergence of all economies into a Western model, and on to Fukuyama’s anticipation of the ultimate adoption by everyone of parliamentary democracy and market economies.[11] Pool’s view of convergence was infused with this vision, which is not only empirically problematic but has been abandoned in turns from modernization theories in last generation to globalization in this one.

So what does convergence look like under globalization? A lot less like homogenization of the modernization theorists and a lot more like blurred boundaries, de-centering, remix and other characteristics of post-modern culture. Moreover, its primary, or at least most visible, sites are those most characteristic of the post-industrial economy – namely, the rise of service sectors and, within them, of information services and a general ‘informationalisation’ of services.[12]

Why should this matter in the Middle East, which many in the region think largely bypassed by industrialization and a global laggard in its diagnostic networked communication, the Internet? Well, because Star Search, when viewed more inclusively than as an Arab version of American Idol or of the Federalist Papers – which is to say, when viewed in its own context and how that context shares larger ones – is an example of convergence under the regime of globalization. Contestants from all over the Arab world competed to be chosen top Arab singer by audience voting. Observers were quick to seize on the spectacle of the first transnational ‘election’ in the Arab world as a political indicator, not least because it became framed as Arab politics are popularly framed, as identity politics. But perhaps the direction of this flow is the other way. Out of the limelight, but only barely, the regional technology community noticed, too. Voting that was recorded on the television show was done via telephone, e-mail over the Internet and SMS (text-messaging) over cell phones that not only had become ubiquitous throughout the region but are interoperable between countries. That is, ‘voting’ occurred in a space that was not only transnational, it was not even national at all, by fans and in a space of communications; despite active lobbying and campaigns for home-country favorites, it was not organized by or through national organs or institutions of state but some cases in spite of state efforts to forbid such voting.[13]

Taken as a whole, there could hardly be a better example of boundary-crossing, or ‘flows’, and unstable associations characteristic of globalization. Transnational Arab satellite TV programs already pointed viewers to associated websites and frequently solicited SMS messages, which they ran as banners on the screen. They already invited audience participation that extended mobile and Internet interactivity to previously passive television. They sought interaction for a multitude of reasons from quick-and-dirty market research to come-ons in pursuit of competitive advantage to branding in order to hold particular audiences. Second, this had spread throughout both entertainment channels on satellite TV and the Internet as well as those devoted to news and opinion (including religious channels and websites). Third, this is, if anything, pre-political in its aggregation of individual preferences translated unmediated by institutions into individual actions: one click, one vote. The messages were sent not to Cairo or Damascus or Riyadh, but to a television company; they were sent over wires and waves that telecoms companies charged to use.

The bulk of LBC’s income from arguably one of the most popular Arab television shows of all time as measured by viewership came not from sponsors but through revenue-sharing with telecoms companies, which made millions. One estimate (based on call rates and numbers of calls) was $2.1 million in voting revenue for 6.5 million votes in 2003 and $1.8 million voting revenue for 4.5 million calls in 2004 attributable to mobile and voice telephone voting in the first Star Search flowing to the telecos that provided those services.[14] In business terms, Star Search ‘monetized’ amateur performance by selling rights to vote on it through a third party, for whom they generated the traffic. (This while telecoms have anxiously sought additional content to expand their custom from wireless email to multimedia messaging to mobile television.[15])

This is what ‘convergence’ looks like as globalization: it includes media that morph into each other, messages that migrate across boundaries and technologies, unanticipated assemblages, shifting reflexivities and leveraging externalities. Returning to the model of a stack of IT, New Media, Demographics and thinking of each layer as a network of relations with multiple others that may be attached to the stack, we may conceive of the convergences they represent as fusions of networks (in the model, along vertical axes). For each activity, project, or practice, connections between the layers are different, engaging some nodes in each layer and not others. In this way, we can see how Star Search is, first, different from politics in some respects and similar in others and, second, how these linkages are dynamic. It wasn’t because voting was political behavior but because the format was already shared between entertainment channels and those for news-and-opinion. In addition, relations of television to mobile telephony and the Internet forged through messages shift when revenue-sharing is added; the relation of cultural to other politics shift when states respecify uses of SMS, much like attempts to structure Internet services (and so the business opportunities) by social policies such as previously for telephony. And so on.

If we think of convergence as fusions of networks, we must think of them as multiple and dynamic rather than determinative or derivative. So what are limits, conditions? Some of the enabling conditions include standardization, which makes networks interoperable. The type site is the Internet, which is solely software based and designed from the beginning to operate over any network, any format of signals propagation – hence, the ease of its spread and its flexible, but also incomplete, adaptation to social and political structures. Something similar is seen in the rapid ‘convergence’ of mobiles and satellite TV; part of their attraction is that both are ‘transnational’, hence the move of mobiles’ SMS messaging to TV, in one direction, is matched in the other by business use of messaging for aggregation (such as sending market information, weather reports, etc.) or for multimedia. As industries come together, and old relations come apart, different media practices and information engage different numbers and kinds of people that resolve variously as publics, niche markets, age and class cohorts.

Conceiving of these primarily as bringing choice to the fore obscures their intermediating structures. Remixing (such as in combining entertainment and voting, television and Internet) and moving to different platforms (politics to culture, mobiles to television, and vice versa) depend on convergences not only of platforms but also on user contributions that are also features of organization by networks. The first phase of convergence as fusion of networks may have been the migration on-line of all transnational and nearly every major local Arab newspaper that, among other things, opened each to every others’ market or readership. With the prices of moving increments of the same information tending toward zero, when all are online, monopolization shifts from controlling channels to branding, or to ‘network externalities’ such as who is on the network. This is, if anything, more apparent in the migration online of religious networks. Even the aggregators present distinct perspectives, and even in implementing the universal imperative of outreach. Initially, going on-line migrates the message of a shaykh or school or dawa organization to another demographic, one that works and recreates on-line, whose practices and interests they have to mesh.[16]

Let me suggest some empirical features of convergence as fusion of networks that seem to stand out and to be connected. In no particular order, they are:

1) Rapid expansions of telecommunications. This brings more access, often by shifting consumer use to new media. New media bring not only new networks, but also those who use them into relations with each other. With expansion of telecommunications capacity and channels, capacity to transfer information (data for work, entertainment, religion) across borders also expands.

2) Software platforms stabilize, providing bases for developing applications within a wider community than when each machine had its own operating system, or where each company promoted its own, keeping streams of information separate and hindering the informatization of services.

3) Commodity computers and software applications replace customized ‘integrations’– the same is true for mobile phones, which are computers – shifting convergence up the “stack” where end users create the input, extend uses, and ‘remix’ contents (i.e., treating them as commodities).

4) Instead of the disintermediation initially predicted, new intermediaries arise to provide services that involve combining technologies, channels, types of data on top of relatively stable platforms. At the individual level, this facilitates ‘citizen media’ and ‘remixing’ different data streams into one’s own product.

5) Elites embrace ‘off-shoring’ practices and as a business model, particularly for transnational media and for building out the soft infrastructures of the information revolution. What may begin as catch-up, in time not only shifts from vertical integrations to horizontal relations, but out-sourcing tends also to move from commodities like testing and programming to design or, likewise in media, from supplying material to conceiving it.

6) Venture investing increasingly competes with central planning, both practically and as a model for resource allocation. More sources feed and feed on specialization over integrated enterprises.

7) Globalization of education that began as access to foreign training has proceeded to institutional and curricular convergence (around international standards), and then multiplication of delivery channels (private universities, corporate training centers, online training).

8) Business/legal convergences in the ‘soft infrastructure’ of trade and property, such as WTO and WIPO, tend to shift the focus of monopolization to branding, and with that the focus of regulation from protecting industrial sectors to protecting ever-growing lists of products, services and (most problematically) information.

This is primarily a list, not a theory, but enough to suggest that what we see in Star Search and in entertainment generally is not a move of politics to culture or the kind of convergence imagined in the modernization paradigm. The former projects a kind of individual hydraulic, while the Rostov paradigm, which Pool shared, imagined all systems becoming more alike, ‘converging’ on a single model. But convergence today is more a matter of boundary crossing, recombinations, highly unstable assemblages, intensifying mobility of media, messages, and technologies that shape convergence as fusion of networks.

Recasting convergence as fusion of networks opens such processes to analysis of alliance-formation and building coalitions around new technologies and new media.[17] In these more political terms, we may see beyond the expressive agency foregrounded in entertainment to instrumental agencies as, for example, different expertises become assets. I do not wish to suggest that the more expressive sides, exemplified in entertainment, are without political significance. They are objects of intense politicking as cultural watchdogs weigh in or as contests develop over the revenue streams they generate. I do mean to suggest that what they signal, however, is not an alternative to or replacement for politics that dare not otherwise speak its name. Instead, Star Search represents a specific irruption of politics that emerges in network societies and networked communications, where mobile media and technologies morph and remix; where claims to participate are based on showing up, on expertise and on appeals to universals; where unstable assemblages and contingent effects may vanish instantly in all but memory when everyone goes home, some move to the next event, or the whole thing proves fleeting.[18] It may be better to think of these as post-national politics because they do not presume the features of national states, such as formation of constituencies or of consensus (whether by consent or imposition), both of which are far more temporary and limited in scope under conditions of globalization, but also more dynamic.

With Star Search and other entertainment programs that solicit SMS and email responses, opinion shows with phone-in, websites that invite visitors to vote on issues or topics of the moment, conceptualizing convergence as fusion of networks captures equally observable facts of fragmentation, failures of meanings to resolve in a unitary fashion, and that users may be interacting with each other. We may unite these processes analytically as fusion of networks and get on with tracing what, precisely, is being brought together. It may not be information sources and information seekers. For, if youth are voting on and campaigning for singers over the heads of their elders and the borders of their countries, they are also ‘branding’ revolution for TV, and playing to more than just the cameras by advertising for participation via SMS and over the Web, such as also recently in Lebanon (see Kraidy, Beyond Al-Jazeera: Social and Political Dimensions of Arab Reality Television).

Notes

[1] Jon Alterman, New Media, New Politics (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1998).

[2] Yves Gonzalez-Quijano, “Birth of a New Media Ecosystem.” In New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, Dale F. Eickelman & Jon W. Anderson, eds. (Indiana University Press, second edition 2002).

[3] Michael C. Hudson & Jon W. Anderson. Internet Pioneers in the Arab Middle East: Routes to the Information Superhighway in Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia (CCAS Occasional Papers, forthcoming).

[4] Jon W. Anderson. “Producers and Middle East Internet Technology: Getting beyond ‘Impacts’” The Middle East Journal 54(3): 401-31, Summer 2000.

[5] This bundle of features is laid out paradigmatically in the Introduction and explored in individual case studies in Reformatting Politics: Networked Communication and Global Civil Society (Jodi Dean, Jon W. Anderson and Geert Lovink, eds. Forthcoming from Routledge, August 2006).

[6] Manuel Castells. The Information Society (Blackwells, 1996).

[7] Dale F. Eickelman & Jon W. Anderson, eds. New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere (Indiana University Press, 1999; second edition 2002). Also Gary Bunt, Islam in the Digital Age (Pluto Press, 2003).

[8] The program was produced by FreemantleMedia, which is based in Europe and produces over 260 TV programs for 39 countries per year. Arab Advisors Group. “Superstar’s second season voting is not as stellar as the first season’s.” Media Strategic Service Report. September 5, 2004.

[9] Tyler Mackenzie. “Found in Translation: A TV version of the Federalist Papers? Yes, in a Way. We know it as ‘American Idol’” Wall Street Journal, 24 September 2004.

[10] Ithiel da Sola Pool. Technologies without Boundaries. (Harvard University Press, 1990).

[11] Walter W. Rostow, Economic Growth; Francis Fukuyama, The End of History

[12] Sometimes called “from atoms to bits,” e.g., Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital (1995); better grounded in the economic sociologist Saskia Sassen’s The Global City (199x).

[13] This is what registers to observers inside and outside the region as a sort of ‘we [the people] will show you [the state]” quality.

[14] Arab Advisors Group, above.

[15] A central theme of now annual conferences on convergence in telecoms and media industries since 2004 by the region’s first market research firm focusing exclusively on these sectors, the Arab Advisors Group based in Amman, Jordan.

[16] Jon W. Anderson. “New Media, New Publics: Reconfiguring the Public Sphere of Islam” Social Research 70(3): 887-906, 2003.

[17] Hudson & Anderson, Internet Pioneers (forthcoming).

[18] Or maybe not. David Knoke and Mark Granovetter (Political Networks: The Structural Perspective. Cambridge University Press, 1990), specify influence as information that passes through networks and domination as constraints they impose on decisions.

Negotiating Nationhood on the Net: The Case of the Turcomans and Assyrians of Iraq

meaningfulconnections — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 18:28:31 +0000

Hala Fattah, Royal Institute of Interfaith Studies, Amman.
Prepared for Going Native on the Net: Indigenous Cyberactivism and Virtual Diasporas over the World Wide Web, edited by Kyra Landzelius (forthcoming from Routledge) … November 2001 .

