Wiberg M. - The Interaction Society[c] Practice, Theories and Supportive Technologies (2005)(en)

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be completely anonymous if they wish” (as cited in Human Rights Watch, 1999).

In a closely regulated news media environment, unfettered access to news and online speech maintains public opinion enlightened and channels into public debatemarginalizedandsubversivevoices.DifferentpublicsusetheInternetto come to terms with their social, economic or cultural exclusion. For students, the Internet is a universal library; for free-lance entrepreneurs, it is a global market; for human rights activists, it is a window onto the world to project Moroccan reality while the unemployed, the poor, and the dispossessed pin their hopes on the Internet to generate alternative identities and possibilities to anoppressiveeverydayenvironment.Also,theInternet,initsspatialdimension of cybercafés, is allowing women access to public spaces traditionally appropriated by men. Online forums and public chatrooms provide subjects with space and opportunities to rehearse new positions and identities and, thus, contribute in ways which may still be undetected, to the reconstruction of gender and social relations.

This chapter has also argued that conservative powers are putting up a stiff resistance to the freedoms generated by new media technologies. From proposals which seek to ban underage users access to cybercafés to resolutions which propose to extend the enforcement of “red lines” policy which regulate commentary in traditional media to Internet usage, proponents of the status quo are trying very hard to contain the space of freedoms the new media technologies have generated. Besides attempts to legislate forms of legal liabilityconcerningInternetusageormaterialsInternetServiceProviderscarry, the forces of reaction have filtered popular culture with stories that represent the Internet as an alienating technology which carries a potential danger for social order. Dalil al-Internet, a newspaper that specializes in Internet news in Arabic, recently ran a story about the risks of Internet usage that epitomizes the negative representations in which reactionary forces try to couch the new technology.Thestory,entitled“TheWolvesofChat,”tellsoftheseductionand tragic fall of a homemaker. Written in first-person narration, the story tells of how an upper middle class virtuous wife and mother becomes an addict to Internet chat and develops an online romantic relationship.19 The narrative provides “realistic” details that trace thesteps and processes through whichthis virtuous homemaker becomes enticed into “the web of sin,” how she forsakes hermaritalandparentalduties,andiseventuallycaughtintoatrapsetbya“chat wolf” who, taking advantage of her naiveté, abuses of her emotionally and physically. The story ends by depicting how the once joyful and generous wife

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and mother has become a manic-depressive and unpleasant being who undergoes therapy to cope with her tragic experience.20 The ideological implication behind this story is that the freedoms provided by the new technology must not be extended to bear on the norms of the real world. Female Net users must be reminded, the message in such stories seems to be, that preying wolves hunt the virtual world as well and that they had better fill their time with “more useful” activitiesthanroamchatrooms“unchaperoned.”Obviously,traditionalintimidation tactics are being adapted to the environment created by the new technology to curb a woman’s freedom and keep under check her virtual rehearsals for self-recognition and self-assertion.

This is not to say that virtual interaction warrants a safe environment for its users. A female Net user is still prone to substantial dangers, which could have serious consequences on her life. In the course of this research, I was quite frequently compelled to forego the position of a researcher to draw an informant’s attention to certain realities. As a general observation, I realized that most young Internet users were impressed by the idea of receiving invitations from foreign correspondents met in chatrooms. Even if I knew that most would turn down such offers, I felt I had to be quite emphatic with a few young informants who hinted that they seriously considered responding to certain invitations. The case of Iman, 21, required that I spent time trying to talk her out of what seemed to be an imminent misadventure. Iman had a Dutch correspondent who offered to send her a return ticket and provide her with an apartment in Amsterdam for her visit. Iman was a nice attractive young woman who worked as a shop assistant. In the course of the interview, she confided that she used the Internet to search for migration opportunities because her family was poor and she had low prospects about her future in her country. For her, virtual hrig was only a prelude to a promising real life experience in exile. I realized she was so desperate to go that she seemed ready to take unnecessary risks. I also concluded that her Dutch correspondent must have reached the same conclusion since he made his offer quite irresistible. I was astounded to find out that she did not even consider the possibility that she was being lured into a dangerous network. I had to try hard to make her realize the risks she was facing. In short, the environment may be virtual, but the risks for a female Net communicant are real.

