Cyberspace, Civil Society & Internet Biographies in the Middle East

From a talk delivered at ‘Focus Asia: Media Cultures and Politics in Asia and Beyond’ at Lund University (26-27 February 2009)

We all seem to be grappling with the new millennium through lists. So, for this part of the conference on Democracy, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere in Old and New Media, I want to add Cyberspace and Internet Biographies in the Middle East. My goal is to tie tie these topics to what kind of social contract is emerging with networked communications. Since all of these concepts, and the data assembled around them, are problematic, let me begin with what I want to add and proceed to what I mean by the kind of social contract emerging with networked communications.

My starting point has been the Internet, first with Islam coming on line in the early 1990s, then in the Middle East in the middle 1990s, and more recently with how it plays with other information and communication technologies in wider worlds of transnational civil society organizations.[1] Comparing processes underway in transnational civil society with other regional ones helps shift the point of comparison and so what they share with other places, frames, instances or – as I suggest here – biographies of the Internet, its stories.

By ‘Internet biographies’ I mean those of Internet professionals but also Internet profession, or promotion, visions or conceptions of the Internet in the region. This might seem unpromising in comparison to other parts of Asia, for the Middle East scores poorly in global comparisons of connectivity, access, use, particularly in comparison to East Asia, where Korea is one of the most connected countries, and China already has one of the largest user communities in the world, while actively redefining ‘connection’. The Middle East even compares poorly within the Muslim world – where, in Southeast Asia, Malaysia has emerged as a global IT player and Indonesia as a hotbed of Internet activity, not to say activism.

But global indicators can be misleading for measuring what is not there instead of retrieving what is. So, I mean to shift the frame of reference to a more wholistic view of Internet experience in order to expand and deepen how we think about cyberspace and civil society in a world of networked communications. Before the Internet as a communications revolution recedes into taken-for-granted conventional wisdom, I think we need a better fix on more precisely what it engages. This has proved something of a slippery subject that has traced a familiar path from enthusiasm to subsequent disappointment, particularly in thinking about cyberspace and civil society, as well as about the Internet, in the Middle East.

Some reasons for this are ephemeral. The dot.com investment boom of the 1990s stoked enthusiasms for democratizing potentials of the Internet as a decentralizing force, a decisive shift from one-to-many communications regimes that accompanied the rise of mass industrial societies to a more open, post-modern, many-to-many communication. With the dot.com investment bust, interest waned or resolved into apologia for authoritarian states and celebrity culture. Critiques of democratization-by-information retraced implicitly or explicitly those since the Frankfort School of the 1930s of the ‘degeneration’ of mass media. Critical views for the Internet’s apparent failure to liberate, quite apart from liberalizing, recast the replacement of cognitive with affective functions that the left detected earlier in the massification of media. The Internet seemed to fall victim to tendencies in open markets for most attention flows to a few sites and most sites attract little. Not agora, it was said, circus, and relief for the authoritarians. The new reality was China: liberalization without liberation. Or Malaysia, a model for the Middle East, with IT for business and business as usual.

My reservations about such views are both critical and based on accumulating research about networked communications and their implications for expanding the public sphere of civil society and the social contract it actually embodies. Certainly, the malleability of the Internet has made it open to authoritarian constructions. In Saudi Arabia and Syria, for instance, extended discussion and experimentation were followed by Internet installation on the existing models of telephony, hierarchical centralization and oversight. However, the opposite ensued in Jordan and Egypt, where both internal pressures and pressures to gain WTO accession produced more open Internet regimes; and overall, there has been a rise in the number of voices, particularly alternative voices, along with numbers of users and producers. The public sphere has enlarged, and not just the discursive one of opinion. The impediment to recognizing more than liberation or cooptation is too narrow a conception of how communication is organized, produced and reproduced under conditions of networked communications, where the roles of gatekeepers from editors in the regimes of mass communications to cultural and political authorities become unmoored from their cohort cultures, reference groups, schemes of training and initiation of newcomers.

