manse jacobi on 16 Mar 2001 05:38:25 -0000 |
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[Nettime-bold] [paper] cyberspace as a new space for young urban moroccans |
beyond public and private : cyberspace as a new space for young urban moroccans (unpublished) by meghann ormond rabat, morocco march 2000 We look for places where we can stay for longer than a few minutes and buy things, turn our heads and see people we know. I tell myself that I don't know all of Rabat, that maybe there exists an imaginary world here, but I don't know where it might be. [His best friend, 19, interjects, "The Internet."] So, every Saturday, I go to McDonald's and hope that something new opens up. Male, 18. introduction Contemporary societal mutations for urban, middle-class Moroccan youth today have been brought into existence by many factors, some of the largest being the destruction of the significance of the extended family unit in the last century, increasing physical mobility, mass education, and the influence of largely foreign mass-media that does not correspond with traditional societal norms. These young people, representatives of the emerging middle- and upper-middle classes in Morocco, are appropriating traditional public spaces in urban areas and revolutionizing former perceptions of public and private boundaries. More astonishingly, they are establishing themselves as the dominant population of Moroccans on the Internet, making connections and transcending societal rules. Current Internet practices by young urban middle-class Moroccans are facilitating societal mutations with greater speed and potency than ever before, while offering the opportunity for young people to essentially re-create aspects of community and culture that they feel are non-existant, fragmented, or have proved difficult to evolve in daily life. They are using the Internet and computer -mediated communication (CMC) to express themselves, communicate with others, and explore aspects of their identity as they are often not permitted to do so in real-life. Perhaps more curiously, they are using the Internet as a tool to supplement and accentuate their real lives, not trying to escape to virtuality but reconciling with reality in a new kind of space-cyberspace. Analyzing the practice of cyberspace offers us a way in which to understand the experiences and desires of people and how they are manifested. Taking a look at how young people utilize virtual spaces can give us insight into the realities, barriers and possibilities of their lives. As our environments shape us, we too sculpt our environments with our own representations of our dominant societal discourses. This process is an ever-evolving dialogue. Public spaces are structural expressions of human needs for socialization. Since they are the forum for interactions between individuals and the outside world, they-be they real or virtual-are a perfect lens through which to identify the mutations taking place in a society that is rapidly evolving. With the speed of change in societies throughout the world due to increased mobility, deracination, and exchange of information, dominant discourses and paradigms are breaking down in favor of new ones. These changes are not slow enough for people to feel as if the newness has been easily adapted into daily life. Without a feeling of stability, people have begun to question their identities and positions within the dominant societal discourse, but these former norms no longer give answers comprehensive enough. Moroccan society is mutating to reflect such questioning ; instead of reflecting dominant societal norms, it exhibits polarities of values, behaviors, and actions of people who no longer feel like norms of any sort are entirely internalized. While this phenomenon appears quite similar to a post-modern Western trend that is characterized by societies whose moral and physical foundations are crumbling, I suggest that Internet practices by young Moroccans are sculpted by cultural and geographical elements that are specifically Moroccan. Young Moroccans are not abandoning real life for the safety of a virtual one but using it as another space to reconcile conflict. Internet practices are not globally homogenous but rather geographically-specific, being sculpted by users to treat contemporary cultural issues in innovatively interesting ways. However, globalization, being « the intensification of world-wide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa, » makes all people reliant on the developments and actions of others throughout the world. 1 Certainly, because of the extreme dominance of Americans, Western Europeans, and the English language in Cyberspace, their practices and the ensuing trends ought to be considered as an important piece of the great cultural pastiche that makes up Cyberspace today. « 98 percent of all the computer hosts on the Net are located in countries in North America, Western Europe, Japan, and Australia-countries that together have only 15 percent of the world's population. The continents of Africa, Asia, and South America are tiny islands in cyberspace.» 2 (See Table 1.) But macro-trends should not always indicate that all users practice cyberspace in similar ways. and the tiny islands ought not be ignored in discussions of the Internet. Cyberspace, considered one of the most important media for the growth of globalization, has radically transformed the way people communicate and conduct business, from the level of our neighborhoods to the entire globe. The spread of the community in cyberspace has revolutionized spatial and temporal perception. The concept of cyberspace as a global space driven by one huge culture and society is followed more often by efficient communication systems, which allow transferring in real time the relevant information to the local scenes where it in fact develops the social, political and economic action. Globalization.also leads to the rediscovery of the local identity, to a re-territoriality, going against the dream of the global democracy. These new processes are visible also in certain virtual groups on the Internet... The global dimension always constructs tension with the local one. The transnational processes create urban territory reorganization, which it engraves also on the virtual spaces. This is a phenomenon of the pluralistic integration among cultures, which are placed in a dialogical relationship but respecting their own basic characteristics. 