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

Social Research, Fall, 2003 by Jon W. Anderson

Except as channels, media play a secondary role in this theory, but a more central one in Benedict Anderson's alternative focus on "imagined community" (B. Anderson, 1983). Employing a more robust conception of communication modeled less on the systemic properties of language than on the actual practice of speech communities, Anderson located the modern imagination of community along ethnolinguistic lines in the diasporas of early modern empires. There language became the basis for more extensive community than religion or dynastic states through the shared experiences of "creole journeys" and then of "reading together" fostered by early print capitalism. While this emphasis on imagination seems distant from Habermas' on rationality, both point to practical links between community and communication, particularly outside of institutional boundaries, and to the more material basis of their reification in new forms for representation of that experience from newspapers to novels spawned by that new media at the same time that they fostered an enormous market. Both focus on margins, but Anderson's is the more open and flexible conception of communication that includes more of mediated communication than only what it shares with interpersonal communication and so is applicable to a broader range of media than its type-site of print. Also, his notion of "creole journeys" foregrounds developments outside Europe and the European priorities in Habermas's theory.

Like Habermas, Anderson can be criticized for what he leaves out or leaves flattened as objects rather than as constituting subjects. This includes women, indigenous peoples, lower classes. While this matters to the story of modernization, removing that story leaves the fundamental insight that links creolization to new media and locates their stations in diaspora journeys. Drawing on these perspectives is not to imply that new media mark some onset of modernity in the Muslim world, but to suggest more global frames of comparison than modernization, modernity modeled on European experience, or drawn from mass media. Globally, today's new media, particularly the Internet and particularly as it is unfolding in the Muslim world, have more in common with the print revolution of early modernity than with the mass media of late modernity, and a public sphere more comparable to the salons and coffeehouses of early modernity than to mediated-saturated mass society that Habermas came to see as later modernity.

As recently as 20 years ago there was little or no Islam on-line, and the Internet was barely visible even in the universities to which it was spreading from research labs where it was developed. Twenty years ago the Internet had essentially the form that it has today: a distributed, decentralized, network-structured rather than hierarchical open communication space into which users brought interests, placed content, and thereby structured it around those interests, which quickly came to include avocational as well as professional interests of its users at every stage of its development and extension. In this permissive context, Islam initially came on-line through the agency of what I have called "technological adepts" who had the access and skills to bring interests they had as Muslims into this new medium (Anderson, 1999). They included students who went or were sent abroad to study in institutes of engineering and applied science that spawned the Internet and, like their counterparts there, used the Internet to place their interests on-line and to engage others like themselves. These students, together with emigre professionals, political exiles, and labor migrants, form part of the contemporary Muslim diaspora. It is a mobile population, not just of settlers but with ties and the material means to maintain links with homelands in a world shrunken by advances in transportation and communication available to ever more people. Students in particular seized on the early Internet and were in time followed by others as the Internet spread.