My thoughts on the Internet were recently jogged by an experience with a slightly older medium, namely, satellite television. In late March 2007 I attended the Third Annual Al-Jazeera Forum, in Doha. Notwithstanding the attendance of a few academics like me, the forum was largely a networking opportunity for professional journalists, just as MESA is for professional Middle East studies academics. However, unlike MESA, forum presenters, as well as the audience, were handpicked. Even the expenses of the attendees were subsidized (my hotel bill was paid by al-Jazeera). This inevitably made the event an exercise in open self-promotion for al-Jazeera.

The panel topics were straightforward: “Parachute Journalism vs. Journalism of Depth,” for example, or “Regional News Channels in the Middle East.” They were all framed by a general tone of praising al-Jazeera's capacity to speak an Arab—or, somewhat less plausibly, “Global South”—truth to American power. A session on “new media” was actually subtitled “Speaking Truth to Power.” Three of the five speakers on the panel focused on the Internet, specifically “blogging”—ongoing commentaries on events, politics, or any subject capable of attracting a readership.¹

This panel was preceded by a keynote address by Lawrence Lessig, a well-known Stanford law professor who advocates resisting government and private-sector initiatives to restrict the flow of information on the Internet, thereby preserving the medium as a “creative commons.”

In the 1990s al-Jazeera's medium, satellite television, was new to the world and to the Middle East. Newness was part of an aura that the network skillfully burnished in its rise to global prominence. Judging by the forum, al-Jazeera is firmly committed to investing in still newer media. By 2007 the network had clearly sensed that its aura of innovation could no longer be packaged solely with the satellite medium. The new media panel subtly downgraded al-Jazeera's bread and butter—satellite broadcasting—to the semidowdy status of “not-quite-new” medium. Satellite broadcasting seems suddenly “so 1999” and hence increasingly out of step with the fast-moving development of digital technology in 2007, which threatens to completely restructure the way professional journalists work.

To me the forum was an interesting window on the practice of journalism but also emblematic of stagnation in the study of Middle Eastern media. The concerns of the frankly self-marketing news network too closely mirror those of the academics who write about Middle Eastern mass media. Stagnation in this field is driven, paradoxically, by obsession with the “new.” The mania for newness is structured, implicitly, by an old and familiar concern for politics that structures much of Middle Eastern studies. Since the rise of al-Jazeera, media in the Middle East has often been conflated in academic writing and journalism alike with a genre, namely, news broadcasting, largely at the expense of the rest of the content broadcast on the medium, not to mention how people consume television, what it means to them, or what goes into its production.

Now that al-Jazeera is becoming “old,” the new obsession is blogging—like news broadcasting, another genre within a rich medium. And just like al-Jazeera, blogs are important within their own self-defined limits. They do explore issues and modes of expression that cannot be handled in other media. Blogs are also attractive to academics for their sheer obviousness. They present politics and religion—the twin obsessions of modern Middle Eastern studies—on a silver platter, making it all too easy once again to make a genre stand for an entire medium.

As a consequence, academic approaches to blogs risk putting the same heavy burden on them that was placed on al-Jazeera. Blogs are implicitly becoming representatives of the new(er) medium's capacity to promote political change, or more precisely, to construct a democratic public sphere or to undermine it. We have seen this already with al-Jazeera, which was initially lauded as the harbinger of an invigorated public sphere, then vilified (or admired, depending on the perspective of the observer) as the voice of Arab and Islamic radicalism.

At the Third Annual Al-Jazeera Forum this false dichotomy between al-Jazeera as the engine of democracy and al-Jazeera as the voice of radicalism animated most of the panels and was, I suspect, a given for much of the audience. For me, being in Doha was at least as exciting as the panels and more revealing of al-Jazeera's production context. The open self-promotion of the event was one side of the phenomenon. Al-Jazeera already has its own museum, with a display case proudly showing off the growing corpus of books written about the news network. It was the last stop in a tour organized for participants in the forum. But a tour of City Center Mall—a fifteen-minute walk from the conference hotel across vast parking lots—was equally enlightening. In a very brief visit to Doha it was the only place I could find where people were not moving at high speed in automobiles. On Friday during prayer time, an ice hockey tournament (the Desert Cup 07) entertained curious shoppers, who were gradually joined by new consumers fresh from their Friday sermon. When I visited City Center again at night, I noticed a dilapidated bus at the most remote end of the mall's parking lot, as far as possible from the well-heeled shoppers. It was full of despondent-looking, clearly exhausted, dusty Pakistani construction workers waiting to be taken to whatever facility housed them. For me this was a necessary part of the experience of the medium—a crucial counterpoint to the talk inside the conference hotel about al-Jazeera as the “voice of the Global South,” just as the giant American air base about half an hour up the road from the conference hotel (an American chain) was an inescapable element of the news network's avowed mission to “speak truth to power.”

How have Internet developments changed what I study about the Middle East? Not, I would say, in the sense that I am inclined to have my work co-opted by debates on the democratizing potential of new media. The last thing I would like to see is a repetition of the sterile debate over the political effects of al-Jazeera carried out in academic analyses of blogs. I should emphasize that I find both blogs and al-Jazeera fascinating and important, just not necessarily in terms of their potential to promote or undermine democracy in the region. They have to be understood in their full contexts, including their relation to cultural expression that may be less neatly packaged than blogs or political journalism.

In a more positive vein, I think debates on the political effects of new media can be productively recast as more complex investigations of how authority is socially constructed in the region. This medium is striking in its attraction for youth and in the superior ability of young people to understand and use it. This is true everywhere in the world, but not all societies construct senior authority (particularly of males) as emphatically as those of the Middle East. Not that the relative empowerment of youth through a new mass medium is unprecedented in the Middle East. Over a century ago the printing press began to restructure who had the authority to write, and subsequent forms of mass media articulated with emergent youth cultures to greater or lesser degrees. (Think, for example, of the relatively centralized medium of radio compared to the less easily controlled medium of the audiocassette.)

At a minimum the Internet in the Middle East can be seen as a new phase in a long evolution in hierarchies of authority. Blogs are one manifestation of this evolution, but so are mushrooming computer malls and Internet cafés, adaptations of digital technology to music and video making, and tensions between generations not accustomed to seeing youth empowered over their elders. To see the Internet this way, as part of a long history of adaptations of mass media rather than as merely a tool of opposition, is to acknowledge its significance without conflating “media” with “new media” or “new media” with political journalism—and without forcing the analysis into a debate over whether Middle Eastern media promotes either democracy or a clash of civilizations.