3 The possibilities of this relatively new medium overwhelm us in the Western post-modern world. « The overheated language that surrounds current discussion of computer-mediated communications falls within a long tradition of American technological optimism. The optimists today tend to represent urban decay and class polarization as out-of-date formulations of a problem that could be solved with the right technology. » 4 Post-modern Westerners turn to the Internet as a safe-zone from a daily real life that has failed them. « Denied or having deconstructed the more traditional methods of sustaining a community, users of [cyberspace] must develop alternative or parallel methods. » 5 Western hopes of re-discovering community, where real neighborhoods become too dangerous to walk in and families are widely dispersed geographically, should be comtrasted to trends of those in developing countries. In developing countries, the optimism lies in the potential of connections to integrate themselves into a more forgiving and democratic space, cyberspace, in which they may be able to more easily compete economically and culturally bear witness to their local heritages. The Internet is regarded as a way to strengthen daily reality as well as the future by making connections and being heard, thus bettering the conditions of daily life. Young Moroccans who are familiar with the Internet and computers are creating, connecting, learning, and deciding on things that have never before been available to them. Given this freedom that new rules and technology have offered to them, how are they manipulating, behaving in, and perceiving the new space in which they are participating ? orientation This study was conducted in the city of Rabat, the capital of Morocco with a current population of 1.2 million people in its metropolitan area. Moroccan urban areas are economic, political, and intellectual centers, attracting wealth and power, sponsoring intellectual and creative prusuits, and their technological proximity to the ailleurs (or outside world) is unchallenged elsewhere within the country. The cultural and socio-economic differences between rural and urban areas here is quite stark. Urban areas are witnessing a sharper increase in religious fundamentalism and unmanageable percentages of unemployment, while rural areas remain almost untouched by modernization efforts and most rural people are illiterate. By 2000, the Moroccan government remarked that 54 percent of Moroccans (a population of 30 million) live in urban areas-a great change from the time before French colonization in 1912 when the urban population was less than 10 percent. 6 The rural to urban migration (exode rurale) in the last century was caused mainly to a highly destructive colonial economic policy that impoverished and rendered landless millions of people, forcing them to seek employment in the cities that were occupied by the French. Today, every major Moroccan city-including Rabat-is surrounded by bidonvilles, or shantytowns, physical proof that migration did not always improve economic conditions. The socio-economic caste system, put into place by the French, continues to thrive today where a vast majority lives in impoverished conditions while a small elite and emerging middle class enjoy an aisé position of influence and wealth. Rabat is a unique case in Morocco, where an overwhelming percentage of its population works for the government (stable and secure jobs) and is situated in a middle class socio-economic bracket. When we talk about young urban Internet users, we are talking solely of those who have the economic ability, time, and means of transportation to access the new technology. Rabat is home to many of these young users. contemporary issues for young people Seventy percent of Moroccans today are younger than thirty years old. 7 However, « youth » , along with the free time and amount of self-exploration it entails, can really only be enjoyed by those in a socio-economic position that does not force them to work to support the family, marry early, or not go to school. In urban Moroccan society, becoming an adult means having financial independence because everything else relies upon it. Middle-class educated children are financially dependent upon their families from birth often up through their late twenties due to the unemployment crisis in the country. Indeed, those who even have doctorates have difficulty finding adequate jobs with a certain amount of security and stability. A secure job ensures a secure future ahead, enabling the new « adult » to forge ahead with his/her own plans and to act out the societal obligations that the title of adulthood carries along with it. Those plans include the making of one's own home, marrying, and having children. Almost all Moroccans marry. It is unthinkable not to do so. In 1960, the average marriage age was 17 years old. By 1982, it rose to 24 years in urban areas, and 28.3 years for the urban educated population. 8 The age of marriage (the traditional rite of passage) has risen in recent years for both men and women, correlating with the lack of employment available to young people. Young people that are not able to be financially-independent are forced to rely on their families for increasingly longer times-extending their experience of youth. Educated, unemployed young people who are expected to be « adult » and responsible in the outside world of political and academic space and who see Western manifestations of independence on television and in film are fully aware of what they are missing. They feel distant from their parents, and relations are often stressed between them because they are not « allowed » to realize their individual definition of freedom. A great deal of frustration is engendered from this feeling of not being able to freely act according to either traditional or Western standards, leaving young people in confused tension with their outside world. With the liberalization of gendered space, where women have in the past two generations emerged from private domestic spaces and into work, school, and other