Deborah Wheeler has been one of the few social scientists studying the Internet in the Arab world since its inception in the mid-1990s. Her work on Kuwait represents perhaps the most sustained look at Internet and related information technologies in a particular Arab society. This book has been seven years in the writing and describes the development of Internet use over the last decade. The result is an ethnographically rich and informative account of disruptive technologies, the effects of which on cultural and religious values are just beginning to be understood.

Despite ready access to billions of pages of text and a global cacophony of voices, we still know rather little about the ways personal computing and universal information sharing are affecting the children and young adults whose social experiences have been immersed in the Internet. Most academic readers of this journal will have sent their first e-mail as adults, will have settled on screen solitaire as their favorite computer game, and will have resisted the temptation to spend long nights in virtual chat rooms or to blog their thoughts about life, the universe, and everything. Not so the Middle East and North Africa high school and college students who, like their peers around the world, will smile knowingly at compound words like MySpace, FaceBook, and SkyBlog. Something is happening in the cybercafe down the street, in the bedroom lit only by the glow of the laptop screen and the flicker of a WiFi light, in the hall outside the classroom where Short Message Service messages are hastily retrieved from cell phones—but we do not know what it is.

For those of us interested in the Arab world, this book is a fine place to start. In an introductory chapter, Wheeler tells the four-decade story of the emergence of the Internet very well, and she situates it in the Arab world with clear acknowledgment of the ways it has been both typical and unique there. Arab societies have, collectively, some of the lowest rates of Internet access in the world, for reasons related to poverty, to language, and to politics. Kuwait, as a society with both a high median income and strong constraints on public expression and gender mixing, nicely illustrates the contrasts in contradictions of The Internet in the Middle East, even as it reminds us of the very real differences as one cybersurfs from Casablanca to Baghdad. Because this is a book grounded in the ethnography of Kuwait, it cannot really claim to be about the Internet or the Middle East. For that we must await other similarly grounded accounts, some of them hopefully by Deborah Wheeler.

It is impossible to write an adequately researched volume on any aspect of the Internet and to see it through the process of scholarly publication without a feeling that many of one's factual claims have been superseded—if not contradicted—by the exponential growth of communication technologies. Wheeler acknowledges this, and one wishes for a Web site with regular updates for the major data on the prevalence and quality of Internet use by Kuwaitis even as one realizes how valuable this early snapshot will be shortly, when the world is all Net, all the time.

The core of this book is a set of chapters explaining the context of Kuwaiti values and political structures and illustrating these by examples drawn from both face-to-face and online interviews with male and female Kuwaitis at home and abroad. If the sample is highly educated and unusually articulate in English, this is characteristic of the most active Kuwaiti Internet users. The second chapter of the book details the development of the Internet in the Middle East and North Africa, noting that “the Internet is growing and spreading more slowly in the Middle East and North Africa than any other place in the world” (p. 31). Indeed, a recent announcement that an Arabic search engine is under development for deployment late in 2006 notes that only 0.2 percent of Web pages available on the Internet are in Arabic, and the prevalence of both Internet connections and computers has remained relatively low throughout the region. With a 2005 estimated per capita income of $22,800—more than half that of the United States and almost twice that of Saudi Arabia (CIA World Factbook)—Kuwait's population is far more affluent than the Arab world in general. Wheeler's account pertains primarily to Arab citizens of Kuwait and not to guest workers, so it is fair to characterize the Internet users she describes as economically comfortable. As she explains in detail, however, the conservative religious and political circumstances of Kuwait place substantial constraints on the ways information has been used and underscore the contradictions between what is available to Internet users in the way of political opinion and social discourse and what the regime would otherwise choose to make available. Indeed, Kuwaiti women have had Web access for twice as long as they have had the vote. Internet penetration is estimated at roughly 10 percent of the population, assuming 2.5 users per machine (p. 47). Kuwaiti media have noted both the positive and negative potentials of the new media, contrasting business and educational benefits with risks to traditional religious values and constraints on the mixing of the sexes. With respect to political openness, the picture that emerges is one of doubt that the Internet alone can effect democratization and that the regime wishes to see such democratization occur. The interaction among these factors is complex and culturally nuanced, and here Wheeler's account is particularly valuable. She identifies four prerequisites for the development of a viable information society in the Arab world: “an IT infrastructure, a knowledge economy, a public culture of discursive openness, and formal legal institutions that support the digital age” (p. 55). None of these is firmly in place in Kuwait. As a result, much of the larger discourse of personal empowerment linked to Internet access must be hedged with respect to Kuwaiti (and the larger Arab) society.

The third chapter of the book provides a detailed account of the development of modern Kuwaiti society under the influence of the al-Sabah family and the exploitation of the 10 percent of the world's oil reserves under Kuwaiti soil. Because the government owns 97 percent of the land of Kuwait and employs 95 percent of the Kuwaiti population (p. 72), an ethnographer's account of the functioning of the governmental system is absolutely crucial, allowing us to understand how Kuwait might have had the largest penetration of Internet use among Arab societies by 1998 without reaping the benefits claimed for the information economy in that optimistic era. The other unique influence on Kuwait during the decade of the 1990s was, of course, the first Gulf War; this both disrupted society and stimulated the rapid deployment of a new information infrastructure.

The role of religion generally, and of online Islamic activism specifically, is examined in both chapters 3 and 6, and here Wheeler's account should also provide a valuable point of comparison with other Arab and Muslim societies. As she notes, “Islamist movements in Kuwait pursue active campaigns to saturate public spaces with signs and symbols of a faith-centered existence” (p. 169), and the Internet has proven a particularly unruly venue for such saturation. There are Kuwaiti fatwa sites and Kuwaiti banking sites and Kuwaiti newspapers online, but these are only a click away from very un-Islamic alternatives.

In chapters 4 and 5, which concern gender and youth culture in Kuwait, Wheeler offers a number of verbatim interviews that set the general argument in relationship to those who are actually struggling with the larger societal issues. The interviewees are, to be sure, a small and select sample, consisting of highly educated and articulate Kuwaitis with either excellent Internet access at home or access to the resources of the foreign university at which they are studying, and their willingness to communicate frankly with a foreign ethnographer distinguishes them from the bulk of the population. This is a necessary constraint on most Internet studies at this point, and Wheeler is to be congratulated for providing data on the basis of which comparisons can be made with the accounts of Internet users in other Arab countries and in non-Islamic societies. It will be fascinating to see how the new social software of blogs and podcasts allows the emergence of a MENA discourse that is both richly personal and universally accessible. As of this writing, blog search engines identify tens of thousands of mentions of “Kuwait,” but few blogs appear to be by and for Kuwaitis. This will surely change, and we seem to be experiencing the beginnings of an Arab commons in which some of the richness and variety of Middle Eastern and North African personal experience may find its voice.