Page 89 - Cyberculture and New Media

80 On the Way to the Cyber-Arab-Culture
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that can hold official decision-makers accountable. The deliberative camp is
less prominent than the other two within Internet rhetoric and practice, yet the
decentralized communications enabled through Web publishing, electronic
bulletin boards, e-mail lists, and chat rooms does seem to provide public
spaces for rational-critical discourse. The deliberative position also offers a
more powerful democratic model. Both communitarian and liberal
individualist models posit a unitary subject, whether it be the undifferentiated
community or the isolated ego. As such, both fail to take seriously the
multiple differences between subjects within pluralist societies. Moreover,
both assume a pre-discursive political subject that requires little in the way of
public discourse. In contrast, dialogue and difference are central to the
deliberative model. The latter model assumes that difference always exists
between subjects, difference which necessitates a process of rational-critical
discourse in order for privately-oriented individuals to become publicly-
oriented citizens and for public opinion to develop that can rationally guide
democratic decision-making. Despite the fact that cyberspace has never been
a space free of offline administrative power; that the Internet is largely
developed, monitored, and regulated by government and controlled by
corporate interests; and that online commerce dominates the Web, an
enormous amount of discourse takes place online in a manner relatively
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autonomous from state and economic affairs.
New media, particularly the Internet and satellite television, have
flourished, occupying many of the channels through which the exchange of
ideas and information can take place, even across borders, eroding barriers
that formerly impeded the flow of information. The introduction of these
technologies has had tremendous ramifications in the Arab world,
particularly concerning culture and identity, and one can look to the changing
nature of the region’s popular music industry as an example. The Arab
audience’s taste is increasingly becoming more sophisticated and diverse,
given the introduction of satellite television that gives access to the Arab
public not only to local and regional programming, but also to international
programming. Arab satellite channels are not only competing with their
regional counterparts, but with their international ones as well. The
consequence then is an empowerment of the audience and an improvement in
their satisfaction. This phenomenon is affecting the Arab popular music
industry in several ways. It has given greater importance to the visual aspects
of popular music because of the mushrooming Arab satellite music television
stations, modelled after their foreign competitors such as MTV. Viewers can
now vote for their favourite videos by sending e-mails or text messages from
their cellular phones to the channels, resulting in a more defined measure of
singers’ popularity. Not only does the Arab audience take the artist’s voice
and lyrics into consideration, they now also consider the artist’s image to be
of equal importance. Furthermore, they no longer have the attention span for