formerly male spaces, a sexual revolution-like that which accompanied the emergence of women into the public sphere elsewhere-did not take place. What this means for contemporary young people is that, despite gender mixity in many realms, sexuality and sexual behavior has not been introduced as an accepted part of societal discourse. Sexuality largely remains a taboo and highly controversial subject-evidenced by the fact that, although handholding may be permitted in the streets, two unmarried people discovered to be having sex can be condemned to up to a year and a half in prison. If marriage is the only legitimate institution not only for being recognized as an adult but also for sexual expression in society, and marriage ages continue to rise due to the unemployment crisis that impedes people from gaining societally-recognized stability that allows for marriage to happen, what happens to the young people who are affected by this situation ? family and community relations Family, only a few generations ago, was the central insitution of Moroccan society, as the source of socialization and education, employment and business, health insurance and security. Community ties were based on inter-family relationships, allegiances, and agreements. Today, most urban families are nuclear in size and extended family is located in other parts of town or other towns. No longer is it easy to live nearby one another geographically. Members within the extended family see each other less and less as a result. Bennani-Chraibi traces such destruction of the family to, not surprisingly and rather correctly, economics and general education. « The static construction and emergence of a new economic order have largely occurred outside of this social structure. School socializes, produces, distributes titles and licenses and therefore values, preparing for the entrance into the working world and progressive autonomy. The individual begins to exist in the social field, outside of the family group. As the educational system is in crisis and the employment field closes, social mobility is blocked. » 9 The family is resorted to for security when outside societal promises fail, but reverting to the family structure which has also significantly changed is awkward. To find a certain amount of sympathetic understanding, young people often surround themselves with friends of similar ages, social and economic positions as themselves. Most young people interviewed do not feel as if they can discuss issues important to their lives with their parents. One 18 year-old male said, « There's a proverb that says you can't choose your family, but you can choose your friends. » Many often avoid telling their parents what they do at night, how they do in school, and with whom they are. In some cases, they confess to lying to their parents out of fear that their parents would not approve of their decisions and take freedom away. Friends and siblings seem much more reliable and understanding than parents, offering compassion and support in one's best and worst times-while parents are often left in the dark about their children's lives. Friends' schedules are often based around one another and they support one another in almost any circumstance. Friends are no longer just from one's local neighborhood or members of the extended family but represent the physical and mental mobility of middle-class young people in Rabat, coming from academic settings and specialized interest groups that share a certain sport, hobby, or talent. Friends have not only become more specialized but oftentimes more geographically distant from one another, spread throughout a variety areas of Rabat, perhaps living in Casablanca, or even studying in another country. Community, once defined by family interrelationships, familiar neighborhood interactions, and religious practices, is increasingly a conglomeration of people from different areas representing shared economic or social traits, not necessarily shared geographical ones. Neighbors, often having uprooted themselves from their formerly established geographically-based communities, now know each other less. Indeed, they are suspicious of one another because uprootedness and increased mobility have permanently distorted former definitions of community. Interestingly, Rabatis-whose contemporary remnants of the indigenous medina somewhat reflects the way people used to live, in extended familial clusters with evolved visual architectural barriers guarding inhabitants of individual as well as semi-communal spaces from intrusion from the « outside »--continue to, albeit perhaps subconsciously, construct barriers that separate the « inside » from the « outside ». Such is characteristic of pre-colonial communities throughout the Muslim world. The high walls built around residential villa compounds occupied by nuclear families are not so different from the walls around traditional urban communities whose great gates closed at nightfall. The « outside » is the untrusted and lonely unknown that may exploit, steal, or challenge what happens « inside » if allowed to enter. The « inside » is a psychological social space comprised of perceived family, friends, and partnerships that increasingly span across physical space and beyond blood-lines today but nevertheless continue to exist as an important part of young people's lives. In contrast to its high walls and iron gates, the typical middle-class Rabati home is often left unlocked when someone is inside-availing close friends and family members easy access into the inside space. Home is not only the nuclear family's territory but also the second home for « insiders » who can stay from several hours to several days without being asked to leave. Most people pity those who live alone and must manage live by themselves ; similarly, they are suspicious of loners and those without connections to others. Culturally, it is considered extremely important to be surrounded by one's « insiders, » people that are stable, caring, and helpful. Today, although having such people is important, those « insiders » do not have to be blood-related or geographically proximate. Young people are looking for « insiders » that share similar life experiences outside of their homes, families, and neighborhoods. relationship to the outside world Bennani-Chraibi, in her study of Moroccan youth, focused on the educated population because she believes that they measure the extent to which multiculturalism exists in the literate population [where roughly fifty percent of Moroccans are illiterate] and measure the integration of these people due to free general education for all, which she refers to as an idealistic motor for social mobility that was largely unsuccessful. 