By Daoud Kuttab

New media opportunities have been a godsend to creatures and consumers of information in the Arab world. While the traditional media have been slow to respond to the opportunities offered by new media, others have not.

The constraints on information flows in the Arab region have left a big dent on traditional media outlets. Most radio and TV stations are government monopolies. Most major newspapers are directly or indirectly controlled by governments or businesspeople with close associations to ruling regimes. Checks and balances in the form of independent associations or oversight by academic and media critics have been largely absent in the Arab countries.

This stifling atmosphere has created a generation of journalists who have either fled their native countries or had to practice self-censorship to survive financially—and sometimes physically.

Transnational satellite and the worldwide web have together jolted this media culture out of its deep sleep.

The result was first noticed and embraced by democracy-seekers as well as militant Islamists, with governments and traditional media only paying attention at a later stage. Whether it was the pan Arab Al Jazeera satellite station or the tens of thousands of bloggers on Maktoob, the Arab world's equivalent of hotmail, information started breaking out of the blockade that had been erected physically and through administrative means by various undemocratic regimes.

By and large the majority of new media practitioners do not come from the media world itself. Self-censorship had left an entire generation of Arabs on the outside of this new phenomenon looking in while the young generation worked and developed its different angles.

For some it started as a hobby or form of self-expression and quickly took on added import:

• A video of Egyptian police torture, shot as a joke and ending up in the hands of blogger Wael Abbas, whose posting of it changed his life and career;
• A businessman, Bahrain’s Mahmood Yousifi, working in technolgy and tinkering with Google Earth only to discover his own country and the fact that vast strips of land inaccessible to the housing-deprived public were available only to the rulers for their hunting parties;
• The long-term research of North African blogger Sami be Gharbia who, in cooperation with European colleagues, traced the travel of a presidential plane at a time when the president officially never left the country.

While most of these early efforts were individual, some have been organized through a university like the American University of Cairo, a media NGO such as AmmanNet or a technology business like Maktoob. A multi-language website specializing in freedom of expression, Menasset.com, has been well established.

Unfettered by the strict controls of governments or their surrogate publishers, the new media has broken taboos, exposed corruption and abuse and allowed the Arab community at large to express itself more freely than ever.

Unlike the U.S., where existing media outlets have put themselves in the forefront of the new media buzz, most traditional Arab media outlets are lagging behind and unable to shake the shackles that they have been born into and perpetuated. Success in this new media field cannot be manipulated, but must be earned by gaining a skeptical public's trust.

GOVERNMENTS IN A QUANDARY

The Information Revolution has arrived with a vengeance in the Arab world. New technologies have leveled the information playing field worldwide, limited only by the restrictive practices of Arab governments.

Ruling regimes in the Arab world have chosen to tackle the issue simply by identifying new media activists and punishing them as an example to other pretenders. While a number of individuals have been harassed and jailed, this tactic has failed to deter the majority of new media content creators and users.

It may well have resulted only in more and more new media activists hiding their identities by working anonymously.

The fact that this new media is borderless means that it has been much more difficult for governments to exercise control.

Government legislation didn’t initially deal with the Web and it was difficult for governments to punish a virtual media outlet except by creating an electronic ban for local users, a difficult and expensive process easily bypassed by clever technical experts. Repressing the web also ran contrary to attempts by many of the same governments to take advantage of the economic benefits of globalization.

It put governments in a quandary, embracing the free flow of goods and services while wanting to inhibit the free flow of information

FILTERING—WITH EMPATHY AND SENSITIVITY

The endless amounts of information that the new media opportunities provide require a set of filters to navigate and decipher.

Major companies such as Yahoo, Google, and YouTube have a responsibility in the way they deal with the Middle East that is going through the birth pains of reform. Technical robots alone can't overcome some of the problems that can arise when dealing with a region that is large, different and highly volatile.

The human element will always be central when dealing with relations between differing and energetic regions such as the U.S. and the Arab world.

The situation may call for a unique form of U.S.–Arab cooperation in articulating, developing and continually nurturing such an electronic filter that can help bring a level of credibility to the Net in the eyes of Arab users and, at the same time, remove the excuse from Arab governments and their surrogates who are happy to pounce on this new platform using the abuses by a minority as their excuse.

Such filtering must be handled with the utmost sensitivity so as not to give the impression of censorship or manipulation of a source of free information. It must advance freedom of expression, not restrict it. It is, in short, a delicate balancing act.

Daoud Kuttab, currently teaching at Princeton University, is a Palestinian journalist and media activist who helped establish the Arab Media Internet Network (AMIN) in 1995.

Previous | Next