The problem here may be the old-regime model as point of comparison. In the Middle East, the destabilizing effects of the Internet’s many-to-many communication regime and generally freer access to produce as well as to consume were quickly grasped and, in retrospect, seem to have been contained by successfully extending models of control from broadcasting and models of centralization from telephony to installation, regulation, access, and use of the Internet. However, such analysis leaves over much data that had little place and less priority in views of information as liberating down to Habermas’ imperatives for civil society and its information regimes. So, what do they miss?

Let me start with the notion of cyberspace. As an anthropologist and not a political or media theorist, my own view is that initial conceptions of cyberspace as alternative or ‘virtual’ reality were wrong descriptively. All subsequent research that set out to test or specify this notion and related ones like ‘virtual community’ have turned up continuities, not discontinuities, with ‘real life’.[2] A classic example was the finding of a Pew survey in the US that traffic in pornography on the Internet declined when mothers followed their teenagers online, for email as they went off to university, shifting the balance of Internet use from expanding social experience toward relationship-maintenance. Not only do users project pre-existing activities, projects, and even capabilities into cyberspace, cyberspace itself is less a place, alternative or otherwise, than an idea. It is a projection altogether familiar in anthropology of a liminal beyond, the world reversed, where meanings are loosened, chimera and changelings abound, where order – temporal, spatial, social – generally dissolves in time out of time. In anthropology, the classic example and site is the bush in Africa folklore where, beyond the margins of the village and social order, boys are taken to loosen childish identities and sensibilities.[3] For us, cyberspace is the postmodern bush, often characterised as a ‘wild west’, frontierish, populated by monsters from child-molesters to shape-shifting teenagers lost in role-playing games, anti-social pornography, and unbridled fantasy.

In other words, cyberspace is a cultural projection of the ‘far out’, otherness, our Far Other. As such, it is a strong attractor of moral panics, which are themselves quintessentially over the anti-structural. In the Middle East, these panics focused on twin pillars of order – family and state – and linked pornography as sexual experience outside marriage and the family with political subversion as agency outside authority of the state as the threats posed by the Internet’s open access and free flow of information. In this way, the ‘near enemy’ of Civil Society acquired the additional ‘far out’ gloss of Cyberspace and, vice versa, was conveyed to imaginings of Cyberspace quite in advance of much actual experience of it.

The same Internet that posed a site for reflexion also provided sites for cultural performances and for networking. Police, including cultural police, were quickly brushed aside by voices touting the Internet as the material base of a post-industrial political economy not to be missed as the Industrial Revolution was said to have been missed and to have relegated the region to subordination by the West. Such views have been widely taken up not only in commercial sector, but also in the Arab Development Reports since 2002 that link developing ‘knowledge economies’ to the idea that ‘human capital’ was underdeveloped, or in the commercial sector underutilized resource. The Arab Human Development Reports echo views that crystallized from the 1970s to the 1990s that explicitly link development, civil society, and the Internet as an informational tool or, closer to the ground, have led practically every country to embrace the Internet for e-commerce, e-education, and especially as a development sector for participating in a post-industrial world. Departments of electrical engineering, computer science, and business or public administration have been detached from existing faculties and combined into new ones in state universities. Scores of private post-secondary institutions arise to offer similar combinations, and nothing more. Ministries of Communications have been dissolved – notably in Egypt and Jordan – and their functions recast in new Ministries of Communication and Information Technologies, often without the telephone companies but under a new cadre of IT technocrats and priorities for IT development.

I do not mean that there has been good cooptation of the Internet dream as well as bad, but instead that a fuller picture of Internet engagement than whether or not it is liberating, or even liberalizing, is that it is multidimensional. My goal is to open some analytical space between agency-enhancement on the one hand and institutional capture on the other by thinking of Internet engagement analytically along three dimensions of reflexion, cultural performance, and networking.[4] These are analytical dimensions of how people engage the Internet; all three are present all the time. I’ve already re-introduced Cyberspace as reflective engagement. It also provides an arena for cultural performance and for networking – remember those teens expanding their social experience and their social networks or mothers their relationship-maintenance. One could add gamers, bloggers, contributors to wikis, Facebookers, YouTubers, who also network on, perform on and take the measure of the Internet. Here, I would look at two other sets of actors who embrace of the Internet for cultural performance and for networking that more directly constitute than discursively envision a social contract under conditions of networked communication.