10 While the first post-independence generation, to which belong most of today's young people's parents, was guaranteed a job with the government (with tenured stability and assured retirement) if they finished high school, this is not at all the case today. Young scholarized people, unable to join the already bulging bureaucracy and without help from the largely undeveloped and inacessible private sector, have few options in the job market. The unemployment crisis has made many rethink the value of their education, as they are often forced to take jobs that are not challenging enough or are not well-paid enough for their level of education. [The young person] detaches himself from the group. He rethinks more and more his inherited values and drives as an individual. The collective dream of post-independence of an ascending social mobility realized by education for all has crystallized this individualism. Due to the mode of teaching, he is shaped, examined, and graded so that everything wtih which he deals, faced with finding a place in society, is based off of a hierarchy of values based on merit. After fifty years of investment in a failing academic system, a shift occurred from the hopes that drove families to trust their children to schools in the first place to the negative results of educational politics, the unintegrated have three options : escapism, revolt against a system that does not keep its promises, or paying the costs of reverting to former ways of social insertion. 11 Educated young people are often disillusioned and look outside of Morocco for viable options. The ailleurs, or the world outside of Morocco, is largely physically inaccessible except to a small percentage of the population. Traveling remains a priviledge today. In Bennani-Chraibi's study, only 11 percent of her interviewees had ever travelled outside of the country. 12 Morocco is in close proximity to Spain and the rest of Europe ; a simple ferry ride takes people across the Strait of Gibraltar. However, attaining a visa to travel is often difficult and oftentimes involves a coup de piston (knowing someone influential or bribing someone). Those who can travel are either of high socio-economic status, are part of a higher cultural/intellectual level that can speak French or Spanish fluently, are or have been students abroad, or they have family members living abroad that they can visit. Approximately one million Moroccans live abroad, 1/30th of the population of Morocco. « Moroccan emmigrants are a part of the mental universe of young Moroccans, they come back once a year in their nice cars with foreign license plates full of proof of their prosperity abroad. » 13 For most Moroccans, having the opportunity to leave the country is a dream. Most families have at least one member who lives outside of the country. These members are envied and admired by those who continue to live in Morocco ; they are physical extentions of Morocco in the world, offering an outside connection and a source of inspiration. Every year, the United States holds a lottery for immigration-almost every family in Rabat has sent in their letters of appeal at one time or another, in hopes that their children will be able to escape the perceived economic dead-end that is the sitution today in the country. One 27 year old male has two siblings and his mother in the United States. He has sent a letter every year for ten years to the lottery but has had no success. Leaving Morocco consumes him, but because he is unemployed and barely able to support his sister and himself, he has no other chance to leave besides taking his chances in the annual lottery. For years, he thought he would be able to join his family so he kept on postponing his studies, expecting to leave. He takes seasonal work around the city and curses Morocco every chance he gets. Recognition of the outside world plays a fundamental role in the development of the self in Morocco. Situated in the crossroads of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, the country itself is economically, poltically, and religiously tied to and reliant upon global trends and others' whims. « The ailleurs abundantly penetrates the thought space of young Moroccans. Borders are constantly reformulated, keeping young people in a continual process of redefinition and finding within such change a sense of belonging. This space is desired because the image of self is broken and the traditional system of values ceases to respond to all questions generated by the conflicted young person. » 14 Young people tend to separate the ailleurs into two different parts, the Western and the Arab worlds. Bennani-Chraibi notes that, amongst her interviewees, those who desired to visit other Arab countries were largely religious females of a modest socio-economic background who preferred speaking Arabic instead of French. 15 The appeal that the Arab world has for young Moroccans is often tied to their desire to recreate ties to their religious community ('umma). A person dealing with social mutations either chooses to identify or be contrary to what is exterior of him/her because the inner assurance of traditionally unchallenged norms of social behavior no longer exists. Re-identification with the Muslim community has been a popular trend amongst many Muslims living in countries that are suffering due to economic problems like those in Morocco today. Colonialism and Western models of modernization seemed to only make the rich richer and the poor poorer, break up families and communities, and mock the social rules of Islam. Disappointed with the manifestations of many Western ideals, some have chosen to reject them and find justified refuge in more strict interpretations of Islam. Rejection of Western imitation is not a boycott of all things Western. Positive parts, like work methods, technology, and scientific discovery, are accepted. Rather it is the « futile behavior », like clothing, rampant consumerism, and morals, that is cast away or fought against. 