Page 93 - Cyberculture and New Media

84 On the Way to the Cyber-Arab-Culture
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introducing such media Web sites and Arabizing their content. These efforts
started in 1996 when Egypt’s Information Highway Project was launched,
putting the first Arabic Web pages on the Internet. The Egyptian newspaper
Al Gomhuria was the first Arab publication to launch an electronic version in
1996. The Al Ahram newspaper, which has been Egypt’s most widely
distributed daily newspaper since 1876, followed with its own electronic
version in 1998. Today, most Arabic- and English-language Egyptian
newspapers and magazines have electronic versions on the Web. One Web

site, Sahafa Online (http://www.sahafa.com), listed at least 250 online
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publications within the Arab world.
The features of the Arabic language are reflected in the design,
layout, format, structure, and commercial activities in the major Arabic e-
mail, chat, and news Web sites. Language requirements; various Arabic
language accents; preferences of pictures, fonts, and colours; an Arabic style
of goods consumption; and so on are examples of factors that formulate or
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determine the nature of such Arabic Web sites. A Web site is a multimedia
image. “Egyptianness,” for example, must be represented through graphic
symbols. For the most part, Egyptian web producers did not attempt to create
site designs from scratch. Rather, they drew on existing non-Egyptian models
(particularly yahoo.com) and sought to offer Egyptian inflections that would
make the sites more accessible to the typical Egyptian. Web producers used
three key modes of representing the “typically Egyptian”: naming, creating
logos, and limiting content to that deemed consistent with Egyptian
“traditions.” For Web producers, names are a vital advertisement whose
connotations signify information about the site. Naming is a semiotic process
through which a hypermedia producer constructs a single verbal sign that
indexes the site, both figuratively and literally. Ideally, the name will have
connotations that signify, to the desired audience, some of the functions and
meanings of the site. Constructing a domain name can be in part a process of
exclusion; to create an Egyptian site is to create a site that is not American,
French, Japanese, etc. If one’s goal is to create an Egyptian web portal for
Egyptian customers, the name should be instantly recognizable as Egyptian to
Egyptian users, but obscure to others. The most common strategy for
accomplishing this is the use of Egyptian colloquial Arabic, rather than
English or Modern Standard Arabic. Logos are graphic images designed to
generate site coherence and offer a visual supplement to the verbal sign that
is the domain name. As coherent units, their significance is largely dependent
on arbitrary cultural codes. Examples of basic patterns in the construction of
logos for Egyptian websites are: using a topical icon and giving it an
Egyptian, or at least Arabic, inflection; playing with the tensions involved in
particular markers of Egyptian or Arabic tradition; and the appropriation and
transformation of ancient Egyptian signifiers. Appeals to tradition are used by
web producers in Egypt as a gloss for what are sometimes called “silential”