My first example is the Islamic Internet, which I have followed since the early 1990s and described as starting with technological adepts who first brought Islam on-line in pious acts of witness and because they could.[5] They were for the most part students and professionals, who were sent or went to work in high tech precincts where the Internet was developed and used. Like other users, they pursued avocational as well as vocational interests on-line that for them included the texts of Islam and forums for discussing those. They were for the most part among the best and brightest in their countries, tracked early into science and so essentially amateurs in religion, who applied a different intellectual as well as communicational technology to discussing it than the classic hermeneutics of religious professionals. In time, and when the technology became more user-friendly with the Web, they were followed by culture managers, who came on-line to give ‘correct’ information about Islam in the new medium. They were followed in turn by interpreters and styles of interpretation that were also more ‘user friendly’ to those making up the on-line population. That is, they found, or sought, a theologically correct but vernacular voice that spoke to Muslims in growing professional middle classes who sought work and leisure on-line. At the suggestion of Yves Gonzalez-Quijano, I call these post-modern nomads. They include both what Malika Zegdal identified as a “new ‘ulema,” who speak in vernacular terms to conditions of modern life,[6] and a kind of internal migrants within the Muslim world who seek on line an Islam speaking to their conditions that they cannot find locally. Some work on the Internet itself, others through it. They tend to be professionals and highly mobile, both occupationally – they move from one country to another – and socially in the sense of switching identities, not just jobs. In this, the biography of the Internet itself is mirrored in the biographies users – in that it grows by adding users, they grow by adding uses.

Engineers have long conceptualize the Internet this way as a ‘stack’, both of protocols that run it and in a more extended, social sense of adding users who build the Internet. The Internet was invented by engineers for their own work and in the image of that work. They built it as a collaborative structure, open and nearly self-administering or with ‘intelligence’ at the margins. It spread to scientists, who added their own work habits and values on free exchange of information and were among early rationalizers of the Internet as an informational commons, which attracted other academics and the professionals they trained, further adding the gloss of expertise to collaboration and contribution as Internet practice. In this sense, the Internet has been said both to be constructed by its users and to socialize them to its praxis, a seeming conundrum that resolves as a ‘stack’ of uses and of users that grows in time.

To communication with distant machines, the Internet’s inventors quickly added email for operators to communicate with each other, followed by more social (group-oriented) mailing lists and electronic bulletin boards as well as international connections. In this, the career or biography of the Internet parallels those of users: it became more social by the same means that users evolve into a sort of developer by adding data and routines that forge new uses. Each layer serves as a platform for additional applications. So, for example, the World Wide Web, which was conceived by its inventor as a “memory substitute” by adding linking to remote file access,[7] became the platform for portals, which turned it into a publication medium; and the subsequent development of HTML into XML turned the Weg into a medium in which users could interact with each other, the so-called Web 2.0 of blogs, wikis, and social networking sites.

Thinking of the Internet as a stack frees us from the other conundrum of technological determinism vs. social constructivism to see the Internet as a techno-social formation that becomes more social by amplifying certain uses and certain user characteristics. These have to do with the dimension of Internet engagement as cultural performance and networking.

The Islamic Internet is a site par excellence of cultural performances (tech adepts, culture managers, modulators) and examples of networking in the assembly of sites that provide not only sermons and fatwas, but also lessons for children and more informal advice, similar to the personal advice columns of newspapers that address social dilemmas, from how to get along with in-laws to more psychological advice. Few of these sites link extensively to others; most strive to provide a variety of services for a variety of user-seekers. Most also aggregate their interaction with users and make it searchable; so they are highly redundant as well as multiply internally linked. In network terms, they are nodes of strong ties and high informational redundancy that are linked to individual users by weak ties of high informational differentiation.[8] Strong ties are exemplified in friends and kin, who know each other well or share the same information. For that reason, they are said to form echo-chambers, which is the informational side of solidarity-affirmation. Weak ties are those with acquaintances, or that convey a bit, even a single bit in mathematical terms, of information. The distinction is classically put that friends cannot help you find a job, because they share the same information, but friends of friends can have the bit that makes a difference.