16 However, religious practices are largely considered in urban areas to be the choice of the individual practitioner as all Muslims, as it is believed, will be judged in the same way by Allah. Although, one must not forget that Morocco is a Muslim state operating under the Shari'ah, the comprehensive Islamic code of social law. Seated next to a young bearded and djellaba-clad student intégriste on a public bus is a young man dressed in expensively-labelled clothing that mimicks the style of his favorite rap star that he saw on German MTV this morning thanks to the satellite dish sitting atop his apartment building. Just as there are people who reject the West, there are those who heartily accept it and desire to appropriate its perceived values, modes of expression, and its trinkets. They seek to find refuge in the idea of a place that reconciles the emerging individual with the community. The internalization of the ailleurs is a way in which to express the frustrations of the individual who has been distanced or detached from his/her family and social groups because of contemporary societal mutations. Atomized and insecure, many young Moroccans denounce their own society. The West offers the image of a place where anyone can participate and become something, representing the progress of humanity and the myth of development, and seemingly reconciling the individual with groups of other individuals. Sharp criticism of contemporary Morocco and its problems accents young people's frustrations of feeling helpless and unable to reconcile their goals with their perceived daily realities. Bennani-Chraibi notes, « It seems that relations with the family help to construct a group of young people-avoiding an asocial derivative-and impedes the making of an anomic mass in total rebellion. [However,] the project individuel is not sufficiently achieved to detach those still intrinsically reliant upon their families for survival. Individualization is advanced enough so that these situations of dependency grow into irreconciliable tensions. The ailleurs is perceived as the only way to escape. » 17 Young people are consuming idyllic depictions of the outside in hopes of finding more control over their spaces, relationships, and activities. the role of media In traditional Moroccan society, oral traditions were extremely important in all areas of life. Children were taught from a very young age to memorize the Qur'an verse by verse in school. Traders and business people exchanged news and stories as well as goods from their travels outside of the former Empire, connecting one another with valuable information and insight into a world perceived to get bigger and smaller due to verbal exchanges. Moroccan friends refer to such exchange as the « Arab telephone, » where information gets passed along from one person to another until-in a stunningly small amount of time-everyone is more or less aware of what is happening with friends, neighbors, ennemies, and in distant countries. Such tradition survives today in different ways ; not only is information passed on in face-to-face interactions but over the telephone and in letters, in television and radio broadcasts, and over the various forms of communication available on the Internet. Audio-visual media has had a huge impact upon linguistic and cultural practices in Morocco. Television was introduced in 1962, after the Ministry of the Interior decided that it could no longer buffer the Moroccan people from its impact and created RTM Channel 1, the only official station in the country until 1990. Some middle-aged Rabatis have mused about how they loved summer growing up because of the clear skies-not for the beautiful weather but for the fact that Spanish television channels could be picked up without as much interference and they could see images they did not normally have access to. In 1990, 2M joined RTM as the second Moroccan channel. 2M was a subscription-based cable channel that required a cable box and cost 1600 Dh (160 USD) per year. When the channel company finally caught on that, instead of every family buying access, the cable would be bought by one family and split for use by up to eight families, the channel became national and was able to be accessed by 70 percent of Morocco in 1997. 18 Now, 5 Dh are added each month to the bill of every user of electricity in the country to pay for 2M. RTM's programs have always tended to be more conservative and propaganda-filled than its younger counterpart. 2M is currently extremely popular amongst the vast majority of Moroccans because of its variety of programming that appeals to all age groups. However, in the beginning, it was greatly criticized by many because of its reliance on Egyptian programming that was difficult to understand and on French-dubbed programs that brought questionable images into the homes of viewers. It was originally broadcasting 75 percent of its programming in French and 25 percent in Arabic in 1990. 19 Today, there is a greater balance of Arabic and French programming. Eighty-nine percent of Moroccans had a television by 1995. 20 The television became the central object in people's houses. In fact, televisions became more important than refridgerators in the great bidonvilles, or shantytowns, surrounding cities. The popularity of the television in even the poorest of areas should come as no surprise because the television is a tool used by some to escape a reality that is almost impossible to live from day to day. Satellite dishes have been available in Morocco since the early to mid- 1990 's. Any household that can afford a parabole, or satellite dish, will do it to gain access to the hundreds of channels throughout the world and release themselves from the shackles of propaganidizing RTM Channel 1 and 2M. In fact, forty percent of Moroccan households have satellite dishes today. 