Page 95 - Cyberculture and New Media

86 On the Way to the Cyber-Arab-Culture
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using it. Cybercafés in Egypt, for example, play a limited role in developing
computer and Internet literacy among Egyptians. Situations in other Arab
countries are not at all different. Therefore, various strategies are needed to
educate Arabs about better ways of using the Internet and direct their
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enthusiasm toward useful developmental projects.
Another practice illustrates how Arabization occurs at the level of
the chat room. Some Arabic speakers use English format in their Arabic chat
Web sites, due to the pervasiveness of the English language or global
Internet-speak. In their text communications – through e-mails, chat rooms,
or cellular messages – Arab chatters are influenced by the existing, English-
dominated nature of the Internet. But they assert their own cultural heritage
by using English in Arabic ways. For example, in chat rooms, when Arab
participants use speech-like patterns in their online English textual
communication, they follow an informal, socially agreed-upon system, or
style, of characters. These characters are written in English but some have
either Arabic-meaning readability (e.g., salam is the Arabic word for
“peace”), similarities with some Arabic letters (e.g., the number 7 looks like
the Arabic letter ha’a), or are newly innovated abbreviations to speed up
communication (e.g., ASAWRAWB, which is an abbreviation of the main
greeting among Arab Muslims: Al-Salamo Alykom Wa Rahmato Allah Wa
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Barakatoh).
Moreover, Egyptian Web producers are deeply influenced by
national and international discourses that frame information technologies as a
national mission for socioeconomic development. In the absence of clear
definitions of the Web audience, Web producers imagined a “typical”
Egyptian that contradicted their own experiences as users of the Web.
Producers largely borrowed preexisting models, using design elements to
“inflect” their sites with Egyptian motifs. Building on nationalist discourses
of development, Web producers were able to offer investors a compelling
vision of a culturally “Egyptian” Web site that would bring Egyptian
consumers to the Internet. Web producers attempted to mobilize this audience
by designing sites that mixed English and Arabic, employed Egyptian
colloquial Arabic, and used traditional and ancient symbols to generate an
Egyptian “feel” to the sites. However, the conceptual models of access and
related design strategies created by Egyptian Web producers were out of
touch with Egyptian social realities, as there was a significant disconnect
between the potential audience imagined by Web producers and those
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Egyptians who actually had access to the Internet.
Arabs should thus enhance Cyber-Arab-Culture by relying on their
own cultural communication patterns. Across the Arabic world, there are
widespread cultural communication patterns that can be grouped under
various themes. Of most relevance here are basic cultural values and
language and verbal communication patterns. There is an array of values