Weak ties engage the information-seeking power of the Internet, while solidarity-seeking turns out to be weaker, more problematic in this medium. Consider only the success of Google to have turned the Internet into an information appliance by contrast to the near universal tendency of discussion forums from listservs to chatrooms to dissolve in acrimony, shouting, and struggles to keep ‘on topic’. Groups may migrate to the Internet, but rare rarely form there, for the Internet has been designed for, and excels at, information-seeking over solidarity-seeking. So a third conundrum that virtual communities sometimes form, but that group-formation is more often overridden by individual agency enhancement dissolves into the different kinds of ties that these engage, Solidarity seeking and mutual affirmation are strong ties, hence the ‘echo chamber’ character or high informational redundancy. Information seeking proceeds through weak ties; with their information differentiation, they provide the links between nodes of strong ties.

Turning from sites in the Islamic Internet, this structure can be seen in how the Internet emerged in the Middle East. In that context, a similar set of actors has followed a similar emergence, a similar stack of users but different uses. Like the Islamic Internet, it began with some of the best and brightest studying high technology overseas, then bringing it back to work on national development. Like the tech adepts who brought Islam on line, these technocrats were creole journeymen comparable to Benedict Anderson’s creoles of early modernity who recognize each other and the common experience of continual movement between sites that refine this experience.[9] Those sites include variously privileged national labs and international conferences and agencies where new ideas are explored under high-status patronage, outside of the quotidian responsibilities of line ministries. Such sites include the Royal Scientific Society in Jordan under the patronage of then-Crown Prince Hassan, the Information and Decision Support Center located in the cabinet office of the Egyptian government, the Syrian Computer Society, a professional organization of computing engineers under the patronage of the sons of the Syrian president (one of whom succeeded his father as Syria’s president), or Saudi Arabia’s national science foundation. Each assembled a cadre of technocrats under patronage close to the ruler, but outside the line ministries and government agencies, to explore new technologies, initially for administrative modernization and in time expanding to other ‘soft infrastructures’ of development.

These technocrats maintained or developed ties with counterparts in other countries through international organizations, secondments, and conferences as well through alumni relations back to the countries or institutions where they trained. Such ties channeled not only technical knowledge but also theories of development and their evolution from modernization focused on infrastructure to globalization that focuses on ‘human capital’ that they focused on specific situations in their countries. That is, they were both conduits (through weak ties to other nodes) and refiners (through strong ties among actors who composed their nodes). In each country, these technocrats worked behind the scenes of operational government, partly outside it to channel information about the Internet, and inside it to find allies and build coalitions for it.

Initial goals were to bring the engineering behind the Internet to modernize the soft infrastructure of public administration, much as others brought civil engineering to modernizing hard infrastructure. As the dominant paradigms of development shifted from modernization to globalization, they began to seek other allies and build coalitions with actors in commercial and media sectors, financers, and new regulators for such services. Here, the creole journeymen met new elites who were like them in many ways – with advanced educations overseas, bent on appropriating the new information and communication technologies – but operating in the private sector, whereas the creole journeymen of the preceding generation had almost all worked in the public sector. Conversion of public sector into private sector assets is an old story, and not only here. It is also the middle phase of Internet development in the US, when the Internet extended throughout universities by the National Science Foundation during the 1970s was effectively privatized by business-friendly Reagan government in the 1980s. But the story here is not one of simple cooptation.

