Information technology, trust, and social change in the Arab world

The article examines the impact of new media in the region and contests the assumptions that link modern media to socio-political change in the Arab world on both theoretical and empirical grounds.

Abstract

Western assessments often suggest that the emergence of satellite television broadcasting, the Internet and other new media in the Middle East will profoundly change the political and social realities of the region. Such predictions may underestimate the important role played by trust in Middle Eastern societies, where traditional state control of the information media has often meant that more reliance is placed on oral and unofficial means of communications, in the mosque, the coffeehouse, or the marketplace. Just as the validity of the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad were supported by a system of isnad, or the chain of transmission, similarly oral sources of information in the Middle East today sometimes enjoy more credibility than written sources. With this in mind, the article examines the impact of new media in the region. The coming of the Internet and the mushrooming of satellite dishes on Arab rooftops have been heralded in the West as signs of the retreating Arab state, the rise of civil society, the emergence of the public sphere, and maybe a dawn of new politics.I Despite this excitement about modern means of communication and their impact on Arab polities, one is astonished by the disjunction between these pronouncements and the realities of Arab politics and Arab societies. This article is a response to an obvious puzzle concerning political communication, modern media, and their impact in the Arab world. If one looks at the Arab states, one never fails to notice that most Arab states control almost all means of mass communication: print, radio, and television. Naturally, as a result, one would expect that the language of those at the helm of the state would dominate the political language in the Arab world. Yet, the dominant language in Arab societies, at least in the past two decades, has been oppositionist and Islamist, or at least dominated by Islamic symbols. Given that states bar these groups from the various media, it is puzzling that their discourse is dominant. Thus, before making the linkage between the diffusion of state controlled, modern means of communication, and political change in the Arab world one has to contend with the following questions: Why is the Islamist discourse, lack of access to these modern means of communication, still dominant?; Why is it that state discourse is not taking hold, what is available to the elites in terms of means of mass communication and other instruments of social control?; Why is the hegemony of the Arab state weak?; What is the relationship between communication and trust? Before I answer these questions, I would like to contest the assumptions that link modern media to socio-political change in the Arab world on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Macro-sociologists and economic historians have disputed the relationship between technological change and openness of the political order or economic growth elsewhere. Contesting the relationship between openness and new technologies from a sociological standpoint, James Beniger argues that the information revolution came as a response to the crisis of control that resulted from the great flows of material and data that accompanied the industrial revolution.2 This pressing problem of movement of goods, information, and their processing required new means of control. This is why we had innovations such as the telegraph, telephone, assembly lines, and scientific management, he argues. The conclusions of Beniger's argument run against the assumption of both medium theory and modernization theory alike. Another argument challenging the direct correlation between technology and economic growth comes from a giant in the field of US economic history. In his book Railroads and American Economic Growth, Robert Fogel wrote, despite its dramatically rapid and massive growth over a period of half a century ... the railroads did not make an overwhelming contribution to the production potential of the economy. …