New media, new publics: reconfiguring the public sphere of Islam - Part IV: media and information

Social Research, Fall, 2003 by Jon W. Anderson

Emerging Public Spheres of Electronic Communication

These developments render problematic the distinction of public and private domains and forms of expression that became apodictic for a generation of research on Muslim and Middle Eastern societies. Introduced by Hanna Papanek (1973) and Cynthia Nelson (1974) to place a sociological ground under discussions of honor and shame in traditional settings, the public/private distinction opened up the private world of sentiment and expression, particularly women's, but to the relative neglect of the public sphere that new media make increasingly permeable to the circulation of messages from more restricted realms, diluting and in some cases challenging the authority to represent. Today, satellite television is everywhere, with Al-Jazeera's signature discussion shows and dedication to airing opposing points of view its current poster child (El-Nawawy and Iskandar, 2002). To conventions of the press and transnational broadcasting, these add interpretive and discursive forms from more restricted realms, much as the audiocassette earlier allowed sermons to circulate outside both their occasions and official approval.

Passing messages out of conventional channels is a feature of new media. They blur boundaries not only between genre of expression but also between their social spaces. Within days of the Arab States Broadcasting Union rejecting the application of Al-Jazeera TV in December 1998, the story was spread internationally on the Internet by Arabia.On.Line, then experimenting with a mix of entertainment and regional news (Anderson and Eickelman, 1999). At the time, only a handful of transnational Arabic-language newspapers targeting regional elites were on the Internet; now every major daily, all state news services, and many magazines from the region have versions on-line, where they compete not just with each other but with other--notably with religious-purveyors of news, interpretation, and other information previously circulating in more limited realms. Increasingly, many are multilingual and invite interaction with their users, both for market research and as the practices of the profiles they project onto the Internet.

This is the scene of energetic, experimental, and intensely creative activity; but what is new can be problematic. It attracts new people, albeit primarily from younger and subaltern segments of existing elites (Anderson, 1997 and 1999; Gonzalez-Quijano, 2003). Globally, the Internet is barely 30 years old, with a public career outside the research precincts that spawned it spanning little more than a decade and half that in the Middle East. Early enthusiasms for cyberdemocracy (Grossman, 1995; Negroponte, 1995), which frequently replayed hopes invested in mass media a generation earlier (for example, Pool, 1990), have given way to pessimism about digital divides; but in the realm of media, the Internet unites separate features of other new media: lower barriers to entry for producers, a more symmetrical relation between producers and consumers, and higher degrees of interactivity between them than older media from print to state monopoly broadcasting.