It is instead a story of alliance-building and forming coalitions to support the new technology. The Internet is a composite technology, so functionally too much media to be consigned to communications, too much engineering for media, and altogether too free-form. Its early developer-implementers in the Middle East were, too. They formed alliances from university engineering departments with graduates in the telephone companies to get hook-ups, used old school ties to get access to satellite ground links or military fiber optics, built coalitions for enhancing services that could become the bases for introducing Internet to the public with a compound of scientific and public-service legitimacies. Telemedicine installations were early vehicles in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, government businesses in Egypt and Syria. Jordan’s first electronic bulletin board was established by a business services company that enlisted a minister of information, himself trained in computer engineering, to go on-line and publicized it around the world as the region’s first “Ask the Minister” program that even parliaments didn’t have. Financeers were cultivated, and new regulators likewise for friendly implementations of WTO and WIPO requirements. That is, around the technology of the Internet assembled a dynamic, ever changing set of actors beginning with engineers pressing the Internet and IT generally as a new development tool and expanding to businesspeople pressing it as a new development sector, both eagerly abetted by market-oriented international development programs.[10]

These coalitions pushed back against early moral panics over the Internet, such as a 1997 denunciation in the Iraqi government newspaper al-Jamhuriyya of the Internet as an “the end of civilizations, cultures, interests, and ethics,”[11] and others like it from the Chief of Police in Abu Dhabi to cultural and religious sentinels. They pushed back with more benign visions first of reforming administration that often dated to the Ottoman period, then of digital delivery of education, and later of e-commerce, even reversing the outcome of the Industrial Revolution that consigned the region to the status of primary producers who, as a former US president once said, “sell wholesale but buy retail.” For them, the Internet was also a site of cultural performance of their expertise as engineers and as contributors of modernities their countries were capable of. In this, they refracted the high optimism of the 1990s into to using and building the Internet as a network and platform for cultural performances at once modern and Arab from advanced telemedicine to a plethora of Web-based portals.

Regional counterparts to the post-modern nomads also emerged by the late 1990s. At their core were developers of Internet applications – in fact, a range of applications from underlying programs, to web design, to programming in the media sense. A decade after then Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan began sponsoring and promoting projects of engineers at the Royal Scientific Society, a medical school graduate created the first pan-Arab Internet portal, which he subsequently sold to a Saudi media mogul and then reappeared as an IT venture capitalist himself. Programmers, web-designers, engineers circulated between Cairo, the Levant, the Gulf and beyond. A generation of engineers who founded the Syrian Computer Society followed their president, Bashar al-Asad, into government as ministers, ambassadors, governors, agency heads. IDSC technocrats in Egypt created and spun off applications for IT generally and the Internet specifically, while in Saudi Arabia the national scientific establishment was placed between the government and commercial sectors with responsibility for encouraging Internet development by data and media services as well as network installers.[12] In other words, a similar, and similarly mobile population that merged technological and cultural capabilities like those on the Islamic Internet emerged in the regional context of the Middle East. Both were interstitial with respect to traditional lines of organization and authority. Both trade on expertise and slip between different sorts while constantly ‘networking’ with counterparts, searching for allies, building coalitions around implementation and extension of the new technology of the Internet.

Putting these together, the Internet’s biography in the Middle East is a succession of creole journeymen, cultural elites, and their merger in post-modern nomads who modulate the socio-technical development, implementation, extension, pioneering of the Internet in the region.[13] Individual biographies tend to follow the career of the Internet itself. Both emerge as a stack of skills brought and acquired, but most importantly amplified on the Internet in the process of developing it. Thinking of these biographies – of Internet developers and of the Internet itself – as a stack of users’ contributing their cultures and of uses they develop resolves anomalies, uncertainties really, introduced thinking of the Internet as having a dynamic inertia that it imparts to or is absorbed by the static inertia of society.