21 One can see them sitting atop tin shacks in shantytowns like half moons, perched on the small terraces of apartments in quartiers populaires, or slowly positioning themselves on the roofs of the wealthiest villas. The television remains on throughout much of the day in the homes of Rabatis and functions as a regulating pulse to daily activities. Its flashes of images and sounds accompany cooking, housekeeping, meals, important conversations, and visits from friends and family. It maintains a central position in people's homes, always located in the séjour or the main room in which various activities-eating, homework, cooking, and sleeping-may take place. It is here where the family unites for receiving information, entertaining themselves, and participating in a community that is simultaneously receiving the same stories and images. Today, Moroccans turn to the television as the main source of stable and constant information, news, inspiration, and insight in their daily lives. They have scheduled their lives around their favorite programs and televised sports events. In her observations of Casablanca, Ossman notes, « Television now plays an important role in connecting Casablanca to other places, other times. In turn, these images of elsewheres situate local and personal experience because they draw contrasts between what one lives and what one observes. The magic box fulfills a function that orders the movements of the city. By simply assuring that people will be sitting in front of their televisions at given times, it helps create a certain social predictability. » 22 Television has brought with it a never-ending stream of images and issues that, before its use, had never been previously seen or discussed in the private, familiar realm of the Muslim home. Images are now, with the satellite dish, streaming into Moroccan homes continuously. Gender mixity, violence, sexuality, and multiple conflicting political opinions, among thousands of other issues are presented daily before Moroccan audiences undoubtedly leading to great inner confusion and questioning about issues that may never before have seemed unsure or questionable. A group of young men who love the American sitcom, « Friends, » begin to discuss what it would be like to live with friends instead of with their families and dream of an atmosphere in which young men and women can meet without the social taboos and pressures of their own society. A Muslim sister, or intégriste, chooses to turn her head when she hears the music which indicates that a man and a woman are going to kiss during her favorite Brazilian soap opera dubbed in French. Her mother, watching the same soap opera, sees a character decide to have an abortion and takes the opportunity to tell her daughter that abortion is morally wrong. A family eating dinner and watching television is suddenly accosted by a screen full of naked women : the father lowers his eyes, the children leave the room, and the mother rushes to change the offensive channel. Viewers are confronted by images that they have little control over ; their morals and world-views are continually thrown into question. Oftentimes, viewers are confronted with questionable images without anyone or anything to help them understand how those images fit into their lives and who they are. Their options are to either turn off the television or change the channel. however, Moroccans are not choosing to turn off their magic boxes. « Young people live the fragmentation that has been lived by preceeding generations resulting from a gap between modernity with a permissive base and a traditional life characterized by multiple taboos separating the sexes. That young people content themselves to live in an imaginary world of forbidden things while feeling uncomfortable in reality is a form of frustration that has no available equilibrium. » 23 In essence, the television offers a sense of community and sociability that may have been destroyed or unavailable to those choosing to participate. Young Moroccans that have grown up with the television as a family member are often inherently connected with it, because their personalities have been shaped by this medium and the messages it is offering. The tension between television and real life is assuaged not by participation in reality but by participation in the world of television where the panopoly of images, actions, and philosophies do not need to be reconciled as they might in reality. Dissatisfaction with tha national channels' television shows led to the popularity explosion of the VCR in Morocco in the early 1990's. When young people watch videos, unlike the television, it is an activity that most often takes place outside of time in which the family is together. They will either watch films alone or with friends of similar economic and moral background. This time, it is they who are in control of the images and stories that they will watch. A study of young people's video practices in Tunis, Tunisia, is helpful to understand practices here in Morocco because the two countries are quite similar in terms of development and access to technology. Of the 155 interviewees that had televisions, 136 of them had VCRs and only 43 had satellite dishes. 24 The volume of film rental should not be underestimated ; interviewees rented between two and ten films per week. Renting videos gives people more choice and control over what they were going to watch. Oftentimes, video stores have the same access to films that local cinemas do because of the lag time spent in translation and getting to the country, so there is no real advantage to the cinema in regards to new releases. And, as is the case in Morocco, going to the cinema is more considerably more expensive than renting a 5-13 Dh (0.50-1.30 USD) film, when 30 Dh (3 USD) is spent on a single ticket and at least 6 Dh (0.60 USD) on transportation costs for a film in Rabat. In centre-villes of Moroccan cities, Bennani-Chraibi notes that half of the videos in rental stores are usually French-dubbed Western films and half are Arabic films (usually Egyptian). 