Shami 25not only a way of accessing global news but also national news and even
reports on local or neighborhood events, which are usually suppressed by
national television.
ew media, participation and democracy also appear as themes in N
the chapter by Bahíyyih Maroon on the use of the internet in neighboring
Morocco. The interplay of the global and the local is also very much in
evidence as youth in cybercafés use Skype to call friends within the city
and use chat programs to flirt with another person sitting in the same café.
Maroon argues that the introduction of a new technology in Moroccan
society is mediated through the mores and morals of the “Muslim public
sphere,” as evidenced in the kinds of physical spaces created by the tech-
nology (cybercafés) and the modes of interaction within these spaces. At
the same time the technology enables the development of new dimen-
sions in youth culture and creates new cultural and social spaces. Thus,
“Cybers gently push the limits of the moral terrain of society by creating
spaces of desegregated sociability, and by generally expanding the types of
information and modes of communication available to Moroccans.”
aroon’s account shows how state interest in modernization, M
Islamic values that positively view science and technology, and the social
aspirations of youth, work together to create change, even if this change is
currently contained within “new public spaces” while older spaces such as
coffeehouses, streets and parks remain governed by longstanding notions
of morality and gender identities. However contained in terms of num-
bers they may be, Maroon’s account clearly shows the emergence of a new
public and a new youth culture in Morocco, both mediated and enabled
through the Internet and the World Wide Web.
In Iran as well, the Internet is a tool and a weapon in the hands of a
new type of public. Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi examines the emerging ter-
rain of “Weblogistan” and the ways in which virtual spaces enable inter-
actions and identities that are strictly controlled or prohibited in public
spaces. Blogs not only become a vehicle for “public” dissension and con-
testation of the state and hegemonic moral authority but also a means for
creating and recreating selves and identities. Amir-Ebrahimi examines the
freedoms of the “dis-embodied” virtual spaces of the Internet in light of
the severe restrictions on bodies in actual public space. As in all the chap-
ters in this section, the ability to communicate internationally impacts the