As confusing initial pictures of the Internet recede – pictures of liberation and cooptation, of the enhancement of individual agency and of institutional takeover, of democratization seemingly thwarted by authoritarian states – we can see them as partial, even partisan, descriptions of more multidimensional engagements with the Internet. Such outcomes can be sorted more systematically to the different kinds of ties that actually compose networks and the sorts of communications they distribute. It’s been common to think of networks, and so of networked communications, as composed of ‘flows’,[14] with little attention to stratifying their content. That content, I am suggesting, can be broken analytically into strong and weak ties – the one characterizing solidarity-seeking and characterized by high informational redundancy, the other characterizing information-seeking and characterized by differentiation on the margins. The contradictory evidences of both agency enhancement and institutional cooptation occur at different parts of networks, in the links that pass and in the nodes that refine information. Networked communications turn out to be not just the breakdown of one-to-many communications by many-to-many. They do not atomize but, as web-media guru David Weinberger recently put it, ‘molecularize’ somewhere “between the expertise of men in the editorial boardroom and the ‘wisdom of crowds’.”[15]

If this is a more realistic sociology of the Internet, a ‘thicker description’ of it in anthropological terms, what does it mean as a social contract? What kind of society does networked communications sustain, encourage, amplify? We are accustomed to thinking of mass communications as a feature of mass society, amplifying mass culture, encouraging a mass subject, whether as the electorate or more grandly ‘the people’. What does networked communications sustain, encourage, amplify? I have suggested it is weak ties of information-seeking over stronger ties of solidarity seeking – crudely, linking over nodes – and this has consequences for the social contract, particularly democratic social contracts that convert voluntarism into the praxis of democratic politics.

The democratizing impact of the Internet was only a decade ago held out as its greatest promise, whether operationalized in electronic town halls, more open and responsive e-government, or for grass-roots organization.[16] The Jordanian Minister of Information’s experiment with an electronic chat room was one such demonstration project; so were plans for electronic delivery of government services from licenses to health insurance that would by-pass bureaucrats and the infamous slog from office to office for signature after signature. Similar experiments on the intra-governmental side were undertaken in Saudi Arabia and Syria. The democratizing impact has proven elusive, not because of institutional cooptation, but in its absence, partly because it flows through weak ties, which are the stronger force on the Internet than solidarity-affirming strong ties. Strong ties are more evident in nodes than in links, the weak ties that are the sites of enhancement of individual agency. The two, of course, go together; but it is the weak ties of information-seeking that leverage and are amplified in networked communication over affirmations of solidarity. In informational terms, networked communications open up the echo chambers of solidarity affirmation; but they do little for constituency formation, and, without that, agency enhancement does little for representation. “I represent no one, just myself” is increasingly the mantra of the wired up, linked in, postmodern social actor.

This is a sentiment that my colleagues, political scientist Jodi Dean and net-media critic Geert Lovink, and I encountered over and over during a recent Social Science Research Council project (on Information Technology and International Cooperation in transnational civil society organizations), and labeled “post-democratic governmentality.”[17] To a critic, this may sound like more postmodern nihilism, but by “post-democratic,” we mean not pre- or anti-democratic, for this is a field of often aggressively democratic rhetoric. What we mean is that affiliations and engagements amplified by networked information and communication technologies “replace democratic suppositions of representation, accountability, and legitimacy with a different set of values” such as subsidiarity, multistakeholderism, expertise, and reputation-management. And by “governmentality,” we mean those “codes of conduct, strategies of power and forms of knowledge” that surround and inform “the practice, systematization, and rationalization of a field to be governed.” Transnational civil society organizations are in some ways a unique field; but they are one where networked communications were uniquely expected to advance democratization, and they bear structural similarities to the Islamic Internet and to Internet implementation in the Middle East that I have discussed here.

These are, first of all, arenas of voluntary participation, but not of representational or constituency politics. Internet implementations in the Middle East emerge as alliance-seeking and coalition-building around the new technology and through some of its techno-social properties. It attracted diverse actors, who form networks around IT without representing constituency interests that would differentiate them from others, but rather skill sets. This amplifies cultural performances and e-visions, or what I have called the reflexive dimension of engagement with the Internet that project a ‘far out’ or more ultimate reality than the quotidian present. It is characteristic of the Islamic Internet to amplify universal values over the over those of specific communities. Indeed, networked communications seem generally to amplify appeals to more universal values – whether religious or human-rights, scientific or animal-rights – over more specific communities’ values or representation of those.

