306 Mediated Publics
twelve million people.^23 The relatively low cost of purchasing a mobile and
buying phone minutes in the form of paper and plastic cards with scratch-
offs for access numbers has made them exceedingly common objects in
Moroccan cities. Overall, however, the country’s technology sector has
performed poorly, suffering harsh setbacks after the “dot-com crash” of
- As of this writing in 2007, overall market growth remains slow—
reflecting also the global decline in the sector. Gains from the technology
sector in Morocco continue to represent less than 4 percent of the annual
GDP, making it a terrifically small component of the financial stability of
the nation. The effects of the monarchy’s attention to the development of
the technology sector, however, are significant. And they are evident in
very different ways than can be perceived solely by profit margins and
purely quantitative measurements of political participation.
Café Casablanca: Les cybers
In his groundbreaking analysis of colonial North Africa, Franz Fanon
argues that the modes and means by which people occupy space in the
public sphere are prescient indicators of broader social change.^24 Fanon’s
work provides us with a history of the role played by cafés as meeting
spaces and sites of cultural and political information exchange in colo-
nial Algeria. Fanon’s description of cafés as critical nodes of public social
life resonates with Habermas’s description of the historical role played by
public cafés and salons as incubators of the eighteenth-century European
bourgeois public sphere:
The predominance of the “town” was strengthened by new
institutions [cafés] that, for all their variety ... took over the
same social functions: the coffeehouses in their golden age
between 1680 and 1730 and the salons in the period between
regency and revolution ... were centers of criticism—literary at
first, then also political.^25n the Moroccan Muslim public of the twenty-first century, we find I
another example of cafés functioning as nodal points of social reconfigu-
ration.^26 The cost of personal computers coupled with the high price of