Page 205 - Culture Technology Communication

188 Deborah Wheeler

however, deserve further investigation especially in light of women’s
daily realities in conservative Islamic countries like Kuwait.
How might new information technologies shape women’s lives in
Kuwait? In 1996–97 with a Council on the Foreign Exchange of
Scholars Senior Post-Doctoral Research award, I studied the devel-
opment of a Kuwaiti Internet culture and attempted to assess how
Kuwaiti women were participating in these new communication op-
portunities. Throughout my research, my study of women and the
Internet was continuously redirected towards the particulars of
Kuwaiti identity and the social practices which regulate how the In-
ternet can develop and spread, as well as what women do with the
tool once they have access. While in Kuwait I learned that the ex-
pansion of Internet technologies does not take place in a vacuum.
Given contextual factors, new information technologies will not nec-
essarily promote democracy, economic growth, and improve women’s
lives, as many Western thinkers have argued. 6
Careful ethnographic research of the development and impact of
the Internet is best conducted at its point of application. This is es-
pecially true when studying gender issues and women’s voices be-
cause practices on the ground are regulated by processes one cannot
see from cyberspace. Grand theories about global and local restruc-
turing in the wake of the Information Age often fail to consider that
each country has its own culture, its own style of government, its
own norms and sanctions on behavior and gender attitudes, its own
socioeconomic status structure, its own level of literacy and educa-
tion, and its own historical experience. These factors help to shape
what kinds of communicative acts are enabled by the Internet, and
which are discouraged.
The dialectic between new technologies and old culture is
clearly at work in the case of Kuwaiti women and their use of the
Net. Lived experience, including activity in cyberspace, is condi-
tioned by processes of social regulation which do not fail to extend
their reach into the spaces of human interaction enabled by net-
worked communications. To demonstrate this point, this article first
provides an overview of the evolution of a Kuwaiti Internet culture,
and women’s contribution to it. Second, this article records several
examples of women in Kuwait narrating their relationship to the In-
ternet, and uses these narratives as a window upon those aspects of
culture and power which regulate women’s daily lives. Third, this ar-
ticle examines some reasons why access to the Internet does not nec-
essarily determine the result of use. In this section I discuss why the
Internet’s presence in Kuwait will not automatically revolutionize