Liberating Spaces

Until very recently, dictators in the Arab world could repressed non-Islamic political discourse. With the establishment of repressive states in these countries, Islamism became gradually the only political discourse with space to oppose the state: the mosque. Secular ideologies, socialism, communism, nationalism and liberalism were crushed by the violent repressive apparatus of the state. But political messages attached to religion couldn’t be suppressed. Any attempt to do that would have meant an attack on the basic values of the society the state avowed to defend – an Islamic society.

Among the urban population, a powerful socialisation process emerged through the social institutions attached to the religious dimension of Islam. The mosque was not only a place of prayer, the madrassas and the Islamic universities did not only educate, and the Islamic societies’ social services did not merely take care of men, women and children, they were all powerful spaces of transmission of myths and symbols, and were the basic means of production and circulation of the Islamist political and social discourse, the only alternative to the repressive state. The Mosque was the only connection space allowed.

I define connection space as a space, be it virtual or physical, where people, knowledge, ideas and projects can be connected. In the Arab world, in the absence of more secular spaces, the mosque was a connection space that allowed individuals to express socially their opinion with relative freedom – within the boundaries of Islamic religion. It allowed sharing of knowledge, and the collaboration of different projects for taking action (economic, social, political…). It was the primal space for people with socio-political concerns to establish, keep and extend their social network. This was before the Internet disrupted existing social structures and dynamics.

I remembered with very fond feelings the times I went to Egypt to study Arabic in 2002 and 2003. There I was amazed to see how people were hooked to their mobile phones. In Egypt, as in many places in the Mediterranean, extensive and intensive communication and, within the limits of the technology available in those times, social interaction are an essential part of people’s everyday culture. Going from Assouan to Cairo by train, we had to sit next to a guy who didn’t stop talking loudly on his mobile phone for the 6-7 hours of the trip! Now, the social internet has revolutionised the way people communicate and interact. It has opened new public spaces unreachable to state repression, unless paying a high economic cost. The entry of Facebook in people’s lives has changed from where and how they get and share ideas and projects of life.

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At the request of the UK government, Facebook took down 30 pages linked to prison inmates who were, according to the authorities, behaving inappropriately on the site, including taunting victims’ family members. It took them 48 hours to do it.

In itself this fact is worrisome. At the request of a government Facebook decides, at its own judgment, to curtail the individual freedom of 30 people (for though they are in prison and they are crime offenders, they are still people), without the intervention of a judge to guarantee the respect of fundamental rights. It seems that victims, government and Facebook (!) are the new authorities with regards to online freedom.

But it gets worse, for these new authorities are taking their self-assigned responsibilities very seriously, according to their declarations reported on today’s International Herald Tribune (print-version).

Gary Trodwell of Families United, a group founded by relatives of young murder victims, said:

When someone is convicted of a crime he loses his civil liberty through sentencing…We say he should lose his cyberliberty as well.”

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Do you know Beth Noveck? She is the xxxx in the Obama administration. She was also the director of the Institute for Information Law and Policy and New York Law School, one of the creators of Peer-to-Patent, and the writer of the book Wiki Government. It is because of the latter that I write this post.

In the book she says:

In devising these practices [open and collaborative consultation of experts online], we have to remain open to all forms of technology, even those that initially seem trivial or irrelevant. Potentially, ubiquitous social networking technologies like Facebook and MySpace, in which participants “friend” and “poke” those in their personal networks, can teach us more about the idiom of participation than the legalistic practices in which so few of us actually participate (page 143, stress added)

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