Culture, Lifestyle and the Information Revolution in the Middle East and Muslim World

For over two decades, the ‘information revolution’ in the MiddleEast has been framed overwhelmingly in terms of media, more of it,and in comparisons to mass media – from the advent of any-to-anycommunication to ad hoc conceptualizations such as ‘crowd-sourcing’ or‘citizen journalism’ – that register the multiplication of voices, channelsand eroding boundaries in spheres of communication. The record hasexpanded more than conceptualizations of its sociologies in media andcommunications studies. It’s time for other questions that elicit additionaland more basic features of Internet practices from choices that shapeindividual repertoires and participation to continuities between usersand producers to how actual practices scale up, which actually link microand macro processes. To elicit these broader sociologies, and movebeyond the limited social physics of ‘impact’ of the Internet on culture andlifestyles, I draw on the related sociologies of reference group and networktheory, on Science-Technology-Society studies and sociolinguistics tobring disruption of existing institutions, on the one hand, and cooptationby them, on the other, into more unified theory of the play of informationrevolution in culture and lifestyles on the Internet.