The Internet’s Two Histories in the Middle East: Narratives & Networks of IT Implantation in Four Arab Countries
The Internet is a strong attractor of other stories, almost from its beginnings and almost everywhere it spreads. For engineers seeking support to develop the Internet (Hart et al., 1992; Abbate 1999), it was democratic access to information; for politicians, the information superhighway. This is also true in the Middle East, a late comer and slow grower by most global measures. While much attention has focused on what limits it there – settling on access, censorship, costs after a short period of conservative cultural reactions that briefly found no less than Saddam Hussein on common ground with Gertrude Himmelfarb’s “neo-Luddite” meditation on the Internet — there is a different story, actually two. The Internet has two histories in the Middle East, neither of which is about these restraints. It has two foundation stories, narratives, two implantations or implementations that are prior to its popular registers and to absorption into the substantially more engaging stories of media for analysts of the region. These two histories have been repeated across four neighboring countries with very different political economic systems. Hailed as the great opener, the death of distance, facilitator of where do you want to go today, for being digital and electronic democracy, the Internet has a more mundane but denser social history from the perspective of its implementation, its own enthusiasts and early adopters, who are the region’s Internet pioneers; and industrial policy rather than foreign policy or cultural policy would seem to be the better predictor of how their two stories unfolded. But that has its limits, too.
I first outline Internet implantation and implementation in four Arab countries – Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia – and then compare two phases that are subjectively registered as alternative histories of the Internet in them and the region generally. These are stories of the Internet as development tool and as development sector, of development as modernization and as globalization, of two different generations of engineering as well as of political leadership and patronage. Both are stories of building coalitions around IT, of alliances in support of it and of rearranging institutions as their outcomes. Neither is a story of ‘impacts’, in the simplified social physics that imagines the moving inertia of IT imparted to the static inertia of authortarian societies, on the one hand, nor of those societies’ absorbing or coopting the Internet’s dynamism to their own inertias, on the other. Between these extremes that never meet is an overlapping pair of stories of professional cultures, generational succession, building coalitions and forming alliances in support of technologies, and the translations of each into the other.
… agency, exceptionalism, technological determinism, STS constructivism
… Jordan to 2000, after
… foundations: Syria, Egypt, KSA
… timelines, cohorts, networks, conferences
… breaks, development theories and policies, political economy
… middle range, institutions
Tags: arab, Internet, Internet in the Middle East, IT cohorts
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