A central argument that has swirled around the contours of the Iraqi nation from its inception in the 1920s has migrated to the Internet. The argument pits the legitimacy of Iraq as a nation-state against that of a whole host of different “national” communities settled within the modern state. The claim has been made that Iraq has never cohered into a nation because successive governments have prevented the assimilation and integration of “the multiple histories of Iraqis” into “a single narrative of state power”.1 The argument is more a Western construct than an indigenous formulation. State-centered ideology is not monolithic and has its ebbs and flows: in certain periods (such as under the monarchy), Iraqis did indeed forge solid ties of marriage, commercial partnerships, and social relationships across ethnic and sectarian lines.2 Moreover, Iraqi nationalism appeals to certain groups more than others. Various observers have noted that, over the last eighty years, some of the Kurds and some of the Shi’a have been somewhat more ambivalent about their Iraqi identity than others in the country. Recently, different ways in which social groups both inside and outside of Iraq are currently reformulating their ties to Iraq and notions of “Iraq” have appeared on the Internet at the same time that the country passes through one of the severest tests in its history.

Re-affiliation or re-identification with Iraq is apparent on the World Wide Web, where a significant renegotiating of history, ethnicity and religion is visibly gathering momentum on dozens of “Iraqi” sites. There, particularist interpretations of history, culture and politics intersect with projections of national and “pre-national”groups, all of which have their own websites. This article is concerned with the sites of two important social groupings in Iraq, the Turcomans and Assyrians. One of the meta-issues in the debate is how best to make use of a particular community’s history in the battle to re-envision a collectivity’s “place” on the national agenda, even as that agenda is constantly shifting due to forces outside of the country’s control. Perhaps most interesting is the way that these communities seek to relinquish their formal ties with Iraq the state as presently constituted, while at the same time attempting to reinsinuate themselves in the ongoing dialogue to remake the Iraqi nation of the future.

Interpretations of the past, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities makes clear,[3] may also be used to justify a minority group’s vision of inclusion/exclusion in a reformulated Iraqi state. Presuming that “identity and community are to a significant degree constructed and subject to invention and reimagination,”[4] I am interested in finding out how self-identified Turcomans and Assyrians are attempting to overcome political marginalization by means of the rational representation of their past and future. Dirk Hoerder points that nations or cultural groups “assert special group rights against other groups which define themselves as nations, [but] the democratic state…is theorized as neutral and thus as treating each and every person as equal, regardless of culture, ethnicity, religion, color of skin, gender, class or position in the life cycle.”[5] How then are the Turcomans and Assyrians actively reshaping their national identities by manipulating history, ethnicity and information? And how are they confronting the reality of an undemocratic state?

Finally, since the Internet is not available to everyone, it is important to ask where Iraqi sites are located in the “real” world. With the exception of several Kurdish sites operating from the “safe haven” of northern Iraq, and some Iraqi government sites relayed through Jordanian servers, the majority of cyber groups online emerge in the greater Iraqi diaspora. A large proportion of these are situated in north America and represent exiles, refugees and political dissidents whose broader agendas include social justice, political freedom, greater cultural rights and more representative government. The Turcoman and Assyrian web sites reviewed in this article are most definitely the expression of the Iraqi diaspora; none that I have looked at are situated in Iraq proper or Iraqi Kurdistan.

Ethnicity and Sectarian Affiliation in Iraqi Sites on the Web.

Among the more sophisticated sites on Iraq on the Internet are several that refuse to openly call themselves Iraqi. Because of their tortuous relations with the Iraqi state, particularly the Baath regime of the last thirty-two years, as well as a direct consequence of the political fallout from the Gulf war, most Assyrian web sites marginalize their national connections to Iraq, and promote a quasi-separatist agenda that bypasses the state, but accentuate the long cultural and historic roots of the community in the region. On the other hand, most Turcoman sites are adamant about their Iraqi-ness, but equally ambivalent about their connections to the Iraqi state. While the web has allowed both communities infinite freedom to actualize their national potential (if only in the virtual world), certain constraints inhibit both communities’ attempts at further self-actualization online. Because Iraq still harbors a sizeable Turcoman and Assyrian population caught between government strategies and US designs, a clear realization seems to prevail among activists on the web that neither community is entirely free to redesign its national agenda; certain limitations most definitely take over when co-religionists or co-ethnics are leading precarious lives in the home country. Coupled with a genuine feeling that Iraq is indeed one of the national homes of both Turcomans and Assyrians, this residual connection to an idea of Iraq inevitably colors the interpretation of their community’s history, and paradoxically reinforces their Iraqi identity in the process.

Of the many “northern” Iraqi communities that have contributed their share to the makeup of the country, two of the most significant in size, cultural involvement and socio-political longevity are the Turcomans and Assyrians. Ties of cooperation, as well as a history of conflict may well intrude on their associations with each other, and yet there is a certain symmetry in viewing these two communities as a unity. One of the most interesting facets that characterizes these groups is their transnational reach coupled with their local focus. For instance, the wider Turcoman “nation” spreads out from Iraq into Syria, Azerbayjan and Turkey, while Assyrians are to be found in Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Iran and Lebanon. Both communities are the self-proclaimed heirs of two remarkably important civilizations that left their imprint on the region for centuries to come, of which their descendants are justifiably proud. On the other hand, there is a specificity to the Turcoman and Assyrian experience in Iraq that is directly related to their long affinity with the country. This is why any analysis of the negotiation strategies of these communities with the Iraqi state entails a reexamination of the way transregionalism affects particularist identity in each specific case. [6]

Turkomans in Cyberspace.

Most Turcoman (or Turkmen) sites are in the Turkish language, whether hosted by Iraqi, Syrian, Azeri or Turkish groups on the net (although a few have Arabic and English sections as well). With respect to Iraqi Turcomans, it is clear that the connection with Turkey shapes the community’s historical view of the world, and nowhere more so than on the web. Virtually all the Turcoman sites I surveyed dated the community’s origin to the ninth century AD when one of the Abbasid Caliphs in Baghdad recruited Turkish soldiers to staff his army. Eventually these same troops became the force behind the throne, and even overthrew one Caliph and replaced him with another. The web site of the Turkmen Peoples’ Party (www.angelfire.com/tn/halk/), one of the Iraqi Turcoman political groupings, is particularly interesting in the way it Turkifies every invasion force, occupation army and government after the Turkic-speaking Mongols ransacked Iraq in the thirteenth century. This Turco-centric angle is so pervasive that the Turkish soldiery of the Persian Shah are given more importance than the Persian occupation of Baghdad itself, while the Ottoman Empire’s reconquest and control of Iraq are subsumed into the wider narrative of “Turkish” expansion without a thought given to the multi-ethnic plurality and diversity that made up the Ottoman experience. Finally, more astounding still, and completely unsupported by historical facts, is the claim that, “The Turks have ruled Iraq from 833 to 1924.”

The Iraqi Turcomans’ focus on Turkey is conditioned by Turkey’s “big brother” role in northern Iraq after the Gulf war and the reality of regional politics. In the wake of Iraq’s defeat in the Gulf war of 1991, the Turkish Republic has been re-energizing its support for Iraqi Turcoman groups, trying to stave off the specter of a potential Kurdish state and bolstering Iraq’s territorial integrity in the face of Turkey’s rival in the region, Iran (see www.foreignpolicy.org.tr/ing/books/oguzlu_09.html). The Iraqi Turcomans’ emphasis on Turkey’s position in northern Iraq is also complemented by the realization that regional alliances, both of a formal and informal kind, must be initiated among the many Turkish-language groups in neighboring countries, such as in Syria, Iran, Armenia, Azerbayjan and Turkey itself, in order to provide a counterweight to the Iraqi Turcomans’ political isolation.

It is the Iraqi Turcomans’ attempt to strike an equitable balance between these regional proclivities and their community’s wholesale identification with Iraq as their country of origin that provides a dilemma that has yet to be solved satisfactorily. For while all the Turcoman websites I looked at unequivocally back a unified Iraq, characterized by democracy, human rights, freedom and a multi-parliamentary system, these same sites also refer back to the historical injustices committed against the Turcomans from as early as 1936 onwards. The ambivalence towards the Iraqi state is manifested in a number of ways. For instance, the community historically assimilated faster than other minorities in the country, in part because most of its members were Sunni Muslim and Turcophile, two assets that allowed Turcomans easy access, and integration into the post-Ottoman Sunni elite. As early as 1921 and definitely by 1947, Iraqi Turcomans had begun moving to Baghdad and other cities in Iraq, and begun the process of acculturating into an Arab environment.[7] And yet most websites skirt the issue of voluntary assimilation altogether (perhaps because it dilutes a Turcoman political platform?); their ire is reserved for Iraqi government attempts to forcibly deport Turcomans from their ancestral homeland in the north of the country to locations further south at an accelerated pace from about 1970 onwards (See www.turkmencephesi.org/english.htm). The Iraqi government is also criticized for defaulting on language and cultural rights, political assassinations of prominent Turcoman politicians and army officers, and favoritism to other minorities in Iraq.

And yet there is hope that in a post-Saddam Hussein era, the three-million strong (by their count) Turcoman community will once again regain its position in society. This is apparent from the relations its members have forged with other non-Arab minorities in the north such as the Kurds. For despite fierce contestation over Kirkuk, the city claimed by Turcomans as well as Kurds, the Turcomans have moved towards acceptance of a future federal arrangement for Iraq, in which indigenous communities have a chance to preserve their autonomy in a decentralized state system (see www.kurdishobserver.com/2000/11/26/hab01.html). The interesting thing to note about the Turcomans is that, as the most assimilated minority in northern Iraq, they seem to feel that they have no other agenda but to stay where they are and to defend themselves against the encroachment of the Iraqi state. Short of a Turkish invasion of northern Iraq that might set off a chain of events in which the Iraqi Turcomans would then revert to the “mother” country, (at present a remote possibility), the Turcomans have no intention of declaring independence from Iraq. As their websites make very clear, the Turcomans have a long history of attachment to the country that goes well beyond a resigned acceptance of their socio-political situation in a dictatorial state. The Turcomans value the fact that Iraq as a whole, and especially the northern part of the country, is the established homeland from which their fathers and forefathers spread out all over the country, and they are justifiably proud of their achievements in the making of the country, and its traditions. Were it not for the depradations visited upon them by Iraqi governments of the past as well as the present, the Turcomans quite conceivably would have no qualms about returning to Iraq, to live side by side with other minorities in a state that guaranteed their civic, socio-cultural, political and economic rights. And while all diasporic communities subscribe to the myth of “return,” the Turcomans may be the one Iraqi group that will actually fulfill it.

Assyrians on the Net.

In comparison to the paucity of Turcoman sites on the web, there is a veritable plethora of Assyrian cyber communities, quite a number of which are hosted by various Assyrian groups in North America, Europe and Australia. Indeed, the San Jose Mercury News reported in its September 2, 2001 edition(http://www.assyria.ninevah.com), that “persecuted and displaced from their ancestral home in the Middle East, Assyrians are finding a virtual homeland in cyberspace.” A typical website is that of the Assyrian International News Agency, which sets down the Assyrian credo, in all of its bold simplicity, in this way: “Assyrians are not Arabs. Assyrians, including Chaldeans and Syriacs [of which Maronites are a branch], are the indigenous Christian people of Mesopotamia and have a history, spanning seven thousand years, that predates the Arab conquest of the region”(www.aina.org). While this is the view held by the majority of Assyrians around the world, it is nonetheless the equivalent of throwing down the gauntlet to non-Assyrian Iraqis. By not equating themselves with an Arab civilization that “Arabized” the majority of Iraq’s native population, and by pointedly referring to Iraq as Mesopotamia even after eighty-odd years of its establishment as a nation-state, most non-Assyrian Iraqi Arabs would consider AINA’s views as somewhat anachronistic, if not apolitical and narrowly nationalistic. Paradoxically, AINA’s portrayal of Assyrian “civilization [as] the foundation of Arab civilization” rings true with many Assyrians today, even as it continues to rankle Arabs wherever they are. Indeed, the fall-out from the Assyrians’ insistence that they are just who they say they are took on such grave dimensions that on October 5, 2001 AINA lodged an online protest against the Arab American Institute, the Chicago Tribune and several other groups in the US, categorically rejecting the labeling of Assyrians as “Arab.” [8]

This theme is picked up by other Assyrian websites. One site that tries to bypass polemics and offer a perspective on the current situation of Assyrian Iraqis is that of the Assyrian Democratic Movement, or Zowaa, a highly interesting mix of political activism, historical narrative and visionary pragmatics (www.atour.com/adm/docs/history.htm). As the premier site of Iraqi Assyrians, it focuses on the development of Assyrian activism in the country, and relates the history of oppression, assassinations, deportation and exile familiar to most Assyrian Iraqis. But as Zowaa’s representative in the US and Canada, Dr. Lincoln Malik, makes clear these massacres represent only part of [Assyrian] history, albeit its most painful part. We must look at history comprehensively and with purpose. Selective renditions of history may help win an argument in a coffee-shop, but are not useful for serious political deliberations. To be relevant, the discussion must focus on the ideas and strategies offered our people in the current historical era. Abstract discussions of what may have been, or ought to be, will not deliver our people from their current national dilemma.

Always speaking for ADM, or Zowaa, Dr. Malik asserts that Assyrians are the indigenous people of Iraq, and not a national or ethnic, religious or linguistic minority. As such, their rights in Bet-Nahren, the Assyrian homeland (most of which is in northern Iraq, but also extends to Syria, Iran and Turkey) are guaranteed by the UN Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples and have the full weight of international law behind them. Assyrians refuse assimilation and will never accept forced “Arabization” by the regime, and yet they are “loyal Iraqis…who love their country, and will join the struggle to save it from the hated dictatorship. In this [the Assyrians] are allied with the broad masses of the Iraqi people from the Kurdish north to the Shia Arab south.” Therefore, everything must be done to protect and preserve the Assyrian community still in Iraq, “under the banner of democracy in Iraq, and affirmation of [the Assyrian] national existence in [their] homeland.”

