300 Mediated Publics
society” on the order of a twenty-first century modern state. As a national
project, Morocco’s information society has carried out massive bureau-
cratic overhauls and attracted a mild scale of new financial investment.
The project has also spurred the growth of a satellite-connected public
sphere in the country.^1 This chapter examines how the effects of such a
national project are experienced on the ground in the localities of every-
day life. I argue that while the production of social space is affected by
emergent technologies, the “situated moral understandings” of Muslim
Morocco also impact how new technologies are understood.^2 We will
examine how the institutionalization of new information and communi-
cation technologies at once impacts and is impacted by moral assump-
tions, which guide the rules and norms of social practices in the pub-
lic sphere. Based on interviews, participant observation and document
research, this chapter describes what I call the “technogenic” turn in
Morocco. In what follows, I analyze public opinion toward new tech-
nologies in Morocco and describe the government’s efforts to develop an
information and communication technology (ICT) industry. After con-
textualizing the conditions in which the ICT industry is growing, I offer a
detailed account of how communication tools, including the World Wide
Web, instant messaging and chat rooms, are employed in social prac-
tices at the local level by examining the growing presence of cybercafés
in Morocco’s economic capital, Casablanca. The chapter then compares
social practices in cybercafés to practices common in older café forms in
Morocco. The distinctions between the older and newer types of public
space articulate the technogenic quality of urban Morocco’s contempo-
rary public sphere. As we will see, current perspectives toward technology
inform the ways in which new technology tools are received and situated
by social actors in the public sphere.
Toward a situated understanding of the public sphere
The public sphere, while universal in theory, is embroiled in the every-
day functions of community life. Individual subjects necessarily mediate
between the formation and reification of particularized social values and
the experiences of cultural identity at work. The work of Seyla Benhabib