316 Mediated Publics
occupation by women. This is true even though much of what occurs in
cybers is specifically social leisure. Just as the streets of Casablanca that
are filled with women during the day (on their way to and from places)
become absolutely devoid of women after dark, so too do cybercafés
lose the presence of women at night. The perception of cybers as sites of
knowledge building is not enough to overwhelm the existing unwritten
prohibition on the presence of women outside in the city after nightfall.
In this chapter we have seen that infusing an existing space (the tra-
ditional café) with the tools of new technologies and creating a hybrid
space (the cybercafé) alters the texture of the public sphere’s rules of par-
ticipation. In and of themselves the spaces created by ICT do not threaten
any normatively held values. On the contrary, the flourishing of cyber-
cafés coincides with popular beliefs and moralized perspectives on tech-
nology. It is precisely the nature of technology’s consistency with exist-
ing moral beliefs that establishes an opening through which the rules of
participation are expanded and the moral terrain of public life becomes
slightly altered in an irrevocable manner.
Afterword
On 11 March 2007, the stakes involved in the access to information and
communication flows in Morocco were declared in a deeply saddening
and unexpected manner. A young Moroccan man was asked to leave a
cybercafé because he was using his computer to access jihādī Web sites.
The man had in fact been attempting to use the Internet to confirm the
details necessary to carry out suicide bombings on sites in Casablanca. A
skirmish ensued between the café owner, the young man and three other
men accompanying him. The backpack detonated, killing the young man
and wounding four others in the process.
s event calls to the foreground the issue of democratic partici-Thi
pation, which is challenged when “open access” is utilized for violent
subversion. Further, it indicates the divergent forms of information and
communication for which technologies are put to use. We have seen that
Internauts use ICT tools to expand social networks locally and globally,
read news, chat and play games. Most of the activities engaged in by men