ADM’s insistence that cultural rights cannot stand alone, and must be buttressed by political and civil liberties finds wide echo among other Assyrian political parties. One of these, the Assyrian Democratic Organization or Mtakasta, claims a deeper affinity with Assyrians in Syria (www.atour.com). Ironically, the ADO has developed a wide rift with the ADM, which it accuses of highhandedness, excessive secrecy and ill-advised political alliances with various Iraqi Kurdish factions. But both the ADO and ADM are adamant that a political solution to Assyrian rights must be found within the greater Iraqi [or, in ADO’s case, Syrian] nation. The vision of a supra-Assyrian nation endowed with cultural, religious and linguistic privileges and functioning as a collective standard to which all Assyrians should aspire is a useful panacea for the Assyrian diaspora, but untenable as a realistic alternative.

Finally, among the most interesting sites on the web is that of the Journal of Assyrian Academic Studies, the only scholarly publication devoted entirely to “serious research about the culture of the Assyrians, from and after the time it survived the demise of empire” (www.jaas.org). The premise of the journal is itself intriguing, and speaks to the dispersal of Assyrian communities all over the world. Briefly stated, JAAS believes that it is high time for scholars to move away from the study of Assyrian civilization in Antiquity, and the legends of the “fall,” to a study of Assyrians in the modern world, especially in the diaspora. As a leading Assyrian specialist states on the front page of JAAS, “confusion [exists] between the annihilation of the Assyrian political system [i.e Assyria in Antiquity] and the annihilation of the Assyrian people,” by which the Professor is of course referring to the history of oppression of the Assyrian people by various regimes, Iraqi, Iranian and Turkish from the beginning of the early twentieth century onwards.

In two fascinating reviews of the Saudi anthropologist Madawi Al-Rasheed’s book, Iraqi Assyrian Christians in London: The Construction of Ethnicity in a recent issue of JAAS, a number of additional points are made with respect to the realities of Assyrian diasporic existence in the UK and elsewhere. While one reviewer gently takes her to task for daring to question the idea that present-day Assyrians are the direct descendants of Assyrians of old, and launches into a physiognomic investigation that ends up in the Assyrian section of the Louvre Museum in Paris (!), another criticizes her for conflating the five recognized “Assyrian” denominations with the Church of the East (the Assyrian National Church). Throughout the reviews, the reader is continually made aware of the “ever-morphing spectacle” of Assyrians forgetting parts of their historical existence and over-inflating others, and including some Assyrian denominations while forgetting others. Finally in view of the strong statements made by Assyrian political parties on the web, it is interesting to note the scholarly consensus on present-day Assyrians in London as being virtually apolitical, and so conservative as to be reclusive in all matters except religion and language.

The Use (and Abuse) of History.

I have already referred to Turcoman claims of a continuous Turkish political presence in the whole of Iraq “from 833 to 1924,” an assertion far too metaphorical to be historically accurate. A similar reinterpretation of history is made by other groups in the region. In its official letter to the Arab-American Institute, asking it to stop identifying Assyrians and Maronites as Arabs, the Coalition of American Assyrians and Maronites (CAM) lays stress on several issues, all of them relating to the distinctive histories claimed by different peoples in the Arab/Middle East region. CAM asserts that Assyrians and Maronites are ethnically distinct from Arabs while the Assyrians also are different on the linguistic front; that both the Assyrians and Maronites diverge from the rest of the native peoples in the region by virtue of their Christianity; that Assyrians are the indigenous peoples of northern Iraq, southeast Turkey, northeast Syria and northwest Iran while Maronites are the indigenous peoples of Lebanon, and finally, and this is the clincher, “that Assyrians and their civilizations, and the Phoenicians of Lebanon, span seven thousand years and predate the Arab conquest of the region” (www.aina.org).

Both the Turcoman and Assyrian visions of religious-linguistic-cultural differences and sweeping historical pretensions are matertially assisted by the freedom and, to a certain extent, the anonymity of the net. But freedom and anonymity quite often function as ancillaries to the larger Turcoman and Assyrian projects of regaining a political foothold in Iraq on more equitable terms than before. While recourse to the greater Assyrian Empire or pan-Turkism is a necessary marker in identity politics, making possible the further in-gathering of diasporic communities in cyberspace around a central ideology of cultural inclusiveness and pride of place, the more pragmatic Turcoman and Assyrian political leadership do not accord history as privileged a position as political survival or, indeed, national regeneration. For instance, Mr. Ninos Gaboro, the head of the Assyrian Democratic Organization is on record as supporting the following positions:

That [the Assyrian leadership] concentrate on minimizing dispersion of our peoples, especially in the Middle East [and] that [the leadership] actively involve the educated segment of our society in the decision-making process and every other political and economic aspect of our lives.

In order to do so, ADO or the name it goes by in wider Assyrian circles, Mtakasto, believes that the most urgent objectives in Syria, Iraq and wherever Assyrians are settled, are to

Secure [Assyrians’] national existence,
Awaken and develop our national identity;
Support unity among various denominations and
Work for the recognition of Assyrian national existence in the Middle East,

all of which are legitimate rights (www.atour.com).

Similarly, the Assyrian Democratic Movement, (Zowaa for Assyrians) is for the strict enforcement of human rights for Assyrians in Iraq because “Assyrians…do not have an ancestral homeland outside of Iraq.” Thus in both parties’ appeal for a reliable survival mechanism to protect Assyrians, whether in Iraq or Syria, the notion of a wider Assyrian nation independent of, and oblivious to, any successor regime that came after “the fall,” is circumscribed out of necessity and pragmatic consideration.

Conclusion.

Eleven years after the Gulf war and the relentless caricature of Iraqis as a compound of Sunnis, Shi’is and Kurds, the view Iraq as another Yugoslavia ready to break up into ethnic or sectarian enclaves continues to have a solid constituency of inveterate Iraq-bashers in the US government and media. Inevitably, this construction relegates other Iraqi ethnic and religious communities,of whom it is are barely aware, to an obscurity which they most certainly do not deserve. Perhaps because neither the Turcomans nor the Assyrians fit readily into the US’s strategic vision for Iraq (unlike the Kurds and the Shi’a), both groups must fight for their existence using uncommon tools. Of these, the Internet is the most versatile. At once virtual meeting place, ethnicity index, cultural club and political barometer, the Internet brings diasporic communities together and shakes them up into a heady mixture. What emerges is a field of dreams that achieves its greatest actualization on the World Wide Web.By allowing the convergence of dozens of sites on greater Turkmenistan and Assyria to project the histories of indigenous peoples, and their collective visions of the future, the Internet makes possible the renegotiation of identities and nationalities that had long been relegated to the backwaters of exile. Unlike the facile generalizations in the “illegitimacy” thesis that present Iraqi nationalism as a brittle phenomenon held together by state coercion, Turcoman and Assyrian websites are fully agreed on their Iraqi-ness, but seek to define it on their own terms. Because both communities view Iraq as their homeland par excellence, and the Turcoman and Assyrian populations still settled in the country as tangible proof of their civilazational heritage as well as their future promise, neither community thinks of questioning their Iraqi nationhood. Nonetheless, by means of their online agendas for cultural and political regeneration, and their re-imbued visions of citizenship in Iraq, Turcoman and Assyrian activists online are putting the world, and especially Iraq, on notice of their programs and intentions, and so beginning a vital and necessary dialogue to reopen the question of their long-awaited “return” to the homeland.

Notes.

1 Charles Tripp. A History of Iraq. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

2 Hanna Batatu. The Old Social Classes and the New Revolutionary Movements of Iraq. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978, pp.47-50

[3] Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991, pp.1-7

[4] Michael C. Hudson, “Creative Destruction”: Information Technology and the Political Culture Revolution in the Arab World, revised version of a paper presented at the Conference on Transnationalism, sponsored by the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies,Amman, Jordan, June 19-21,2000. (nmit.georgetown.edu/papers/mchudson.htm).

[5] Dirk Hoerder, “Negotiating Nations: Exclusions, Networks, Inclusions.” Histoire Sociale/Social History Vol.XXXIII, November 2000, p.226

[6] Jon Alterman, “Transnational Media and Regionalism,” Transnational Broadcasting Studies No.1, Fall 1998.(www.Tbsjournal.com/Archives/Fall98/Articles 1/JA1/jal.html).

[7] Stephen Helmsley Longrigg. Iraq, 1900 to 1950. London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1953, p.9 and p.381

[8] At a conference on Iraq at Villanova University, Pa., in 1988, which I was fortunate to attend, an Assyrian clergyman made the comment that Assyrians were “Iraqis, not Arabs.” An Egyptian Professor in the audience immediately got up from his seat to challenge the assertion, but failed to make headway with the clergyman

posted: 12/28/2001

Dr. Hala Fattah is an historian and independent scholar attached to the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies, Amman, Jordan. She can be contacted via email to hmf@index.com.jo

Internet and the State: The Rise of Cyberdemocracy in Revolutionary Iran

meaningfulconnections — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 18:23:37 +0000

Babak Rahimi, European University Institute, Florence.
Paper delivered at the ISA Conference, Brisbane, Australia. Rev: January 2003.

It was not long ago, in the not so long history of information and communication technology (ICTs), that the Internet was hailed as an emerging new democratic medium to undermine authoritarian regimes. Whether considering the increase in competence of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) on a global scale or the effect of information on local politics, cyberspace, understood as a digitally constituted means of communication, provided an exciting new frontier where political power manifested itself in a radical democratic way. Such cyber adventures into a virtual horizon anticipated rise of citizen empowerment (‘Netizens‘) in decision-making processes, fostering cross-regional networks of civic associations with a limitless supply of information by making transparent the internal life of authoritarian regimes to an unprecedented degree. With this assumption, politics appeared to move away from the traditional face-to-face political interaction and participation in physical spaces towards a more digitally structured, free-floating means of communication, one that would allow a radical retreat from all autocratic institutional spaces, in which speech is strictly kept under supervision. Here, the democratic threat of the Internet for authoritarian regimes was an obvious one: state domination can be held back from the unlimited boundaries of cyberspace, hence allowing autocratic power to yield to a more democratic virtual order. As former U.S. president, Bill Clinton, once remarked, attempting to control the Internet is like trying to nail Jello to a wall.

However salient, and needless to say unexpected, the force of the Internet might have appeared to some in its initial developments, authoritarian states soon came to adopt creative ways to hold back potential challenges posed by the new technology. As Boas and Kalathil argue in the two cases of China and Cuba, the Internet has not necessarily made authoritarian rule less stable. The regimes have learned to maintain control by using digital space to further extend their authority (Boas & Kalathil, 2001). The attempt to control the Net has been a complicated one. By applying a combination of two policy strategies, namely, ‘Reactive’ and ‘Proactive’, the authoritarian regimes have managed to expand their influence in the four spheres of political life, namely: mass public, civil associational organizations, economic and international civic groups -e.g. Transnational advocacy networks or CSOs. Since the expansion of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) in the early 1990’s, authoritarian regimes have responded within this sphere of political life to curtail the effects of the new technology in such that the Internet has become in fact another site to extending the rule of autocratic regimes.

State control in reactive measures is most ‘visible, involving direct efforts to counter or circumscribe the potential challenges outlined above by clamping down on Internet use’ (ibid.:3). This form of policy is mainly patent in the case of Cuba, where cyber activity encounters direct state restrictions over the Net. In what the authors call the formation of a ‘national Intranet’ program, control of cyber-sites ensures that the regime monitors in what is being produced online. The measure allows the government to prevent the flow of information by establishing state-run Internet sites, and, therefore, limiting the private sector to access the Net.

In the case of proactive measures, however, control is orchestrated in a more complicated way. Such measures stem from the notion that the Internet itself can be used as a device to promote the authority of the state by implementing regime sponsored web programs, e-government services, state-controlled Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and, above all, self-censorship to curb the democratic drive of the Net. In the Chinese case, software devices have been sparsely used to filter content and censure web sites.[1] By making the Internet available to the public on the national level, the Chinese government promotes its authority by channeling on-line discourses, developing regime affiliated bureaucratic domains and commercially based government interest sectors on the Web, and even wage online ‘guerilla war and cyber attacks against data networks’ of domestic political dissidents (ibid.:10).[2] While challenges posed by the development of the Internet in recent years have been considerably managed by the regimes, the discrepancy in the uses of the two strategies remain salient in the ways the Internet‘s democratic force has been transformed into another authoritarian site for domination.

A dangerous illusion to earlier claims about the Net lied in the assumption that somehow the availability of means of information- be the triumph of the free press in the nineteenth century or the emergence of mass media from radio, television to Internet in the twentieth century– ultimately bolsters the practice of democracy. Whether one considers authoritarian or (transitional and consolidated) democratic polities, the role of mass media appears to have been overstated. Here, the question is not the way in which mass media can challenge the state, but how the state engages with the new technologies to greater its domain of control.

