A Decade of Internet Time in the Arab World: Or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet

Abstract

We examine a decade of Internet use in the Arab world and the reasons behind the lag in the development of Internet usage in this region in comparison to others. Our chief concern is to understand why Internet development lags in the Arab world. Why is it that Internet use is almost exclusively in terms of Web 2.0 social media models, rather than the production of content? Why are these models so heavily concentrated in a handful of Arab countries? Why do less than 10% of Arabs use the Internet for commercial purposes, and only five percent use the Internet for political activism?We answer these questions in the following ways:An analysis of the tension between regulatory policy, and the political Internet: The development of Internet usage in the majority of Arab countries has been stymied by regulatory polices and the fear of political censorship (amongst other consequences) that renders users of the Internet relatively mute. Unable, or unwilling to engage in either political or social critique, many users of the Internet in the Arab world remain digitally apolitical. Although we do not proclaim the death of the public sphere, we argue, in this instance, for its dearth. The intensification of flow and the fracturing of civil society: We describe the dearth of the public sphere in terms of a network effect. This effect is commonly perceived in the myth of transparency that accompanies the Internet, in which information and commodities appear or are manipulated as if by magic, thus rendering material space “transparent” and intensifying an apparatus that Appadurai has characterized as 'flow'; itself facilitated by the near-immediate global communication of IP-based information. Appadurai has argued that one effect of is the extension of the spatial envelope of civil society to include those who have migrated from the national home, but who remain politically active within their “native” public sphere. We argue that something else is occurring: Our data shows that although individuals may choose to participate in political dialogues across space, they do not do so as members of a public sphere, but as nodal actors within politicized networks. They may well exert political efficacy “back home”, but they do not do so as members of a public sphere.Conclusion: We conclude that a digital divide has developed in the region. One in which e-commerce, networked political activism, and social media models are concentrated amongst a few users in a few countries, while the rest languish, digitally impoverished.Our methodology is interdisciplinary: combining survey research (using our results as the UAE research partners of the World Internet Project); an historical analysis of Internet usage in the Arab world; a discussion of policies that stunt the development of Internet usage in the region; and critical theory. Critical theory must address empirical fact: Processes that are too often assumed to exist at a meta-historical level, and whose effects are often read backwards from cultural evidence, must be enumerated and inform theoretical models.