Culture, Lifestyle and the Information Revolution in the Middle East and Muslim World

Abstract

For over two decades, the 'information revolution' in the Middle East has been framed overwhelmingly in terms of media, more of it, and in comparisons to mass media - from the advent of any-to-any communication to ad hoc conceptualizations such as 'crowd-sourcing' or 'citizen journalism' - that register the multiplication of voices, channels and eroding boundaries in spheres of communication. The record has expanded more than conceptualizations of its sociologies in media and communications studies. It’s time for other questions that elicit additional and more basic features of Internet practices from choices that shape individual repertoires and participation to continuities between users and producers to how actual practices scale up, which actually link micro and macro processes. To elicit these broader sociologies, and move beyond the limited social physics of 'impact' of the Internet on culture and lifestyles, I draw on the related sociologies of reference group and network theory, on Science-Technology-Society studies and sociolinguistics to bring disruption of existing institutions, on the one hand, and cooptation by them, on the other, into more unified theory of the play of information revolution in culture and lifestyles on the Internet.