But to what extent can we identify these restrictions to deter the democratic quality of the Internet? In the particular case of authoritarian regimes, is the state able to put in place limits on the Net? While a study on the relations between mass media, society and state cuts across myriad issues, in this paper I identify the Internet as an encounter with a unique form of political communicative space and in terms of an emerging new building block for political mobilization. By using contemporary Iran as a case study, I want to argue for the democratic potential in the uses of the Internet by showing that there is in fact a groundbreaking path, in which the new technology is providing for the expression of political dissent: an online cyberspaces that transcend the control of authoritarian powers. What the paper maintains is that, despite diverse measures implemented to curtail the force of the Net as a new alternative space of political contestation, the Internet sustains creative ways for political dissent to challenge state control.

I offer here a review of the recent developments of the Internet technology in Iran since the early 1990s by considering these developments in context of the ongoing tension between the growing reformist political movement and the clerical authoritarian regime. The basic claim is that the development of the Internet in Iran has emerged as an alternative domain of political opposition against the regime in ways that further increases the current crisis of state legitimacy. Although the paper acknowledges the social limitations to the uses of the Internet, an attempt is made to sketch out the innovative force of the Net as unique and alternative domain of political opposition in confronting state hegemony.

From inactive to reactive strategy:

When in January 1993 Dr. Larijani, the director of the Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics (IPM), forwarded Iran’s first electronic mail as a greeting message to the University of Vienna administrators, he would have been surprised to learn that by end of the year 2003 the demand for Internet use in the country would soar to an estimated level of 1.2 million, one of the fastest growing rates in the world (MEED ,2001, September).[3] The fact that Iran became the second country in the Middle East- only preceded by Israel- to gain access to the Internet would have not been anything astonishing. After all, the Islamic revolution of 1979 was meant to put into practice the intrinsic relationship between scientific technology and religion; the revolution was an unprecedented event in modern history that emphasized the significance of faith in the scientific pursuit for knowledge. The surprise would have been caused, however, with the growing public interest in the Internet as a blow to the initial objective of the IPM, Iran’s main academic provider service, in acknowledging the Internet with the sole purpose of exchanging scientific ideas within the inter-university system. Similar to countries like the U.S. in the 1960s and early 1970s, when the U.S. Department of Defense and academic institutions placed computers in the exclusive hands of a few experts in the field, in just a decade, the community of the Internet users in Iran has transgressed the domain of a small number of specialists, mainly in the academic circles, and spread to the larger arena of mass consumption.[4]

While more Iranians discover the various uses of the Internet, the lack of technological expertise to cope with the changes has become the major challenge for the state. With more than 100 private ISPs on the rise, a developing technological scientific class of Net-experts and a mounting demand for unrestrained forms of technological communication by the mass public, the government-owned Telecommunication Company of Iran (TCI) has been facing serious challenges as a result of the recent technological boom. The problem of course is not so much the lack of state policies to properly deal with the new information technology.[5] The main problem in the case of the Internet emerges in the domestic markets, where the lack of necessary expertise, industries and capital in the field of computer technology has left the state-controlled media with the challenging task to update the system.

In part, some of the difficulty seems to appear as a result of the force of technological commerce, and the state’s failure to take necessary steps to provide the country potential software development sites with the increasing internationalization of the market economy-as it has been the case in other Asian countries like India. But, for the most part, the strongest challenge lies with the curious Iranian public, where the use of the Internet appears to cut across age, class, gender and religious boundaries. As an indication of this rapid growth, Internet access, in Tehran at least, has developed to be so sophisticated in recent years that it has even surpassed some levels of European nations, like the UK. The Guardian reports in February 2002, ParsOnline is offering ‘Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) connection at 2Mbps, four times faster than that available to home users here, and for people out of ADSL catchments area, there are wireless links available, running at 5Mbps, something unheard of in the UK’ (Guardian, 2002, Feb). Such rapid, needless to say unusual, development largely reflects the mass anxiety to come to terms with the growth of global technology within the context of a waning economy and an on-going political crisis- a point that I will return to later.

With more than 70 percent of Iran’s 68 million populations born after the Iranian revolution, the domestic problems, which are seen by the public as setbacks to achieving a modern social order, seem to identify a new source of social relief. The Internet is viewed in this sense to qualify as a channel to express dissent within a new digital space of interaction that would involve the possibility of being connected with the outside world. The public recognition is that the Net holds a wealth of new scientific, cultural and political resources that ultimately promises progress for a nation at the brink of economic and political crises. As the Guardian quotes an Iranian computer store employee, ’… there is a sort of fever here in Iran. All the families who can afford it have a computer. All of the children are taking classes, and we sell a lot of educational software’ (ibid.:1). The ‘fever’ here is the encounter with a new culture of information technology, making available a virtual life that transcends the increasing domestic economic and political pressures.[6] What makes Iran a fascinating case study is the way in which the changing state-society relations reflects an ongoing-process of political transformation as acts of dissent are displayed in a wide range of public spaces, increasing the pressure for major alternations in the nation’s governance. While the 1979 militant revolutionary mobilization has given way to the reformist movement after the election of Khatami to power in 1997, the Internet has become a curious site of protest in the changing face of the Iranian politics.

A) Competing sectors and emerging non-sectors

As in China, prior to 1993, the Internet in Iran was still an untapped virtual resource to both civil and state institutions. However, whereas in China the technology was largely developed by the state in the form ofintra-governmental communicative resource, Iran’s first experience with the Internet appeared from a relatively state-independent institutional basis: the university. In fact, to this day most of Iran’s domestic Internet connections are still based in the academic institutions, the national academic network (IRANET.IPM), though additional outside links have become established by the Iranian Post, Telephone and Telegraph (PTT), providing service to both commercial agencies and governmental organizations. Despite earlier setbacks in the growth of information technology as a result of tensions between the IPM and the High Council of Informatics (HCI), a state branch mostly responsible for information technological expansion, Iran has been so far successful in developing a dynamic field of Telecom industry sector, independent of state control.

Contrary to conventional expectations, the Iranian state has so far welcomed the Internet by allowing numerous sectors, and non-sector associations, to access the technology without interference. There has been some obvious points of conflict between the state and the private sectors/non-sectors. But, tensions between state bureaucratic agencies, such as HCI and the Data Communication Company of Iran (DCI)- a branch of the PTT- and the emerging private technological sectors has appeared primarily in disagreements over improving the quality and the availability of network access, rather than finding ways to control Net content. Internet use in the economic sphere has so far posed multiple challenges to the government. The state information bureaucratic agencies have grown uneasy in the domestic telecom market in competition with the developing ISPs.[7] Here, the momentous role of the Iranian ISPs to creating dynamic institutional bases for the development of the Internet has been significant.

Vibrant and innovative in outlook, Iran’s ISPs have opened up both institutional and non-institutional spheres of competitive commercial and political activism, unprecedented in the history of Iran’s information technology. This has been largely evident in the foundation of IRANET, the Information and Communication Network of Iran, in 1993 by N.J. Rad, a subsidiary of Pilot Iran, a private company. Operating together as a large bulletin board system and offering full Internet access, E-mail services, electronic publishing and Internet service design (World Wide Web), numerous organizations have gone online in a relatively flexible market-driven environment to conducting business. Along with the academic sector, the commercial industry in Iran maintains an active presence on the Net. With the changing technology, the Internet companies are creating new online jobs that help to cut down Iran’s 12% unemployment rate (Guardian, ibid.: 1); they are providing services for the general consumption in ways unprecedented in the history of the Iranian economy. The rapidly growing Internet use in the commercial sphere, thus, presents a significant opportunity for the growth of entrepreneurship in Iran, and an emerging middle class with the ability to invest in the domestic markets.

The role of the state in the development of the Internet has also been impressive. The government has helped to codify contracts and restructure the technologies to attract international investment. In recent years, there have been attempts to make some changes in the protectionist legal clauses, a significant obstacle to Iran’s troubled economy, for attracting foreign investment in the country’s telecom market. As Ahmad Motamedi, the minister of telecommunications points out, ’We are now taking our first steps towards privitization and establishing regulatory policy which would allow the entry of the private sector (BBC, November, 13).[8] This remark is made as the economy increasingly moves away from government sponsored programs, mostly institutionalized under the presidency of Rafsanjani after the Iran-Iraq war, 1980-88, towards more privatized schemes, assumed to improve incentives for economic growth.

But the shift not only entails changes in the infrastructure of the Telecommunication for promoting investment, as a way to remedy Iran’s troubling rentier economy, but also facilitating the growth of new forms of commercial activity that increase demands on the state‘s control of society. With legal reforms, the Internet has been not only technologically upgraded with the economic changes on the short-term basis, but expanded to a larger degree in accordance with the global Internet by further opening up the domestic sites to commercial industries, transnational net works of CSOs, and other political (non-sector) groups.[9] Here, once again, the ISPs have played a crucial role. As recent developments show, opening the telecom market to foreign investors have enabled the privately owned Iranian ISPs to promote their sites outside of the country. With the possible emergence of a new domestic Net-business class, the ISPs present a significant opportunity to expanding the Iranian economy on both domestic and international markets by anticipating certain forms of political liberalization- though not necessary an inevitable outcome.

Accordingly, the most significant aspect of these structural changes lies in the increase exposure of the public to ICTs, providing access to the international community by creating pluralistic domains of interactions and participations in a mundane sense. The ’mundane’ here implies the ways in which the Internet is encouraging everyday interaction-both political and non-political- to turn to online services. Here, the growth of cyber-showrooms and advertisements, e-mail, Internet service design, and especially the popular use of chat rooms, facilitated mostly by state-independent ISPs, has opened a new non-sector to emerge on the scene, namely, the mass public.

Although we can say that exposure to alternative sectors and non-sectors outside of the country plays a central role in the spread of the domestic Internet among the youth in Iran, the cause for the rapid rise of a mass public, however, can be explained with the growing young population in Iran. The current demographical shift in the country identifies a major source for the high demands from the public in the new technology. In correlation with the demographic changes, the growth of (especially private) universities has further opened up a new dimension in the popularity of the Internet among the young student population. The massive university intake since the end of the 1988 war, especially from the female population, has allowed a large educated public mass to access the Internet through the academic institutions.[10] This presents significant changes while a growing non-academic public- especially the younger population- is finding the Internet as an alternative arena for social interaction- especially with the use of chat rooms and online entertainment services (Web, 2001).[11] This can be seen not only as a broadening of the intellectual horizons of the mass public with the spread of information with development of the Net, but also as a considerable cultural shift in popular culture in that, to use Ansari‘s words, ‘… suggest that technological penetration of society is far deeper than might be expected’ (Ansari, 2000:65). The new generation has found an innovative way to build online communities where couples meet to chat, young men dress as they wish and young women go uncovered without being harassed. Coupled with an internationally acclaimed growing popular film industry and striking demand for satellite use, Internet appears to further complement changes in the way the mass public restlessly aspires to interact with the world. As one would expect, this broadening of perspective goes beyond mere mundane activities. The state-independent depth of the impact has to do with the ways in which the Net has also become a political arena for dissident groups to voice their opinions against the state where in ‘real time’ and ‘real space’ they would be limited in doing so.

B) State responses

As mentioned earlier, until recently Internet use in Iran has been free of control. Unlike other Middle Eastern states, namely, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates[12], Iran has so far encouraged the expansion of the Internet, and it has actively participated in its development mainly on institutional level. This might come as surprise since in the other forms of information technology persistent measures by the hardliner authorities has produced tough policies to circumscribe possible threats posed by the ICTs and the mass media. But up to the present moment, there has been no systematic strategy to block web sites, filter content or clamp down on the use of the Internet in Iran. Even when the government closed down more than 450 cafés in mid-May, just a month before the presidential elections 2001, the move was not meant to prevent the use of the Internet, but to reduce high-speed access to the Net due to the use of low-cost ’voice over IP’ (VOIP) telephone calls abroad that was, in return, undermining TCI‘s revenues (Radio Free Press, 2001, July).[13]

The role of state involvement is crucial. So far, the Iranian state has seen unprecedented changes in its technological infrastructure, mainly in the form of creating Internet governance. The first step has involved an attempt to design e-government programs on the web in order to improve the state bureaucracy. This appears to be the hallmark of the government’s new policy to decentralize the state and improve efficiency as various major governmental agencies (e.g. Iran Air, Budget and Planning Organization of Iran, Ministry of Energy, National Iranian oil…) find themselves online for improved intra-governmental interaction and efficient public services.[14] The project is still expanding, while additional state-run industrial organizations and governmental agencies attain full Internet access. Likewise, state institutions are finding themselves surfing the Net on the ‘pretext that government business necessitates it‘ (Ansari, 2000: 67). With the policy of Net governance, the Internet is not necessarily becoming more governmentalized; it would be more appropriate to say that the government is becoming more Internetized.

What the Iranian case shows us is that engagement with the Internet by the state is more like encountering a forum in which the government finds itself operating as another online actor, rather than a regulative force to manipulate the discourses online. In this context, there has not been a clear-cut government policy for the Internet since its introduction in 1993. This is due to state’s own ambivalence towards the new information technology that has so far facilitated complications to an already turbulent political life in Iran. There are, I argue, four main reasons for this ambiguity.