In the final course, it should be remembered that the importance of the Internet does not only lie in the unfathomable pool of information it now makes accessible to its users. For that matter, as Philip Bereano has put it, “[only] the naïveorthescurrilousbelievetheThirdWaveclaimthat‘informationispower.’

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Power is power, and information is particularly useful to those who are already powerful” (as cited in Stoecker, 2002, p. 148). Moreover, following Mowlana (1994), one can make the point that Moroccan society has long been an information society. While Moroccans have traditionally appropriated folk culture (Haddad, 2001), folk media and public spaces for information transmission (Graiouid, 1998, 2003) and grassroots organizational channels in the case of social movements (Belghazi & Madani, 2001), traditional communications tend to reproduce existing power relations and spatial division.

The Internet, by contrast, provides a space where individuals can implode borders and rehearse multiple identities. It is too early to have a clear view of how Internet use is affecting users and society at large. Cummings, Butler, & Kraut (2002) are right to insist that “[only] by examining people’s full set of social behavior and examining their full inventory of social ties can we assess the net social impact of online social relationships” (p. 108). Yet, it is already evident that one important contribution of new media and communication technologies lies in their appropriation by different groups and communities as forum for interaction and the rehearsal of invented identities and relations. Given the strict spatial divide which regulates gender and social relations in Morocco, the Internet acts as a palliative channel to the separation between men and women and as a sphere of interaction where participants exchange opinions about issues of general concern. At times, relations built in this virtual space migrate to other settings and may even develop into global partnerships. However, we need to remember that emancipation or empowerment is not mapped onto online interaction. Rather, the World Wide Web is better viewed as a nexus in which relations are negotiated, contested, but also reproduced. Eventually, virtual hrig comes out not as an escapist exercise practiced by dysfunctional individuals but as an engaging rehearsal for more tolerant and accessible worlds, both virtual and real.

Acknowledgment

The author would like to thank Professor Douglas A. Davis for his continuous support and genuine interest in this research and for his insightful feedback on an early draft of this chapter.

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Endnotes

1From the Moroccan Arabic verb h’rag (“to burn”), the word hrig has been used in the context of “burning the traffic light” before it has become the household term for “illegal migration.” Hrig has been predominantly used to describe the attempts of desperate young migrants who risk their lives on board of pateras (small boats) or hidden in the asphyxiating trunks of lorries and trucks to make it to the Spanish shores. The term “virtual hrig” has been recently appropriated by cybernetic communities to describe online interaction in search of virtual partners.

2Cited in R. Dudd (1989, p. 310).

3Similar concerns about the role and implications of new technologies and cyberculture have been made by a number of thinkers. Howard Reingold, one of the first theorists of virtual communities, noted that to “the millions who have been drawn into it, the richness and vitality of computer-linked cultures are attractive, even addictive” (1994, p. 3). C. Odone, for example, has also noted the empowering dimension of computer-medi- ated interaction: “… the web could serve as the first building block in the creation of a whole new social solidarity, founded upon cross-cultural, interdisciplinary dialogues and cemented in an ‘empowerment’ and ‘enfranchisement’ of marginalised individuals” (1995, 10). By contrast, Sobchack believes that “the new electronic frontier promotes an ecstatic dream of disembodiment,” an estrangement he calls “alienation raised to the level of ekstasis” (as cited in Culcutt, 1999, p. 21). M. Poster (1990) lamentsthedispersionanddislocationofthesubjectthroughelectronically mediatedinteractionwhileKevinRobinsperceivesinnewtechnologies“a negative agenda” and “the desire to rise above reality, as if we’ve been living as caterpillars and new tech will turn us into butterflies” (as cited in Culcutt, 1999, pp. 20-21).

4In this respect, I note, with Brian Winston, the pitfalls of technological determinism: “when considering the impact of technology it is absolutely necessary to keep the realities of our socio-cultural-economic arrangements - including their dynamics - in mind. It is not enough simply to look at technology and its dynamic and assume, in a deterministic fashion, that because a technology exists or is possible its diffusion is therefore inevitable” (1995, p. 226). However, I also underline Andrew Feenberg’s (1995, pp. 14-15) celebration of the democratic potential intrinsic to technology: “Coupling the technical design process to aesthetic and

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ethical norms and national identities through new and more democratic procedures is no utopia. Modern technologies open not only possibilities internal to the particular world they shape but metapossibilities corresponding to other worlds they can be transformed to serve. Technical change is not simply progress or regress along the continuum so far traced by the West; it may also come to include movement between different continua.”

