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Globalization, Democracy, the Internet and Arabia
Globalization, Democracy, the Internet and Arabia
Working Papers on New Media and Information Technology in the Middle East, September 2008
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.
paper
eng
Dominika Sokol,
26 Oct 2008