First and foremost, on a practical level, the absence of censorship is largely due to technical challenges, in which the government has not yet been able to tackle (Radio Free Europe 2001, July). This, in comparison, puts Iran far behind China’s advanced techno-computer scientific infrastructure, where a sophisticated use of reactive and proactive measures has affirmed state authority in the field of technology. The second obvious advantage is the economy. I have already touched upon the economic benefits of the Internet in tandem with the current privatization policies of the state, a factor that has been especially advanced in measure since the presidency of Khatami’s in 1997. But the Net has impressed the Iranian state in ways that other ICTs have failed. The authorities have hailed the Internet as a new source to promoting the state in attempting to alleviate political pressure while projecting an aura of ’modernization’ in engagement with the new technology. This is perhaps the most crucial point in Iran’s handling of the Net. The positive reaction complies with the initial ideological project of the Islamic republic to export the revolution around the world within the currents of modernity, understood here in terms of technological advancements. The Internet has been attractive to the authorities, and civic institutions associated with the clerical regime, as a potential forum for online discourse of ideological propagation.

First, the Net has become a new site for the government to present its ideological perspective on current affairs. This stems largely in reference to state sponsored news agencies and official civic organizations that aim to promote the status of the Islamic republic and the clerical authorities around the world.[15] The state sponsored clerical authorities, for instance, in the notoriously conservative cities of Mashad and Qom are busy building websites, providing their interpretation (tafsir) of the Quran on the homepages.[16] There is more to the Net than a simple lucrative business. As Ansari explains, ‘…internet use has been given a boost in the belief that is the ideal vehicle for ‘exporting the revolution.’ He adds, ‘Far from advocating an insular purity, many clerics began to argue by embracing the new technology and harnessing it to good use as they saw it, a more confident Islamic Revolution would be better able to spread the word’ (Ansari, 2000:66). Second, the Internet is providing an opportunity for the authorities to propagate the State Shi‘a ideology on the web.

But there is more. By making the Internet available to the mass public, the state has found an alternative channel to further legitimize its power in the face of internal strife over the definition of the revolutionary state. The non-censorship policy has been in place, mainly, to affirm the original ideology of the Islamic Republic by permitting new technologies to extend state authority. Instead of a proactive measure, in which the government fully participates with the technologies to further advance its authority, the Iranian state has maintained a passive involvement in the process of the Internet development, so far. This is most visible, for instance, in the case of ISPs. Though access providers are responsible for preventing access to ‘immoral’ or anti-state material, for the most part, such legal constraints are merely written on paper rather than executed in practice.[17] Many Iranian ISPs operate on a relatively free basis, at times even openly defying the state by offering ‘Uncensored, no Filters’ services (Guardian, 2002, February).

The logic of inactive strategy manifests the essentially ideological aspect of the authoritarian regime in terms of promoting scientific technology for the benefit of the revolutionary ideals. This is so since the Islamic republic is indebted to mass media as a major cause for its establishment in 1979. Here of course I have in mind the use of audiotape as a way to spread the words of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, once exiled as a political dissident during the Shah’s regime in the 1960‘s and 70‘s. Historically, mass media, in particular print media, has played a significant role throughout the history of revolutionary Iran- including both the constitutional revolution of 1905-09 and the Islamic revolution of 1979. As Gheissari notes, in the absence of political parties, the media has provided the major, and at times the only, forum for political actors to express themselves and actively engage in political life (Gheissari, 1998, 78-84). In fact, for over a century revolutionary Iran has been a virtual community with the mass media, producing invisible communities of political actors. The development of the Internet in this sense has simply extended that historical process, rather than introduce a new era. What makes the Internet an interesting development in relation to authoritarian state-building is that it has in fact actualized the common and invisible (virtual) public spaces, in which political relations occur, and which everyday life undergo an experience of constant process of virtuality.

This point is further complicated as the revolutionary state continues to experience a crisis of legitimacy. The conflict was unleashed with the election of Khatami to presidency in 1997. Mainly backed by the general public, civic organizations and the intellectual community, all critical of the very political validity ofVelayat-e Faqih (the guardianship of jurisconsult)- the political dogma behind the Islamic Republic, Khatami‘s presidency has brought to life an energetic political force by emphasizing the rule of law and civil society, Jama’ah Madani, as requisites to a free society.[18] As part of these challenges, thinkers like Kadivar, Soroush and Shabestari, advocated a pluralistic form of sovereignty amid a changing environment of political discontent with the Islamic Republic.[19] Their main concern was directed at the non-democratic institutions of the state, in particular the non-elected elites that identify authoritarian elements in the political establishment. Meanwhile, the student protest of the summer of 1999 opened up the arena of political dissent to the grass-root youth organizations. By basing itself on mass-based popular support, the reformist movement marked a unique period in the history of revolutionary Iran with the potential to challenge the stability of clerical regime. Although experiencing harsh responses from the conservative authorities, the movement has emerged to redefine the foundation of the Islamic Republic.

This crisis of legitimacy emerges within a complex political system. Since the revolution of 1979, Iran has witnessed the institutionalization of two significantly distinct political arms of authority, that is the elected Majlis (parliament) and the presidency on the one hand, and an appointed branch, namely the clerical office of Velayat-e Faqih, a deputy representing the Hidden Mahdi, the Twelfth Imam of the Shi‘a religion.[20]rd movement, has re-emerged to circumscribe the challenges posed by the conservative faction. The institutionalization of a twin-state structured political authority reflects the complicated coexistence of the secular, the elected branch, and the appointed elite, the religious figure, representing the ultimate status of sovereignty. It was within this complex system of political and religious co-existence that inherently led the way to conflict as the two spheres of governance began to redefine their political positions within the state apparatus and, more importantly, on the constitutional level. With the re-election of Khatami to the presidency in 2001, the crisis has intensified as the dynamic reformist currents, known as the May 23

The recent attacks by the hard-line authorities on the reformists print media have become a testimony to this crisis. This can be identified with the polarization of Iranian political culture, especially after the 6th[21] Coupled with the rapid growth in the publication of magazines and newspapers since 1997, the mass media has witnessed an unprecedented shift in the development of civic associations predominantly emerging from the reformist camp (Menashir, 2001:131-152). Given the popularity of the press and the dangers posed to the authorities, the conservatives have taken measures to ban news agencies and imprison some of the reformist leaders in charge. Crackdown on the reformist press has not only generated resentment between the factions within the state institutions, such as tensions between the parliament and Assembly of Exports (a branch that monitors and appoints the supreme leader), but also signaled the hardliner’s determination to block the reformist attempts to challenge the establishment via the mass media.[22] But the friction continues to persist as reformists carry on to publish material critical of the conservative authorities, while the conservatives continue to press to ban reformist news-papers. These tensions, however, demonstrate that the press has become an ongoing battle ground for the political adversaries struggling for legitimacy as the Iranian society continues to experience greater changes with the on-going political crisis. parliamentarian election in March 2000 when the conservatives launched a series of clampdowns on the reformist-dominated press in a way to tackle the threat of opposition. The move came about towards the end of the 1990 when the print press increasingly expanded its public domain with Khatami‘s election victory.

How relevant is the Internet to this conflict? The fact that the Internet has been uncensored-so far at least- allows us to acknowledged its unique significance in this political ambience of competing ideals. The Internet marks an alternative platform for the reformists to challenge their antagonist for a war of words, expanding the crisis in ways that could have not been possible in previous political settings. Consider the famous case of Ayatollah Montazeri, a dissident cleric once in line to be Iran’s supreme leader. Montazeri shocked the conservatives in December 2000 when he put his 600-page memoir on the Internet (http://www.montazeri,com/), criticizing the ideological foundation of the state. The 81 years old Ayatollah, who was chosen to succeed after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, expressed his fierce opposition not only against the current leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenehi, but the very political dogma of Velayat-e faqih online, considered blasphemous in the eyes of the hardliners. Where the political has become more of a limited pursuit in the ’real’ spaces of everyday life, where decision-making processes are constrained under the forces of constitutionally enforced authoritarian state institutions, the Internet has opened a new domestic arena of contestation, accommodating numerous dissident civic organizations online.

In other cases, journalists and pro-reformists have all found something interesting on the Net. Consider the following cases. Akbar Ganji, a pro-reformist journalist, and Saed Ibrahim Nabavi, a prominent reformist, jailed since the parliamentary elections, have gone online to battle with the authorities in cyberspace.[23]gooya.com (Dareini, 2001, May).[24] The letter was later electronically sent to the Associated Press for world attention. Their efforts come about as political actors outside of the country play a key role in mounting campaigns for their freedom. This is meanwhile greater challenge emerges from the least expected quarters. Here, the case of Mohsen Sazgara is also worth a mention. A leading reformist, Sazgara puts online his daring letter to the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic on the freedom of speech, on the popular Iranian website,

The most interesting step in highlighting the effect of the Internet in the Iranian society was marked by the May 1997 presidential election. On the level of mass political participation, in an unprecedented way, the 1997 elections saw the meeting of the two candidates, Mohamad Khatami (http://www.khatami.com) and the runner-up Majlis speaker, Ntegh-Nuri (http://nategh.co.ir) on the Net.[25] While the two candidates fought their votes for presidency, the most important impact, however, appeared on the grass-root level: the student movement. the Internet played a significant role in the uprising of the summer 2000, when students mobilized their opposition against the conservatives in chatrooms, organizing meetings, interacting and communicating electronically as the state continued to close down public places, in particular the university.

In reaction to these serious challenges posed by the Internet, it should be obvious that the authority’s response would be an harsh one. In an already fractional state, the conservatives are now taking reactive measures to counter the political impact of the Internet. Recently, however, Judiciary chief, Ayatollah Shahroudi, has called for ‘establishment of a special committee for legal investigation on Internet-related crimes and offenses’, proposing legal measures concerning the creation of a new legal office that deals especially with Internet-related offenses (Reuters, 2002, November). Although resistance is certain to appear once debate reaches the parliament, an attempt has been made by the authorities to create a national Intranet under the auspices of TCI (MEED, 2001, November). With this move, the conservative elites are beginning to acknowledge the significance of the new information technology as something more than a mere means of communication to spreading information; they are realizing its potential as a new political forum, wherein the state is challenged in more complicated ways than expected. As Ahmad Janati, a senior cleric, puts it, the Internet is like a ‘poison poured into the mouth of the people’. He adds, ‘The child who has been poisoned is taken to the hospital and treated’, but this kind of poison ‘is not easy to remedy…even with 100 doctors at the bedside’ (Menashri, 2001: 190).

Conclusion

What the development of the Internet in Iran demonstrates is the way in which diverse oppositional groups, sectors and civic associations participate in a struggle against their opponents within a distinctive space qualifying for a peculiar form of political interaction. Here resistance lies at the heart of the political process present on the Net. While the state attempts to counter or circumscribe forms of dissent online, opposition (re) emerges in the most invisible and indirect forms to undermine the authoritarian state. Even more importantly, the state itself experiences a radical change once engaging with the Internet, as the dispositional feature of cyberspace breaks down the very authority that the state aims to extend in virtual reality. The Iranian case demonstrates that, as a result of a crisis of legitimacy in an authoritarian state, the adversaries in cyberspace can turn political strife within a decentralized and disembodied virtual space.

On the relationship between the Internet and authoritarian states, this paper has left many critical issues untouched. While attempting to argue for an alternative conception of computer based information technologies as a source for the formation of a new form of polity, I have not, for instance, discussed the impact of CMC on stratification processes in terms of class and status production online. For the moment I maintain though that any decisive judgment about the new technology is still too premature. Having said that, I think what is important to bear in mind is not just the limitations, mainly induced by perceptible ways we encounter the new technology, but long-term latent transformation that can be deciphered only in due course of time.

One can still view the Internet development as a new potential form of political activity in such that disempowered groups and grass-roots movements find an alternative space to become part of the political process. Despite the constant accusation of elitism regarding the Internet, there is still considerable evidence to show that the new technology is significantly penetrating societies on grass-root level.[26] With the case of Iran, the future relationship between the Internet and democracy still remains in the process of making; but, more importantly, the process also shows the continuous unmaking of authoritarian establishments.

In the Transparent Society (1992), Gianni Vattimo argued that mass media, including computer information technologies, play a significant role in the emergence of a new form of political society. It is not that they make society more ‘transparent, but more complex, even chaotic, and finally that it is in precisely this relative ‘chaos’ that our hopes for emancipation lie.’ (Vattimo, 1992: 4). The chaos that Vattimo heralds here is, in what I regard, the promise of a new political reality in a virtual space of alternative political power. Here both the Internet and the political currents in Iran show us a new democratic possibility for political action in a world that appears to offer no other alternatives. In the title of the paper, I have used the term ‘revolutionary’ rather that ‘post-revolutionary’ Iran; in respect to the Internet, by this I hope to show that there is still a revolution underway, however silent it may be.

Notes

^[1] This does not mean that China merely limits its strategy to a proactive method to monitor the Internet. It is interesting to note, as Boas and Kalathil explain, China has also been filtering material for deemed politically sensitive material on the Web. These are done by mostly block or subvert critical information against the regime in place of state propaganda. In case of chat rooms, Chinese Server Providers employ censor administrators to keep an eye on the material from bulletin boards. See Boas & Kalathil (2001: 6).

^[2] China appears to be the only state that is forcefully pursuing this strategy on a global scale. This move by China is not so much to prevent the rise of domestic political opposition via the Net, but an overall endeavor to develop the state’s military technology on a competitive basis with the U.S. See Ming Zhang (1999,Nov-Dec: 16-18).

