Page 97 - Cyberculture and New Media

88 On the Way to the Cyber-Arab-Culture
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Arabic speakers share common features of communicative style, which may
conflict with styles of other language speakers. Reported features include: 1)
repetition; 2) indirectness; 3) elaborateness; and 4) affectiveness. Repetition
is a major feature at the very heart of the Arabic language and discourse.
Indirectness refers to a speaker’s concealment of desired wants, needs, or
goals during discourse. Elaborateness refers to rich and expressive language
use. Native Arabic speakers may use substantially more words to
communicate verbally than do speakers of some other languages. Two
rhetorical patterns contribute to the perception of elaborate Arab
communicative style: exaggeration (mubalagha) and assertion (tawkid).
These patterns serve a crucial function of regulating credibility during
interaction. When Arabs are communicating with each other, they are forced
to exaggerate and over-assert in order not to be misunderstood.
Affectiveness, or “intuitive-affective style of emotional appeal,” relates to
organizational patterns and the presentation of ideas and arguments. Arabs
predominantly use the “presentation” form of persuasion, in which people
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and not ideas are most responsible for influencing others.
The preceding explanation of Arab cultural communication patterns
indicates the uniqueness of Arab culture which, like any other culture,
requires careful adoption of new cultural forms in media and cyberspace to
ensure the preservation of cultural values. A Cyber-Arab-Culture has been
created already in cyberspace, through the notions and processes of
globalization, democratization, privatization, digitization, and Arabization.
However, its current status does not offer a promising future, given the
previously demonstrated examples of anti-Cyber-Arab-Culture practices.
These pose a danger: the potential to absorb the defects and disadvantages of
the above processes rather than benefiting from their advantages. This could
lead to the dissolution of this newly produced cyberculture, as a result of its
inability to resist global practices that conflict with Arab cultural values. To
avoid this danger, usage of new media technologies must be open to
reflecting and encouraging Arab cultural communication patterns, rather than
diminishing them and imitating western patterns incompatible with Arab
culture. If Cyber-Arab-Culture is not permitted to flourish, there is a
dangerous potential for the distortion of Arab culture in cyberspace, and the
creation of contradictory practices that might work against the development
and betterment of Arab societies.