25 This changes in higher socio-economic suburbs, where most films available are in French and Western. The more educated and wealthy a Moroccan is the more likely that s/he will rent a Western (typically, American or French) film. The Tunisian survey noted that young people, between the ages of 14 and 25, chose films that had actors they preferred, that were suggested by rental store employees, or whose advertisements they saw. The smallest influence on film choice came from the film renter's family, indicating viewing practices not involving the family and desire to have personal control over the choice of the film. As we see here, young people are not turning away from foreign images but wanting increasingly more control over what they choose to see. Thus, they are choosing with what community of consumers they want to participate and have shared experiences, even though such experiences are isolated and passive ones. Escape, intrusion, or forum, television and video in Morocco are « places of fabrication of images of others and of the self-often the occasion to confront oneself, to advance or pull back from the mobile borders that separate the individual from the group. » 26 Such desire for control over consumed intake is intensified when it comes to Internet usage, as we shall see. introducing the internet Internet access has been officially available since the end of 1995 in Morocco. By July of 1999, 30,000 Moroccans were using the Internet. 27 The French Embassy in Morocco listed 62 cybercafés and Internet providers by location in 1999. This figure is one year old and does not represent the amount of cybers and providers currently operating but nevertheless is useful in giving us an approximate idea about who is receiving access from where in the country. 46.8 percent of users were accessing the Internet in the Casablanca metropolitan area. 27.4 percent were in the Rabat-Salé-Kenitra area. 13 percent were in Northern Morocco (Tangier-Tétouan-Oujda). 9.7 percent were in the Southern region of Morocco (Marrakech, Agadir, Settat). 6.5 percent were in the Fès-Meknes area. (Ambassade français) Logically, these figures make a great deal of sense. Moroccan Internet make up a population that is overwhelmingly urban in origin. Casablanca is an economic and industrial megapolis, with a population of 2-3 million people. Rabat is the political and academic center, with 1.2 million people in the environs. The small percentage of users in other areas (whose urban areas are comparable to the size of Rabat) within Morocco highlights the lack of technological development and access outside of these two great urban magnets who, combined, make up two-thirds of the Internet-using population.. Because Internet access remains a middle- and upper-class priviledge, we can correctly assume that the concentration of wealth and power in Morocco reside within these two cities. The high cost of access at the beginning was very restrictive for most people. In 1998, home and business access cost between 400-500 Dh (40-50 USD) per month with a subscription for 15 hours on-line. This price did not include local telephone charges, ranging between 8-15 Dh (0.80-1.50 USD) per hour. In 1999, the access prices went down considerably to around 200 Dh (20 USD) per month with an unlimited number of hours on-line, not including local telephone charges. The great price reduction was due to the fact that Maroc Telecom (Itisslat al-Maghrib), the then state-run telecommunication company that had a powerful monopoly over the entire country, was going to face a great deal of competition in the beginning of 2000 with the Spanish company, Méditel, and the French Maroc Connect. The price reduction was part of a larger ploy touching all realms of telecommunications in Morocco to attract and keep customers with Maroc Telecom. Recently, Wanadoo, Maroc Connect's internet provider, announced a one-year subscription for 990 Dh (~99 USD) with an additional free month, again not including local phone charges. Certainly, as this new offer shows, prices will continue to drop because of the new competition between telecommunications companies in Morocco. However, home and business Internet access is not even a viable option for most middle class Moroccans who are aware of and interested in using the Internet simply because most people do not have computers at home, school, or work. The prices of computers in Morocco are similar to those in the United States, but one must take into account that the monthly income of middle class Moroccans is most certainly less than that of middle class Americans. Computers in the home remain rarities here ; they are most often found in the homes of the upper middle class and upper class, university professors, and less frequently students in the sciences and engineering. Buying a computer has become a fad amongst many Moroccan elite, another expensive trinket to show off to friends. And, even if computers are in some homes, often they are not used efficiently because most people receive no assistance or training unless they are willing to spend a great deal of money, like the 900 Dh (90 USD) price tag for 14 hours of instruction at places like Génération Multimédia in Casablanca. The less-fortunate who do not have computers at home, work, or school-the category in which most Internet users in Morocco fall-- frequent one of the numerous cybers, the French slang term referring to cybercafés and spaces, located in every major Moroccan city. In 1996, the price for one hour of Internet access was around 30-50 Dh (3-5 USD). With the explosion of cybercafés in recent years, prices dropped in 1997 to around 20-25 Dh (2-2.50 USD), in 1998 to 15-20 Dh (1.50-2 USD), and in 1999 to 10-15 Dh (1-1.50 USD). In areas where cybers compete for business, the prices have gone down as low as 8 Dh (0.80 USD) in March 2000. This trend will continue due to the new telecommunication competition in the country, making connections more affordable for the cybers and for people to access the Internet at home ; reasonably, the prices will continue to go down at cybers so that customers will stay with them instead of going home for a connection. Today, it is still cheaper to access the Internet from a cyber than from home because of the accompanying local phone charges, however that may soon change. Generally, people will move from one cyber to another when better prices can be found and do not restrict themselves to going to cybers in proximity to their homes. Cybers, because they provide affordable and easy Internet access to all, are extremely popular urban spaces and will be discussed in further detail below. The Moroccan government, in a positive move towards technological progress, recently announced that, by 2004, every academic institution in Morocco will be equipped with computers. Computer classes will be required in institutions of higher education, and 75,000 governmental functionairies will be trained to use the computer. Prime Minister Youssoufi announced, « Morocco must go through substantial reforms in education and training so that it will be able to catch up in the technological information revolution and follow the technological develoments in the course of the years to come. » 28 Human Rights Watch notes that practically no Arab state wants to look as if it is anti-Internet (translated as « anti-progress »). Morocco's 30,000 Internet users help to make up the one million users in the Arab states (excluding Libya and Iraq who currently have no services). 