^[3] Quoting statistics from Pyramid Research, however, the Middle East Economic Digest (MEED) suggests that Iran is rapidly increasing its Internet users form 250,000 in 2000 to 450,000 in 2001, a changing ratio of 30% for every six months that could reach 1.2 million by the year 2003 (MEED, 2001, November). This is to bear in mind that much of the current rapid change is taking place in the context of, what Braude calls, ‘antiquated copper cable-based telecommunications infrastructure’ that is currently being renovated by the telecommunication Company of Iran (TCI) in order to keep up with the growing demands (Radio Free Europe, 2001, July).

^[4] The central objective for DARPA (The Defense Advanced Research Program Agency) in introducing computer mediated communication in the late 60’s was mainly to share information by way of electronic mail from one person to another. However, this mailing process was quickly transformed into mailing lists as each message often contained information to be shared by more than one user. Usenet, as collection or repository of numerous newsgroups available on the Internet, can be traced back to the early 70s when bulletin boards marked the emergence of the first subscribed mailing list, dialed through regular telephone line with a computer modem connected to another computer.

^[5] As the case of banning the satellite dishes demonstrate, the state has the ability and the will to quickly mobilize against the use of new media technologies as potential threats to the establishment. But increasing demand for western programs, the government ban on the use of satellite was futile. It did not take long for the state to discover the flourishing illegal use of satellite dishes, along with fax machines, DVD drives and video programs, as it proved little point in attempting to curtail the ongoing expansion of the new technology in the country.

^[6] It is interesting that the reasons for the inexpensive computer products in Iran have to do primarily with the U.S. embargo on Iran. Since its inauguration back in the hostage crisis and extended with the Iran-Libya Act (ILSA) in 1996, the embargo has forced the private technology sector of Iran to seek the acquisition and maintenance of satellite and computer equipments, such as software and technical parts in the pirate market of south Asia, hence providing cheaper access to computer technology.

^[7] Friction between state agencies and private Internet providers, mainly service sectors, intensified once the current state Telecommunication Company closed down a number of Internet Coffee shops after discovering that many were using online services to call abroad. This was due mainly to the cheap availability of international connections via the Internet that simply won out over rates offered by TCI.

^[8] Ahmad Motamedi, the minister of telecommunications tells BBC, ‘We are now taking our first steps towards privitization and establishing regulatory policy which would allow the entry of the private sector’. See BBC article ‘Iran to open telecoms market’, BBC (2001, November). This would mark a crucial step by the state towards privatizing the economy, as communication technology in Iran faces urgent need of infrastructure upgrading.

^[9] Consider the case of APADANA, a private ISP based outside of Iran, offering Web services (including Java programming and email services) while providing virtual domain services with Internet access in Iran and abroad. For more on Iran’s ISPs see the following site: www.iranispassociation.com, an umbrella organization for dozens private providers.

^[10] Fathi notes, ‘Nearly every university in the nation is now wired to the global network, as are hundreds of elementary and high schools (International Herald Tribune, 2002, August).

^[11] This is made mainly in reference to the rise of ‘coffee-nets’ where the use of voice chat has become an inexpensive way for the young to have conversation online, as the Islamic state continues to impose its moral guideline for the separation of the sexes in the public places. As Shams notes, much of the success of the Iranian ISPs rests in the growing demand of the younger population for the use of the Internet- a point I shall turn to in due course (Web, 2001).

^[12] See Human Rights Watch, The Internet in the Middle East and North Africa: Free Expression and Censorship (New York, Human Rights Watch, 1999).

^[13] The main objective in this case was to reduce the loss of international long-distance profits caused by the popular use of (VOIP). See the article ‘Internet is Transforming Iran’ (Radio Free Europe, 2001, July).

^[14] As of 1994, 10% of the governmental agencies were already provided with network technologies, though the percentage has increased, especially with the election of Khatami to power in 1997.

^[15] See, for instance, state-run news websites like http://www.kayhannews.com/ or http://www.irna.com/. For the official site of the Ayatollah Khamenai, the spiritual leader of the Islamic Republic, at the city of Qom see http://www.wilayah.org.com/.

^[16] See http://www.hawzah.net-eng-default.htm/ , or http://www.balagh.net,IslamicPropagationOfficeoftheIslamicSeminaryofQom.com/.

^[17] An Internet provider is required by law to ask the user to sign an agreement not to access to ‘immoral’ material.

^[18] The doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih was introduced by Khomanie in his 1971 book, Hukumat- I Islami (Islamic government), where he argued that Islam is self-sufficiently capable of establishing laws for government and administration to shaping a just society. In absence of the twelfth Imam, a faqih, or the high cleric, is responsible to govern justly and rule over an Islamic society in place of the absent Imam according to the sacred laws of Quran and the Tradition. The doctrine was put in practice after the 1979 referendum in support of an Islamic state. See Heinz (1997).

^[19] It is worth noting that many of the dissident intellectuals were ardent participants in the 1979 revolution and even took offices in the Islamic state-at least in its formative years, 1980-88. Soroush for instance worked for the state university and strongly advocated the ideals of Velayat-e Faqih, as preached by the late Ayatollah Khomeini. For a recent study of Soroush’s intellectual life see Boroujerdi (1996).

^[20] By ‘Shi’a religion’ I mean the Imami sect of Twelver Shi’sm.

^[21] It is interesting to point out here that some of the independent news agencies have gone online, producing their printed material while publishing it on the web. For a good example, see http://www.hamshahri.com.

^[22] According to the constitution, the Assembly of Experts is the only foundation in the government that stands over the supreme leadership, supervising his actions and checking his performances. Given the fact that traditionally the conservatives have dominated the branch identifies a deeper level of factionalism inherent in the political system of the Islamic Republic.

^[23] Akbar Ganji, one of the leading journalists and contributors to the reformist’s journal of Rah-e Now, Tehran weekly, was jailed in April 2000 for accusing the former president Rafsanjani on the internet for the chain murder of writers and intellectuals in 1998. Saed Ibrahim Nabavi, a satirist and a writer, jailed for his daring approach towards the conservative establishment in 2000. See websites: http://www.akbarganji.com/ and http://www.nabavi.online.com.

^[24] In this letter, Sazgara directly blames the supreme leader for some of the major problems in the country. There he argues that Khamenehi’s repressive policy towards the journalists and intellectuals has brought ‘enmity’ for the Iranian people, encoring dictatorship and stifling freedom of expression.

^[25] In fact, the result of the elections were announced ‘live’ on the web site of the Iranian government, meanwhile state-independent news agencies, like Hamshahri, and state official press organizations, like Ettela’at, competed for the latest report.

^[26] Consider the case of Zimbabwe, where the democratic opposition has resisted Robert Mugabe’s regime and its monopoly of information in the rural regions by e-mailing daily news bulleting to other rural sites, where they are printed and distributed by children on bikes. See (Economists, 2001, April 7-13).

References

Books

Ansari, Ali, M. (2000). Iran, Islam and Democracy: The Politics of Managing Change. London: The Royal Institute Affairs.

Boroujerdi, Mehrzad. (1996) Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

Gheissari, Ali. (1998) Iranian Intellectuals in the 20th Century. Austin: University of Texas, 1998.

Heinz, Halm. (Tr.) Brown, Allision (1997). Shi’a Islam: From Religion to Revolution. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers.

Keck, Margarat & Sikknik, Kathryn. (1988). Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Khomeini, Ruholla. (1979) Islamic Government. Springfield, Va: Reproduced by National Technological Information Service, U.S. Department of Commerce.

Menasheri, David. (2001) Post-Revolutionary Politics in Iran: Religion, Society, and Power.

Vattimo, Giani. (Tr) Webs, David. (1992) The Transparent Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Articles And Articles from Internet Database

(1999)The Internet in The Middle East and Africa: free expression and censorship. The Human Rights Watch. New York. Web site: http://www.hrw.org/advocacy/internet/mena/html.

Boas, Taylor and Kalathil, Shanthi. (2001) “The Internet and State Control in Authoritarian Regimes: China, Cuba and Counter-Revolution.” Retrieved from http://www.ceip/org/files/publications/wp21.asp-html.

Ming, Zahng. (2000) ‘War without rules’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientific: November-December, volume 55, number 6.

Shams, Korush. (2001) ‘This time, the culprit is the Internet’ (in Persian), Web, 19, February.

(2001), ‘Biking the Samizdat’, Economist: April 7-13.

(2001), ‘Internet is Transforming Iran’, Radio Free Europe: July. Retrieved http://www.rferl.org/welcome/english/releases/2001/07/44-160701.html.

(2001) ‘Iran Clamps down on Internet‘ , Middle East Digest, V. 47, N. 47, November.

Hammersley, Ben. (2002). ‘Iran Nets Another Revolt‘. Guardian: February. Website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,653282,00.html.

(2002), ‘Iran to open telecom market’, BBC: November.

Sedarat, Firouz. (2002), ‘Iran Move to Monopolize Internet Access Draws Fire’, Reuter: November.

(2002), ’Iran flirting and frank discussions online, with no controls’, International Herald Tribune, August.

The author may be contacted via email to brahimi77@hotmail.com

The Digital Revolt: Resistance & Agency on the Net

meaningfulconnections — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 18:14:14 +0000

Will Taggart, University of Arkansas
Adapted from a paper delivered at a symposium on “Indigenous Cyber-Activism and Virtual Diasporas over the World Wide Web. Gothenburg, Sweden. June 9, 2001.

I would like to open with a vignette taken from anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey:

“In the late 18th or early 19th century a group of runaway slaves and serfs fled from Kentucky into the Ohio Territory, where they inter-married with Natives and formed a tribe – red, white & black – called the Ben Ishmael tribe. The Ishmaels (who seem to have been Islamically inclined) followed an annual nomadic route through the territory, hunting & fishing, and finding work as tinkers and minstrels. They were polygamists, and drank no alcohol. Every winter they returned to their original settlement, where a village had grown.

“But eventually the US Govt. opened the Territory to settlement, and the official pioneers arrived. Around the Ishmael village a town began to spring up, called Cincinnati. Soon it was a big city. But Ishmael village was still there, engulfed & surrounded by “civilization.” Now it was a slum. “Hasn’t something similar happened to the Internet? The original freedom-loving hackers & guerrilla informationists, the true pioneers of cyberspace, are still there. But they have been surrounded by a vastness of virtual “development,” and reduced to a kind of ghetto. True, for a while the slums remain colorful – one can go there for a “good time,” strum a banjo, spark up a romance. Folkways survive. One remembers the old days, the freedom to wander, the sense of openness. But History has gone… somewhere else. Capital has moved on.” (Bey 1996)

On October 6, 2000, a group of Israeli hackers succeeded in shutting down the website of the Hizbollah, setting off an international cyber-conflict unprecedented in its scale and sophistication (iDefense 2001). Various transnational groups of hackers and “defacers” split along nationalistic, religious, and ethnic lines have joined the conflict in reaction to competing media accounts of the most recent uprising in the West Bank and Gaza, alternately known as the second or Al-Aqsa Intifada. These marginalized communities, “ghettoized” and set apart from the mainstream of an increasingly capitalistic Internet, are an interesting test for recent theoretical formulations of “imagined” translocal communities (Anderson 1983), postdiscursive colonies, and postnational formations (Appadurai 1996). The actors in this conflict – virtual scions of the digital ghetto – utilize their “primordial” taxonomic divisions (Foucault 1970) as a means to channel their disruptive and essentially anarchist impulses. Appeals to nationalistic, humanitarian, and religious ideologies, while important, serve primarily as alibis by which the actors may demonstrate their skill and continue to play the “game” of taunting their neighbors in the virtual ghetto, thereby accruing status in their shared, translocal communities – i.e., the digital undergrounds. Their actions are folkways, resistances.

That the members of these communities are ghettoized “netizens” is perhaps not obvious at first glance. Website defacement connected with the Al-Aqsa Intifada is comparable to gang and hip-hop graffiti; they call into question the formation of relationships between art, artists, and resistance movements; and they lead us to question how we know and what we see on the web. How is our vision/discourse limited, and what is the role/agency of technology in this process?

Some Background

In the early 1990s, only a few options existed for online discourse. Compuserve, E-mail and BBSs (dial-up bulletin board systems) were certainly important, as was the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and MUDs (multi-user dungeons). One of the most important arenas online at the time was the Usenet and its NetNews discussion groups.

These groups were arranged alphabetically; and since there were only a few hundred (or maybe a couple of thousand) groups, each group was for the most part equally visible. Each member therefore possessed equal voice and agency. Visibility was parallel, rather than hierarchical as it is today with the widespread dependence on search engines for the production and dissemination of ranked information. (There are exceptions to this structure: for example dmoz.org is a human generated directory of the web, and map.net offers a visual non-hierarchical map of the web.) There were narratives, interactions, and discussions among group members. The groups were small and manageable. Content was key, and there were no advertisements, no banner ads. Capital had yet to encroach upon the underground. alt.hackers, alt.phreakers, alt.cyberpunk, alt.viruses—each were a forums for discussion and information trading and mportant gateways into the higher, more exclusive circles of the underground(s).

These communities are now neglected and largely forgotten. The work of the defacers I study is a means by which these communities reassert themselves in the vast matrix of information by occupying the space (sites) set aside for others. These “occupations” serve as initiatory rites for the defacer community and expressions of resistance against an Internet dominated by corporate interests. The defacers circumvent the usual paths of knowledge on the web most often mediated by corporate “search engines” like google and yahoo by engaging broader transnational mediascapes. The world press, for example, has taken note of their exploits and by this process these groups gain visibility and agency on the Web. Ways of knowing are reconfigured as information is pirated and realigned by these groups.

