Page 86 - Cyberculture and New Media

Mahmoud Eid 77
______________________________________________________________
CIT, Siemens and Ericsson for supply and installation of digital exchanges.
Lebanon has over one million new telephone lines, compared with less than
31
300,000 lines at the end of the civil war in 1991. In Saudi Arabia,
“following 40 years of slow growth, the telecommunications industry
expanded with remarkable speed, from a rudimentary network of 188,000
working lines in 1978 to about 858,000 lines only five years later – an
32
increase of 455%.” Jordan has taken several steps toward improving its
telecommunications sector; however, “these initial steps will have to be
accelerated if the country is to achieve its vision as a centre of international
33
trade and finance.” Bahrain has shown “an extraordinary capability for
acquiring and using advanced telecommunications. Consequently, the island
nation has become a vital regional telecommunications centre in the Middle
34
East.”
The ongoing developments in telecommunications have paved the
road for Arab countries to go online and join the global information
superhighway. Their level of development cannot be assumed to be
homogeneous, as individual countries differ greatly in educational standards,
financial strength, and willingness to innovate. The development of
telecommunications has differed greatly from one country to another in the
Arab world. Although the twenty-two Arab countries are similar in religion,
customs and values, history, and language, they differ in many other aspects,
including wealth, population, area, geographical location, political direction,
35
and foreign relations. Differences among these countries have been clearly
reflected in such things as telecommunications infrastructure, information
36
and media productions, communication policies, and cultural industries.
Examples of highly qualified Arab countries in the telecommunications
sector are Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. In Egypt,
telecommunications are controlled by Telecom Egypt, “a joint-stock
company in which the Egyptian government owns the majority [of] shares.
With over 9 million subscribers, Telecom Egypt is the biggest
37
telecommunications operation in the Arab world.” The United Arab
Emirates subscribes to the Arab Satellite Communications Organization
(Arabsat) and has upgraded its entire telecommunications service with digital
technology. Emirates Telecommunications (Etisalat), the United Arab
Emirates’ federal telecommunications authority, launched its Emirate Internet
and Multimedia unit after a major organizational overhaul. Other e-services
into which Etisalat is moving include Warraq, an online encyclopedia of
Arabic literature, and a bilingual search engine enhancing Arabic-language
38
Internet browsing.
The privatization of administration, manufacturing, and service
delivery has been one of the more obvious features of Arab economies in
recent years. For a variety of reasons, Arab governments have sought to
change arrangements created in earlier phases of public ownership and