I was at a lively panel discussion entitled Iran’s Generation Next: Sex, Blogs and Social Change on Wednesday evening organised by the New Windows Society in Vancouver.

The main speaker was journalist, author and UBC adjunct professor Deborah Campbell, who talked about how Iran is changing. Also on the panel was Bob Hackett, SFU School of Communication, who discussed the media and democracy.

For my part, I set the scene for Deborah by discussing the impact of the internet on society in the Middle East.

Full text of the talk after the jump.

How the internet is changing society in the Middle East

Talk delivered at Iran’s Generation Next: Sex, Blogs and Social Change event
Simon Fraser University, Harbour Centre, Vancouver

I plan to talk on how the internet is changing society in the Middle East. I have personal experience of living in the region, as in the early 1990s, I spent four years in the Middle East as a foreign correspondent for the BBC. During this time, I was reporting for radio and television. The internet was still in its early days. But I was fortunate enough to get a taste of its potential in 1993 when Egypt hooked up to the net. At the time, access was provided through a government organisation and tightly controlled.

As a journalist, I was one of the lucky few to be able to get an internet account. Remember this was 1993 – going online meant dialing in over a slow connection. In those days, you were only allowed to be online for an hour a day. There was one number to call, at peak times all you ‘d get would be a busy signal.

But even with this slow, unreliable and often frustrating service, going online was an eye opener. It offered an inkling of the potential of this new communication technology. By going online, I felt connected to the world, able to access all sorts of information and bypass govt censorship of the media. And remember that as a foreign journalist, I had better access to information than most people.

Let’s fast forward to the present. There are now millions of people online in the Middle East. In Egypt, there are more than five million people connected to the internet – and those figures are from December 2005.

Add in the rest of the Middle East – that’s another 20 million people online. This may sound like a large number.

Still, this is only a fraction of the population of the region – it accounts for just some 10% of the population. On a global scale, the Middle East makes up just a couple of percentage points of the total internet population.

But if we look at the trends in the region, we are seeing phenomenal growth. Overall use of the internet has risen by 500% since the year 2000. In Egypt, the numbers are up by 1,000%.

In Iran, and we’ll be hearing more about this in Deborah’s talk, some 7 and a half million people are on the web. To put that into perspective, the number of people online has risen by almost 3,000% since 2000.

The Middle East is in a midst of an information revolution. One part of this is the rise of satellite television in the region – There are now more than 250 free-to-all satellite stations in the area. We could spend the evening discussing the impact of stations like Al Jazeera or Al Manar (Hizbullah).

But this evening we are focusing on the internet. I wanted to highlight one key difference between satellite TV and the web. TV is a one way medium – the audience consumes information. But the internet offers a way for the consumers of information to become producers. People can use the web to present their take of the world – it might be through a MySpace page, a video on YouTube or on a blog.

This phenomenon been described as user-generated content, or as citizen journalism. And this is changing the way we see the world, offering different perspectives beyond the mainstream media.

One of the tools are blogs – and we’ll be hearing about blogging in Iran from Deborah. It would be wrong to overstate the power of blogs. Yes, blogs are the activity of a tiny elite, they only reach a fraction of the audience of Al Jazeera. And blogs in Arabic make up less than 1% of the blogosphere.

But it would be wrong to dismiss them as irrelevant. A large proportion of the readers of Arab blogs are political activists, journalists and other elites – add to this foreign scholars and governments. So you may have a small audience, but it is one with influence.

Yet this is more than about politics. The availability of easy to use web publishing tools is changing the way Arabs interact with each other and with the outside world.

Blogs and other online discussion forums are being used to talk about music, sports, television, sex. In fact one study of Arabic language forums found that 42% focused on sex.

Who uses these new tools – the young who feel excluded in a region dominated by old men. And perhaps surprising, many bloggers are women. According to recent figures, young women make up half of the 2,000 bloggers in Saudi Arabia. The percentage is similar in Egypt.

Before I hand over to Deborah, I wanted to talk about an event which demonstrated the impact of blogs in the region.

In October last year, there was a wave of sexual assaults on women in downtown Cairo. Bloggers, both men and women, started writing about what they had seen – they spoke of crowds of men running after women, surrounding them and trying to rip off their clothes. One of the victims started up her own blog, called wounded girl from Cairo. She wrote:

“We felt like we were in a war. I had emptied my self defense spray on the endless number of guys who surrounded us and yet it still wasn’t enough. We, girls, had our butts, breasts and every inch of our bodies grabbed.”

At first, state media ignored the attacks, but bloggers kept the issue alive by posting pictures and accounts of what had happened. It was picked up by an independent Egyptian TV station. A week later, state media mentioned the event, with official denials that anything had happened. What the blogs succeeded in doing is shedding light on the issue of sexual harassment in Egypt.

Of course, governments in the region are trying to silence these voices. Bloggers in Egypt and Tunisia have been arrested and sent to prison. Internet filtering is common in many countries, so that critical voices find their websites blocked in their home country.

But despite this, the internet creating new ways for people to express themselves, to share experiences and discuss issues in ways they could never do before. One of the best examples of this is Iran, and Deborah will talk in detail about the societal impact of this revolutionary medium.

Thank you

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