The subaltern status of these groups is reflected in their language, specific to the hacker/defacer undergound(s). “Fuckz” are given to opponents as defacers taunt their rivals; “Greetz” are given to those individuals and groups with which they align themselves. These attributions, written into many defaces, serve almost as a genealogy of these groups and (meta)groups and remind one of liner notes and the content of some hip-hop music, where rappers give “props” and “shout out” to their friends in the scene, and deride their enemies. Like rappers, these defacers see themselves as confronting the hegemonic discourses of everyday life and their (oppressed) positions.

This system of establishing group memberships and alliances and identifying enemies is explicitly mirrored in gang and hip-hop graffiti, brilliantly explored by Susan Phillips in her 1999 ethnography of gangs and graffiti in Los Angeles, Wallbangin’ (1999). In her book, Phillips notes seven distinct characteristics of graffiti that set it apart from other media (first derived by another writer Armando Silva). These are marginality, anonymity, spontaneity, elements of the setting (space, design, and color), speed, precariousness (the use of cheap, easy to obtain materials) and finally fugacidad, the fleeting nature of the marks—ephemerality. Website defacements bear more than a formal resemblance to graffiti defined by these characteristics. However, graffiti production differs from website defacement in some basic ways. Phillips had the luxury of visiting her interlocutors in the flesh, passing around a forty, talking spontaneously. While graffiti artists typically use Krylon spray paint, website defacers use HTML and JavaScript. Both graffiti and website defaces are ephemeral; graffiti, however, typically lasts much longer; web defacements usually only last for a few hours at the maximum. Despite the similarities between their art, the artists producing graffiti and hacked websites differ in important ways. Most of the hackers involved in defacing websites are not familiar with each other in any local way—they do not know each other in the flesh; their communication is limited and bounded by electronic communication. So the neighborhood dynamics of graffiti production are absent within these “virtual” communities.

Transnational networks of like-minded individuals have certainly existed for centuries if not for millennia (Ghosh 1994); however, the virtual communities of hackers/defacers possess characteristics that set them apart from transnational networks of times past. The most important distinction from earlier transnational networks is that they can operate in virtual simultaneity and can react to media constructions around them with immediacy and coordination. They can meet in virtual space and devise strategies and without relying on long-delayed mail service or inadequate – not to mention expensive – international telephone calls. These groups are also reacting to the same sorts of information from the international media including the Internet, CNN, etc. So the element of a more completely shared experience is one that earlier groups must have lacked by comparison.

“Play,” Resistance, and Identity

Until last month [May 2001], participants in the “game” (as one of the members of the m0sad team put it, defacing websites is, “just a kid’s game”) of defacing websites, two virtual locales stood out: attrition.org and its defacement mirror, along with its twin site, alldas.de, sat at the center of the defacer universe and served as the basis for the entire defacer community. But last month, attrition.org shut down its defacement mirror, due to an incredible increase in defacement activity. The volunteers who maintained the site could no longer keep up with the volume of hacked sites pouring into their in-boxes anymore; they reported that they were getting 100+ reports of defacements everyday. As a non-profit organization, the webmasters of attrition could not afford to divert this much attention away from their jobs and everyday lives. As they put it in a statement entitled “EVOLUTION,” they had “done their time.” Immediately, my thoughts ran back to the Ishmaelites. The guerrilla informationists were being marginalized, they were on the verge of extinction, and at the same time, they were growing. Alldas.de is now the only focal point for defacers, making the community that much more vulnerable. If alldas.de goes down (and sites like this often do go down periodically, due to the enormous number of denial-of-service attacks these sites endure) then the public manifestation of the hacker/defacer community evaporates.

Webster’s dictionary defines indigenous as “having originated in and being produced, growing, or living naturally in a particular region or environment.” This definition is typically meant to indicate people living in physical environments, usually bounded by certain geographical constructs (e.g., the Sami, the Inuit, Native Americans, Australian aborigines, etc.) and unified by language and culture. However, I believe that indigenous could properly refer to the groups that I am studying, who are unified within the cyberspatial nexuses of their activity (in this case alldas.de and until last month attrion.org). These hacker/defacer communities could therefore be called indigenous peoples of the Internet, since it is the Net that allowed these groups to grow and “live.” Their communities are unique and valuable sites of cultural production; that these sites can disappear so easily is disconcerting to say the least. In a keystroke, they could completely disappear.

These sites give space to Hitlerites, Pakistani nationalists, radical environmentalists, anti-capitalists, anarchists, and those playing the “game” simply for the challenge and the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge and skill all found a (virtual) home at these sites, which, I would suggest, constituted the public diasporic spheres formulated by Appadurai (1996). On any given day, dozens (now hundreds) of websites are defaced, meaning that the original website is replaced by images and texts of the defacer’s choice. These defaces are then posted on one or both of these defacement “mirrors,” thereby providing a space to exhibit the exploits of the defacers and their messages. In connection to the Al-Aqsa Intifada, hundreds of websites have been defaced in support of the Palestinians and Israelis (iDefense 2001); the groups doing these defaces, their organization, group identity, and motivations are the primary subjects of my study.

These groups can be divided according to their sympathies. Notable pro-Palestinian groups include (but are not limited to) the World’s Fantabulous Defacers (the WFD), the Silver Lords (who are currently the most prolific defacing group in the world according to alldas.de with 821 websites attacked so far), and GForce Pakistan; pro-Israeli groups include the m0sad team and InfernoZ. Each group is essentially translocal in character and each possesses unique transnational characteristics. Interestingly, the “realspace” locus of the pro-Palestinian groups is urban Pakistan, their sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians apparently being grafted onto their earlier support for Kashmiri separatists. The pro-Israeli groups are primarily Russian Jews and Russian immigrants to Israel.

All of these groups post their defacements in English, although some members of these groups (especially the Russian-oriented pro-Israeli ones) are not at all fluent in English, as I found out to my dismay while conducting e-mailed interviews. My feeble attempts at communicating with InfenoZ (2001) in computer-translated Russian were a miserable failure. Luckily, he did put me in touch with the m0sad team, the most active of all the pro-Israeli groups, and much to my delight, the m0sad team’s members were able to respond to my queries in English, although it was somewhat broken. All of the pro-Palestinian groups that I interviewed were fluent in English. Ironically, knowledge of colloquial and classical Arabic, the primary language of discourse in Palestine and the larger Arab world, did me no good in my research. That English is currently the lingua franca of these groups raises a number of important questions regarding homogeneity and globalization that perhaps cannot be fully answered or even discussed here. It can be said, however, that the use of English by these groups acknowledges the language as a prime facilitator of global cultural flow; defacements in Urdu, Portuguese, or Russian could and would limit the target audiences of the message(s).

One similarity that members of all these groups share is their youth. When I contacted InfernoZ I was a little shocked to discover that he was only 14 years old. This young Russian defacer, no doubt responsible for keeping more than a few systems administrators up at night, sweating over their system’s security, was probably just passing through puberty; and, at a time when many of his peers were busy watching or playing soccer and entertaining nascent sexual fantasies, InfernoZ was a member of an underground, transnational group shutting down websites across the world. This is not at all anomalous in the hacker/defacer underground, where children as young as seven or eight years old have been known to write their own code breaking programs or “scripts.” These children are usually referred to as “script kiddies” a term that implies a lack of sophistication and skill.

It turns out that most of the members of these groups are in their late teens; all, to the best of my knowledge, are males. macwiz, of the group Silver Lords, complained to me that he hardly had time to hack much these days, as he was busy preparing for his college entrance exams (2001). Of course, the ages of these defacers closely parallels the ages of those involved in street-level resistance in Palestine, where over half of all those killed in the conflict have been children under the age of 15. Perhaps an interesting question might be—do the children rock-throwers of Palestine’s streets see their resistance in terms of “play” as these defacers see their actions?

The images and texts making up the defaces reflect the engagement of these groups with competing mediascapes constructed around ideologies of post-diasporic nationalism (in the case of the Israeli and Russian defacers) and global Islamic unity (in the case of the pro-Palestinian defacers). The Russian/Israeli defacers disrupt Islamic websites and the public, online faces of the resistance. For example, these groups altered the hamas.org website, making a porn site appear in place of the normal hamas site; the Hizbollah site was replaced with a graphic of the Israeli flag waving in the (virtual) wind. The pro-Palestinian defacers focus on Israeli and external pro-Israeli groups in defense of their Muslim brothers. The WFD was responsible for defacing Ariel Sharon’s website only four days before the last Israeli presidential election; a hacker calling himself Dr. Nuker defaced the website of AIPAC, the powerful American-Israeli lobbying group, near the outset of the recent uprising. For the most part, The pro-Palestinian defacers tend to channel their efforts on .il (Israeli) commercial and governmental domains.

The words and images contained in these defaces mirror the most common representations of the conflict made by either side. Those taking a pro-Israeli stance say that the Israelis desire peace and security, but the Palestinians prevent this peace because of their violence. Pro-Palestinians say that violence is an expression of resistance against a tyrannical occupation. The statements of these defacers hold closely to these lines; these stances are, however, amplified in their tone and explicitly designed to shock and offend the opposition. One pro-Palestinian defacement, for instance, features the cartoon character Calvin urinating on an Israeli flag. By the same token, one pro-Israeli defacement features the proclamation “we will destroy all Arabs.”

These exchanges are typically antagonistic, and I believe constitute a resistance not only to opposing viewpoints but also to the hegemony of corporate controlled media altogether. Disruptive actions create media coverage of their own, allowing those engaging in these defacements some modicum of voice and agency. The actors in this conflict therefore are media participants and not merely consumers, which I might suggest is a motive at the center of all activist movements in an era where much of the shape of social reality is determined by competing media: books, newspapers, pamphlets, radio, and, of course, the Internet.

An interesting fact that came out during interviews with these defacers is that they bear no animosity for defacers working the opposite side of the conflict. There seems to be a level of mutual respect between these groups, however different their politics may be. n00gie, from the sophisticated and very active group the World’s Fantabulous Defacers, told me, when speaking of the m0sad team, which is the premier pro-Israeli defacer group, that he had started out much like the members of the m0sad team, performing relatively unsophisticated, low-level hacks at a young age (2001). Given the rhetorical severity of his groups’ defacements, I had imagined that n00gie would condemn the m0sad team, whom I thought he would consider his opponents and rivals. Instead, he identified with them and did not indicate that the m0sad team was an opponent. The m0sad team defacers spoke of the WFD in much the same deferential and sympathetic tone (2001). The explanation for these attitudes I believe lies in the nature of these groups and the larger community to which they belong, that of the hacker/defacer underground.

Residence in this virtual ghetto implies that one is committed above all to the hacker ethic that information, in all its forms, must be free. Although I believe that all of these defacers are sincere in their political beliefs, without a doubt, these individuals would be disrupting digital spaces with or without an overt, conventional political cause. Most of the members of these groups were recruited by these groups because of their past exploits, many of which had no political motive. These compelling political causes exist as a motivation to individuals in these groups and offer an opportunity for exposure and status-enhancement. Random, apolitical defacements typically garner no media coverage; dozens of these pass relatively unnoticed ever day. Politically driven hacks, however, do attract attention within the larger mediascapes: the disruptions caused by these groups’ defacements have been covered widely by the world media.

In conclusion, these transnational groups represent deterritorialized post-national formations of the first order. Most of the members of these loose-knit organizations have never met face to face and probably never will. These groups’ involvement with what is an essentially territorial dispute (the Palestinian/Israeli conflict) is secondary to their larger interaction with the flow of cultural information globally and their engagement and participation with deterritorialized post-national mediascapes.

Epilogue

As of May, 2001, the “digital revolt” concurrent with the Al-Aqsa Intifada is still alive, although the intensity of the conflict is greatly reduced since its peak in late 2000. The WFD has recently engaged in a “Marathon for Global Awareness” and has defaced at least a dozen Israeli sites between May 5^th and 7^th. The Silver Lords have changed the text and images of their defaces to emphasize their support for Kashmiris seeking independence from India. The pro-Israeli groups InfernoZ and the m0sad team continue to deface websites in support of Israel, but at a lessened pace. Interestingly, a new cyber-conflict has arisen online in the past month or so (April/May 2001) between supporters of China and supporters of the United States. This conflict threatens to be even more extensive than the one surrounding the Al-Aqsa Intifada. Several hundred websites have been defaced in the past few weeks and this conflict shows no signs of cooling down anytime soon. This most recent conflict was triggered by the international incident involving the collision of an American spy plane with a Chinese fighter jet in early April. The only interlocutor of mine to participate in this new conflict thus far has been the WFD, who defaced a Chinese site in support of the United States.

References cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso,1983.

Appadurai, Arjun.. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Bey, Hakim. “Notes for Ctheory“. In Digital Delirium, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Accessed Online: http://www.ctheory.com/event/e046.html.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Random House, 1970.

iDefense. “Israeli-Palestinian Cyber-Conflict”(IPCC). Accessed Online: January 3, 2001 at: http://www.idefense.com/.

InfernoZ. Interview, personal correspondence (e-mail). April 11^th and 13^th2001.

Ghosh, Amitav. In an Antique Land. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

m0sad team. Interview, personal correspondence (e-mail). April 12^th and 15^th 2001.

n00gie. Interview, ICQ. April 17^th 2001.

Phillips, Susan. Wallbangin’: Gangs and Graffiti in L.A. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Silver Lords. Interview, personal correspondence (e-mail). April 12^th and 13^th 2001.