5Turner even pins the survival of societies on the availability of liminal spheres: “any society that hopes to be imperishable must carve out for itself a piece of space and a period of time in which it can look honestly atitself.Thishonestyisnotthatofthescientist,whoexchangesthehonesty of his ego for the objectivity of the gaze. It is, rather, akin to the supreme honesty of the creative artist [...] All generalizations are in some way skewed, and artists with candid vision ‘labor well the minute particulars,’ as Blake knew. This may be a metalanguage, but all this means is that the “meta” part of it is not at an abstract remove from what goes on in the world of “getting and spending,” but rather sees it more clearly, whether more passionately or dispassionately is beside my present point. Whether anthropologycanignorethisincandescentobjectivityandstilllayclaimto being “the study of man” I gravely doubt” (Victor Turner, 1984, p. 40).

6I note here that even in the frequently cited case about the use of the Internet by Zapatista rebels in Mexico, the impact of this new technology must be kept within perspective. As one activist has warned: “Despite all the media hype which came with the discovery of the role of cyberspace in circulating Zapatista words and ideas, subcommandante Marcos is not sitting in some jungle camp uploading EZLN communiqués via mobile telephone modern directly to the Internet. Zapatista messages have to be hand-carried through the lines of military encirclement and uploaded by others to the networks of solidarity” (Cleaver 1999, as cited in R. Stoecker, 2002, pp. 151-152). See also “Zapatistas in Cyberspace: A Guide to Analysis and Resources” at http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/ Cleaver/zapsincyber.html

7See Hafkin (2002) for a historical account with progress index of the African Information Society Initiative covering the period 1996-2002.

8See “La téléphonie mobile touche aujourd’hui 1 marocain sur 4” in La vie économique, (2003, April 4, N0. 4210). For a historical survey of telecom liberalization process in Morocco, see Hatif Telecom New:

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Retrieved June 13, 2003 from the World Wide Web: http.www.hatiftelecom.com/news/morocco.html/.

9Maroc Telecom, the public telephone service provider, has further reduced the rate of connectivity for cybercafés by about 47%. This decision will most likely constitute a significant impetus to the cybercafé business and to the extension of democratic access to information and communication technologies. In a recent press release, the Ministry of Industry, Trade, and Telecommunications has indicated that there are 7 millionmobilephonesubscribersinMorocco(theywere3millionin2000, 5 million in 2001, and 6 million in 2002) while fixed phone subscribers stopped at 1, 990,167. According to the same document, there are now 2,500 cybercafés in the country and, while there are only about 45,000 Internet subscribers, the number of Internet users is estimated at about 1,000,0000 (al-Ahdat al-Maghribia, 2003, December 24, N0. 1796,

p.10).

10See also a special report on the crisis of reading in Morocco (La crise de la lécture. In L’Opinion (2002, April 21).

11AcourtrulinginCairo,Egypt,grantedtherighttodivorcetoawomanwho accused her husband of Internet addiction. The plaintiff explained to the court that her husband spent an average of 14 hours a day online and mostly visiting adult sites, a fact which the court thought made him fail his marital duties. The information was reported by the Egyptian daily alGomhouriya in its December 18 2002 issue (as cited in Tel Quel, (2002, December 21-27, N0. 57, p. 40).

12Chatbi quotes a cybercafé owner who asserts that up to 60% of Internet users are teenagers (Chatbi, 2002, p. 16). My own observation tends to confirm that the representation of cybercafé clienteles is largely under the age of 25.

13Data in Tables 1 and 2 comes from an exhaustive 2001 national study, which sought to analyze the behavior and lifestyle of Moroccan youth. Funded by the Moroccan government, the study surveyed about 18,000 young people across the country (Consultation nationale des jeunes, 2001, Ministère de la Jeunesse et des Sports).

14In al-Ahdat al-Maghribia’s controversial section “From Heart to Heart,”

agay correspondent writes that while he feels alienated by his immediate social environment, he has found in chatrooms enough solace to help him negotiate his homosexuality (al-Ahdat al-Maghribia, 2003, January 7, N0. 1447, p. 10).

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