A second class of appeals is to expertise. As claim to participate, knowing how is the companion, as it were, of showing up or volunteering. Expertise here takes many forms but essentially refers to disciplined knowledge of how to do something. Expertise itself is a praxis – here, practical knowledge of Internet technology, understood to include more than machines or their formal properties. Internet technology has from the beginning included social and political knowledge, which also shape the machine by the addition of their properties to it. A product and tool of science and delivered by engineers, the Internet is also as part of the global political and cultural economy. In the Islamic field, it poses the challenge of creolization with the emergence of an additional transnational set of Islamic actors between the super-literacy of a high tradition (which is already transnational) and the widespread illiteracy, by that tradition’s lights, of popular local traditions (also, in forms such as Sufism, transnational). This is the space of pious, professional, emerging middle classes seeking an Islam that speaks to their situation between folk and elite. More than traditional or hermeneutic self-enclosure, expertise is their praxis. They trade on knowing how which, in practical terms, includes making the creole journeys of post-modern nomadism.

In an important study of free and open software movements, Christopher Kelty has characterized participation by working on its means of production as a ‘recursive public’. This is not Habermas’ public composed by a discourse that does not rely on the authority in a speaker, but a more practical one…

…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.[18]

Kelty cautiously projects this kind of public back to the origins of the Internet itself; and it may be projected forward through its and its developers’ biographies that I have characterized as stacks. Such seems to be the case with post-modern nomads both in the Islamic realm who work on the Internet as a site and as builder-users and in the Middle Eastern realm who work on its implementation, first as development tool and then as development sector.

Understanding the Internet public as one that works on it as well as with it helps clarify the prominence of management of reputations for that. Reputation-management not only values participation over mere representation. Being known for that is part of the action, an elementary praxis in a regime of networked communication, where communication is through links forged instead of, as with mass communications, through broadcasting. This is not an attention economy so much as one of links. There is less fame for being famous, such as is the degenerate form of mass communications, than for showing up and knowing how. That may amount to spreading performances over multiple venues, such as Internet shaykhs’ appearing on television or at conferences or in expanding their interactions from giving traditional religious advice to more social and psychological advice on their websites, or religious lessons for children in addition to sermons. But it specifically includes managing reputations for activities that expand tie-ins which expand their networks.

A final feature I would draw attention to is the main one emphasized here in Internet biographies – the constantly morphing identities in them. It is not only that the Internet provides mobilities, both occupational and social, but that networking, cultural performances, and reflexion all amplify such mobilities which register as constantly morphing identities of actors and technologies. The Internet, as a machine, grows as a stack of applications that provide platforms for additional applications much as the biographies of users trace their development in some measure into developers themselves. This is not only because the first users have been its developers. The process continues in the extension of networks from strong-tie nodes of high redundancy through weak-tie links of high differentiation in information content that amplify the stronger force of information-seeking over solidarity-affirming on the Internet. Under conditions of networked communication, there simply is no mass subject corresponding to a single sender of messages, such as posited in the regime of mass communications.

Networked communications also display tendencies to subsidiarity as an outcome of these features. It does not require – indeed, is unfriendly to – hierarchy. A social contract built out of knowing how and showing up over representation and constituency formation, from assiduous attention to managing reputations for that and for formulating appeals to universal values over those of communities, should feature decision-making flowing to the margins, where there is new information, rather than concentrating centrally where it isn’t. And this seems to be what happens. In the nodes, everyone knows the same thing. Action in networks occurs where extra information makes a difference, where a weak tie is a resource, and alliances are formed.

These seem to be empirical features that emerge from comparisons of networked communications as components of a new social contract. I don’t expect the list is final, but I do expect these features will have to be taken into account for thinking about democracy, civil society, and the public sphere under the conditions of networked communication that research so far reveals.