Note: Feedback and comments for the author may be sent to annapaxis@hotmail.com

Appendix

Here is a sample of some of the defacements that have occurred in connection with the Al-Aqsa Intifada (as of May 2001).

neutral defacements
http://www.attrition.org/mirror/attrition/2000/12/22/jeff.sci.shu.ac.uk/

Invention (Ibtidaa’) or Convention (Ittibaa’)? Islamist Cassettes & Tradition in Yemen

meaningfulconnections — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 18:11:01 +0000

W. Flagg Miller, University of Michigan
Paper delivered at the American Anthropological Association, November 2000.

In the spring of 1998, I was walking on the grounds of the University of Aden, in southern Yemen, just after classes had been let out. I went into a small university coffee-shop, and found this pamphlet laying on the glass shelves, free for the taking. [Show slide.] “Interview with a Famous Personality” (muqaabilah ma’ shakhsiyyah ma`ruufah). The alleged interviewer asks a series of questions to this “Famous Personality” in order to produce his “i.d. card”:

Name: “Mr. Satellite”. (And here is a picture of Mr. Satellite, busy at work reducing a fairly contemporary urban Yemeni house to rubble.)
Birth Place: “The lands of the Jews and Nazarenes (Christians)”
Address: “Atop the rooves of many Muslim’s houses”
Principle Occupation: “Undermining the morals of Muslims, and diverting them from their religion.” Then a verse from a chapter in the Qur’an warns those who might stray of the bond between the true believer and God.

Debate over the impact of satellite dishes in Yemen has become heated in recent years. The most virulent opposition to satellite TV programs — which include shows like Baywatch and World Wrestling Federation matches — has come from Islamist groups whose memberships and political muscle have increased dramatically over the past decade (for reasons I won’t go into here.) During my first year of fieldwork in Yafi`a, a rural region of southern Yemen just north of Aden, I consoled several friends whose neighbors’ satellite dishes had been removed quietly under pressure from local “zealots,” or in one case, literally shot off the roof in a barrage of gunfire. A particularly dramatic example of the “reality check” our panel is concerned with; a case in which the virtual influences of global media are violently stymied by angry viewers.

The Islamic “public sphere” — a probability of increasing interest among those who inquire into the effects of expanding “new media” technologies on popular, pluralist discussions about Islam. I’d like to contribute to these discussions today by beginning with the premise that media messages mean something to audiences through interpretive “codes” as Hall and others have suggested. As Eickelman notes, the practices of message-reception, or decoding, by audiences in the Islamic world have been far too little studied by scholars. I’ll therefore focus in this paper on a popular debate that is occurring among audiences in Yemen over the moral registers of audio and audiovisual media. This debate is being waged in terms of oral and literate style. In the flood of sound-bites, musical tunes, printed text material, visual images, and transmitting technologies, distinctions between communicative styles are becoming more, not less, salient, as consumers and producers vie for control over the meaning of messages in a rhetorical arena of high political stakes.

I’ll examine the debate over oral and literate styles by focusing on one audio-technology in particular: the audiocassette. Where audiocassettes are not only inexpensive but record live sound, they can be tailored to audience tastes far more easily than satellite-TV. Most of my research has focused on the cassette — in particular Yemeni vernacular cassette-poetry — that is widespread in Yemen. As a locus of “text formation,” the cassette provides insight into how local discursive practice informs the use and meaning of media technologies. Now, where cassette-texts are easily manipulated by users, they might appear less controversial for Yemenis than the satellite-dish — more “user-friendly”! However, cassettes can be no less immune from heated moral debates, including accusations that they “pour forth corruption on people.” In fact, I argue that cassettes’ facility as recording devices makes them especially subject to controversy. In their sensitivity to local sound-scapes, they can amplify chords that are potentially fractious.

Islamist groups in Yemen have been some of the most successful in using cassettes to broadcast messages and expand support bases, especially in rural areas where illiteracy rates are higher. The Islah “Party,” Yemen’s largest and most heteroglot Islamist organization, has surpassed all others in producing engaging and informative cassettes. Since the 1970s, Islah’s spiritual mouthpiece, Shaykh `Abd al-Majid az-Zindaani, has produced hundreds of cassettes that entreat listeners to lessons from the organization’s “scientific institutes.” During a pre-1990, pre-unity era of antagonism between former North and South Yemen, Zindaani regularly used cassettes to lambaste communist ideologues in the South. In post-unity years, Zindaani became confronted with a new task of enfranchising a populace whom he had once berated. This task has been made particularly difficult by the fact that most of Islah’s membership is drawn from northern Yemen.

So, in its campaign to win loyalty from Yemenis across the nation, Islam has become extraordinarily proficient in tailoring messages to regional audiences. Islah’s task in this regard is particularly difficult given the diversity of audience tastes in Yemen, a diversity fueled by what is probably the most vibrant grass-roots recording industry in the Middle East. The political director of Islah, Muhammad Qahtan, explained to me that with the proliferation of popular music and alternative sources of media entertainment, fewer Yemeni cassette-fans have patience for old-style sermons; especially younger men and women, who constitute the bulk of new Islah members. “On the other hand,” he confided, “we’ve noticed that an interest in folk and traditional songs (turaath) has been growing in recent years.” He then cited a few song genres that, not incidentally, are especially popular in southern regions — precisely the areas in which Islah has been focusing its campaigns. These genres included hiwaariyaat – a playful, flirtatious banter exchanged between a male and a female singer — and also sung political folk-poems released by the musicians whose cassettes I’ve been following in southern Yemen.

Evidence from Islah’s cassettes confirms the organization’s attention to a broad range of poetic genres, many of them regionally stylized. The most successful releases regularly pair the speeches of Zindaani and other Islahi orators within a motley assortment of creative song and verbal genres. While I don’t have time to go into the variety of poetic and musical genres, I’ll simply say that these include: religious songs adapted to pop-hit melodies and re-titled “anthems”; tribal chants traditionally used to rouse spirits of highland audiences; and mock colloquial dialogues between “typical citizens” that serve to reinforce what Islahi speakers have just said, but in a common sense, street-smart fashion.

Now, for those of us keen to the leaking boundaries of Islamism, tribalism, nationalism, partyism, and so forth, Islah’s cassettes are nothing short of a Golden Calf. The blurring of discursive boundaries, however, is of interest not solely to political theorists. In Yemen, such blurring on cassettes is causing heated debates over the foundations not simply of a public sphere marked by the typical terms of civil society, democracy, and pluralism — but specifically, of an Islamic public sphere, one that is as morally just and true as it is inclusive.

For in catering its calls for the application of Islamic law based on the moral principles of the Islamic community, Islah has been accused of “invention” or “innovation” — ibtidaa` — by one of its principle Islamist competitors, the Salafis. A loose assortment of adherents whose spiritual head, Shaykh Muqbil al-Waada`i, resides in the far northern city of ∑aﬁdah, the Salafis are far less politically active than Islah, although for that reason are more appealing to many young Islamist adherents. Like a number of other Wahhabi-oriented groups, the Salafis practice the da`wah — a militant call to action based on legal interpretations that’s typically waged against those who are deemed to stray from God’s divine commandments (Monet 1995). In recent years, calls for da`wah have often been directed against mystical Sufi organizations, especially those that pay homage to local saints. The Salafis argue that in committing an act of bid`a, apostasy, Sufi members’ will confront, according to the Qur’an, the “severest punishment.”

Like az-Zindaani of the Islah party, Muqbil al-Waada`i, the Salafis’ most outspoken leader, has attracted a wide following through his frequent release of cassettes. Less concerned with political gains, however, al-Waada`i’s cassettes are more sober in tone, and typically feature his sermons recorded live on Friday afternoons from his pulpit. One of al-Waada`i’s accusations against Islah is that the organization turns Islam into “pop-song” (fann). In particular, al-Waada`i derides Islah’s creative use of anthems to couch its messages to popular audiences. Even more maligned is Islah’s use of musical instruments, which have been occasionally disparaged by conservatives throughout Islamic history. In a popular arena of mass-produced sound-bites in which debates over doctrine and political orientation are waged in registers of style, persuasion, and entertainment, the aesthetics of sound has become an especially hot topic.

Islah’s reactions to such charges of “invention” are managed in both subtle and heavy-handed ways. On one cassette, az-Zindaani speaks to listeners up-front about the authority that can accrue to those who listen carefully, to his cassettes or any other aural medium. “He who listens to this microphone amplifier can reveal to us how we use it, and how we fix it if it stops. It is the same for whoever listens to… a car. And everyone who really listens to the audible world: he is the companion of truth in his orientation, and his statements, and his explanations. All humans accept this for every listener.” Moral authority rests not in producers’ styles of oratory, Zindaani asserts, but rather with each and every listener. Whether a message is chanted or recited or sung to musical accompaniment, the good listener has the innate ability to hear the truth. Other messages vouchsafing the moral virtue of song are more explicit. Anthems and songs can mollify listeners by explicitly focusing on the place of pop-song in religious devotion. In the opening segments of one cassette, a chorus repeats the refrain: “I’m enraptured with song, not for song’s sake, but for the sake of those who listen!”; and later, somewhat cryptically “I have turned song into my stairway to our candle-lit destination.” Alternatively, cassettes featuring sung anthems can invoke a series of textual frames that index a literate tradition of learning. Such cassettes can begin, for example, with the traditional recitation of a chapter from the Qur’an that frames the contents within an orthodox tone of piety. Similarly, an opening traditional sermon that frequently cites verses from the Qur’an and other key Islamic texts can foreground attachment to spheres of literate knowledge.

As Islah asserts its adherence to the true path, some of the most prominent frames levied against the thick and thin of heteroglot oral invention are visual. [SHOW CASSETTE.] On what is certainly the most creative collection of songs I’ve heard released by Islah — a cassette called “Yemen’s New Dawn” — the front of side A reads in large letters: “Religion is convention (ittibaa`), not invention (ibtidaa`).” (Here it is, in a wonderful green color.) Other cassettes feature such messages as: “In the summons to God’s righteous path, the Islamic cassette is a superb means”, or “May God grant blessings on whomever helps disseminate this cassette.” The messages on Islah’s jacket-covers, however, are perhaps the most telling of all.

SLIDES:

1) Entitled “Why the (national) elections?” Here we have a picture of the Book, the Qur’an, pulverizing a set of musical instruments to bits. The source of literate authority doing its work against possible heterodox oral creativity. This is clearly a direct response to the Salafis… (Appropriately, there are no songs on this cassette.) [Cassette #234]

2) Entitled: “The elections and the future of Yemen” Again, the Qur’an in the foreground, and this ancient scroll… But you also have in the background this minaret! A nice dynamism between the oral call and the literate tradition, but the literate is clearly foregrounded. [Cassette #2/243]

3) “Ask about history” Here’s a colorful sketch that I’m very curious about. It’s got a number of classic Islamic symbols — the crescent moon, the green color which surrounds the earth, the paradisal flower — and here the flower emerges from a pen. Almost a kind of ecstatic vision… I’d be interested to hear what some of you think of this… [Cassette #12]

The imagery on these covers released by Islah is startlingly consistent: on 80% of cassettes that I have purchased, the central mantlepiece of the cover features imagery of the Book or of writing. Such imagery seems to have grown more prominent, in fact, precisely as Islah’s cassettes are increasingly tailored to the aesthetic preferences of popular audiences. Just as the markedly literate textual genres on cassettes frame orally inventive material, so these visual symbols of literate Islam are meant to frame each cassette within a history of orthodox literate practice that carries considerable discursive weight.

Clearly, however, the success by which such frames contain their cacophonous material is up for debate.

Conclusion

In Habermas’s conception of the “public sphere,” the keystone that cements a conditionally new mode of discourse is the open-ended communication between individuals who are uninhibited by status or power. Habermas’s model of public discourse remains as analytically insightful as it is socioculturally problematic. In Yemen, public discourses are — to be sure — directly linked to the spread of media technologies that facilitate the participation of an increasingly numerous and diverse citizenship. However, where such technologies are not only amplifiers of discussion but are conduits to and from centers of trans-local cultural and economic production, their mediation of public discourse is always politically fraught. For some Yemeni Islamists, satellite-TV is destroying rather than creating a potentially “global village” of civic-minded inhabitants; its oral and visual material must be countered with photocopied texts distributed among literate university students. For others, audiocassettes are being misused to the boon of a pop-music lumpenproletariat whose ears seduce them into distorting Islamic principles.

I would submit that the dilemma facing the Yemeni Islah organization — that is, how to promote popular Islamic audio-recordings without losing touch with learned, literate Islam — is an increasingly common one not only for Islamist movements, but for Muslims in general. The old question of how modes of orality and literacy are to be managed within the compass of Islamic communicative practice will remain a compelling moral issue, especially in the flood of sound-bites, images, and readable material that is reaching mass markets. I would argue that McLuhan’s medium-message homology will only become more salient for Muslims as media networks diversify. Ultimately, however — and here is the catch — if an Islamic public sphere is to be “virtual” at all, it must be accessible through the textual conventions surrounding THE Book. As I have shown by examining audiocassettes in Yemen, oral “invention” renders the mediation of Book-ish “convention” even more essential to creating a true and truly public Islamic sphere. Ironically, Book-ish convention is becoming as much a semiotics of oral and visual register as it is of literate practice.

The author welcomes comments on this article via e-mail to flaggm@umich.edu