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

Abstract

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