Palestine
Public Opinion and Arab Identity Online By the TBS Journal
One
of the most fascinating results of the new transnational media is the extent to
which they have allowed the reintegration of Arab emigrants into Arab life and
society. No longer cut off from their homelands, many Arabs living in the West
read Arab newspapers (either in print or on the internet), watch Arab television
(MBC, ART, and LBC are available in the United States by satellite and in some
areas by cable), and actively seek out Arab sites on the internet.
Even Iraq's United
Nations ambassador, Nizar Hamdoon, breaks out of his isolation in New York by
heavily using the internet. He told the Washington Post, "I do the internet, I
keep up with the latest news, I browse through the CNN page and the web sites
of newspapers I cannot get here. There are lots of Iraqi community chat rooms.
I don't give my name. Regardless of their political, social or economic
background, they [the people in the online chat rooms] all feel that what is
happening to the Iraqi people is unfair."
The image is a startling one, but the fact is that there is an online
community of Arabs based simultaneously in London, New York, and many cities
of the region. As the amount of information about the Arab world available
outside the Arab world blossoms, location becomes less and less relevant for
one to play an active role in modern Arab society.
Something as mundane as decreasing prices for international telephone calls
play a role as well. For many years, countries have raised the price of or
taxed international phone service to subsidize domestic operations. Under
World Trade Organization rules, however, international phone tariffs are
expected to drop precipitously in the coming years. As they plummet, so too
will the costs of faxes and other transmissions of information over phone
lines (including the use of international phone lines for internet access).
Because of relative ease of use and a large installed base, in the
intermediate term the telephone may prove more important than the internet as
a conduit for new ideas to enter the Arab world and for reports of conditions
within the Arab world to reach Arab communities outside.
The enlargement of the Arab community to bring Arabs back into contact with
their own societies (and doing so increasingly through interactive media,
given the growing prevalence of the internet in the United States) has had the
remarkable effect of reinserting expatriate Arab intellectuals into the Arab
world. A host of Western-based Arab academics—many of whom left the Middle
East to undertake doctoral research and then found employment in the West
studying the Arab world—are becoming fixtures in the new Arab media.
Western-based Arab newspaper correspondents and columnists also "write back"
into the Arab world, and they are clearly affected by their surroundings. The
internationalization of media coverage has, to a great degree, become like a
huge exchange program, in some ways making the West more aware of Arab
concerns, but in many ways making the Arab world more aware of the political
and social mores of the West. There is a remarkable cross-fertilization of
ideas taking place between Arab intellectuals in the West and their colleagues
remaining in the Arab world, enabled and driven by the new media.
Even within overseas Arab communities, the internet is causing fascinating
changes. As anthropologist Jon Anderson points out, online "communities"—chat
rooms, bulletin boards, usenet groups, and so forth—are not typical of the
societies from which their members have emerged. The online Arab community is
disproportionately composed of scientists, engineers, and students;
theologians, politicians, and military officials are underrepresented. The
result, Anderson reports, is that individuals who at home would yield to the
opinions of specialists find themselves venturing into religious and political
topics. In so doing they bring the insights and tools of their professional
training to the discussion, resulting in a new "creole" discourse that
combines elements of discourse from their own places of origin with Western
scientific training and scholarly inquiry. Arabs still in the Arab world can
monitor and participate in most if not all of these discussions, although in
doing so they are potentially subject to the same sorts of monitoring that
characterize all of their internet use.