To conclude, I do not mean to project a new social contract. ‘New’ is too frequently, sometimes too casually, and typically too categorically bandied about discussions of the Internet. We may be too enchanted by its impact on our own lives. What I do mean to suggest is that accumulating research points to amplification of practices of information-seeking over solidarity-seeking. They include or translate information-seeking into showing up, knowing how, and appeals to universal values as claims to participate, plus unceassing management of reputations for that, all over the head of representational politics and constituency formation that were centerpieces of last century’s social, political, and communications theories. Their mass subjects recede in an emerging regime of networked communications, in its public sphere, which seem to drive and to be driven by another set of practices, strategies, and forms of knowledge that amplify a different subject now only emerging.

Subjective engagement with the Internet includes reflective visions of cyberspace as ‘far out’, cultural performances or what people show, and networking or how people connect; and networking can be disaggregated into nodes of strong ties of mutual affirmation and high informational redundancy linked by weak ties, marked by information-seeking and low redundancy of information. This structure tends to push decision-making and so authority to lower levels at the expense of representation and constituency formation.  Instead, it brings to the fore participation based on expertise, appeals to universal values over values of specific communities, managing reputations for that expertise, and constantly morphing socio-technical identities.

References

---

[1] See, New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, Dale F.Eickelman & Jon W. Anderson, eds. (Indiana University Press, 1998; second edition 2003). Arab Information Project, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (ccas.georgetown.edu). Reformatting Politics: Information Technologies and Global Civil Society, Jodi Dean, Jon W. Anderson & Geert Lovink, eds. (Routledge, 2007).

[2] Barry Wellman, ed.  Networks in the Global Village (Westview Press, 1999); Barry Wellman & Caroline Haythornthwiate, eds. The Internet in Everyday Life (Blackwell, 2002).

[3] The classic account is Victor Turner’s The Forest of Symbols (Cornell University Press, 1967); also Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Cornell University Press, 1974).

[4] This stratification of engagement with the Internet is inspired by Daniel Miller & Don Slater’s study, The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (Berg, 2000), which breaks down Trinidadian embrace of the Internet in terms of objectification, mediation, dynamics of normative freedom, and positioning.

[5] “The Internet and Islam’s New Interpreters,” in New Media in the Muslim World, Dale F.Eickelman & Jon W. Anderson, eds. (Indiana University Press, 1999. Second edition, 2003); .

[6] “Religion and Politics in Egypt: The Ulema of Al-Azhar, Radical Islami, and the State (1952-94).” Intemational foumal of Middle East Studies 3(4): 371-99, Winter 1999.

[7] Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web (Harper, 1999).

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

[9] Benedict Anderson, The Imagined Community (Verso, 1992)

[10] Jon W. Anderson, “Producers and Middle East Internet Technology: Getting beyond ‘Impacts’.” The Middle East Journal 54(3): 419-431, Summer 2000.

[11] Lisa Napoli, “Iraqi Exiles Reach for Home on Web Site.” The New York Times, 27 February 1997. (http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/022097iraq.html)

[12] See: Jon W. Anderson and Michael C. Hudson, “Internet Pioneering in Four Arab Countries: The Internet as a Force for Democracy in the Middle East.” (http://aipnew.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/internet-pioneering-in-four-arab-countries-the-internet-as-a-force-for-democracy-in-the-middle-east/). September 2008.

[13] A more detailed account is Jon W. Anderson, “Des communautés virtuelles? Vers une théorie ‘techno-pratique’ d’Internet dans le monde Arabe.”  Maghreb-Machrek 178: 45-58, Hiver 2003-2004.

[14] Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Blackwell, 1996).

[15] Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (Holt Paperbacks, 2007).

[16] Some examples are Lawrence Grossman, The Electronic Republic (Penguin, 1995); Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (MIT Press, 1995); Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community (Harper, 1994).

[17] “Introduction: The Post-Democratic Governmentality of Networked Societies, in Reformatting Politics, op. cit., pp. xv-xxix.

[18] Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Duke University Press, 2008). p. 3.

Explore posts in the same categories: Internet, Internet in the Middle East, online social life, social software

Tags: arab, social software

You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.