29 Morocco is one of the handful of Arab states whose government does not at all restrict access to information on the Internet. 30 Internet providers do not have to furnish names or identifying information of their customers to the government. Customers of Moroccan providers do not have to sign any contracts about the nature of usage. This allows a great deal of freedom and the possibility of anonymity on the Internet. Furthermore, the Moroccan government is much more tolerant of what is published on the Internet in regards to what are often referred to as the three main taboos that are often not allowed to be freely discussed in written and broadcasted Moroccan media : the Western Sahara issue, Islam, and the King and his family. This is evident to the extent where access to sites concerning the Polisario and the Amazigh movements, such as L'Echo du Polisario and the Website of the World Amazigh Congress Tamazgha, are not restricted for Moroccan Internauts, while in the printed and Moroccan televised media they are all but ignored. 31 However, with the 9 November 1999 « departure » of Driss Basri (the former Minister of the Interior who was perceived by many to be the real power during the reign of Hassan II) and with new policies of Hassan II's son, the new King Mohammed VI, freedom of speech has been significantly enlarged for Moroccans, evidenced by his release of political prisoners at Tindouf and invitations for those exiled by his father to come back to the country like Serafy. It appears that this trend in Morocco will continue with the increase of accessibility to information thanks to the Internet and relaxed governmental policies on expression. Like television and video, the Internet is a source of connections to the world and all of its conflicting messages. It offers a seemingly infinite variety of stories, images, and sounds to the user. Internet users are more active, participatory, and have a great deal more individual control in comparison to the other two forms of media that we have discussed. Users have greater freedom to information, ideas, and images that they have never been able to explore until now. cyberspace Cyberspace is a general term referring to the Internet and computer-mediated technology (CMC) Discourse about the new technology has been chosen to be expressed through a three-dimensional metaphor, likely because spatial metaphors are the most intimate and vivid ways in which we understand reality. Bruns suggests that the power of the metaphor ought not be underestimated, quoting cognitive linguists Lakoff and Johnson, « The way we think, what we experience, and what we do everyday is very much a matter of metaphor. [because] metaphors serve to organize and interpret experience. » 32 Thus, we can understand cyberspace to be « the social and the spatial are inextricably realized in one another; conjuring up the circumstances in which society and space are simultaneously realized by thinking, feeling, doing individuals and also conjuring up the many different conditions in which such realizations are experienced by thinking, feeling, doing individuals. » 33 Temporally, websites, virtual communities, and audiences can appear and disappear at any time, unlike cities and buildings that are comparatively much more permanent and difficult to modify. Cyberspace is accessible at anytime and the same information can be accessed from almost anywhere (excluding countries that have censored certain parts of cyberspace from their real-life citizens, like Iran for example). This new space is an ever-evolving space whose size is constantly in flux and borders are undefined, with hyperlinks and social connections creating accessible frontiers that may have been previously unknown. Familiar sites and users, bookmarked or address book-ed, seem virtually right next door, while unknown information must be hunted for on search engines and seems comparably distant. However, what is distant can be immediately moved next door-challenging our familiarity with space as we understand it in a three-dimensional physical world. We make our own perceived geographies in the constantly fluctuating cyberspace, our own navigation and exploration practices modified this fluctuation. Cyberspace offers a poignant manifestation of post-modern space. Because cyberspaces force us to reflect upon the structures of our real-life spaces and our positions within them, they offer us a vantage point from which to understand society's real conditions that are represented in cyberspace but at the same time challenged and overturned. 34 This sort of reflection allows us to more clearly identify and treat the fragmentation of our real lives because of the extraordinary freedom we have in cyberspace to express and explore. The medium is new, an « other space, » that sits just beyond the borders of nations, societies, and preceptions of space, encouraging exploration and sponsoring-- in the case of young Moroccan users-- a space in which to treat issues that have no space in real-life to be treated. In a space where written communication is the dominant mode of expression and basis for interactivity, people who fail to communicate with one another through shared languages and symbols also fail to participate in the virtual world. Words, as programmed lines, or interactive discourse, are transformed from communication structures to the basic architectures that define the spaces in which we interact. Internet Relay Our choice of words-as dialogues, nicknames, addresses, messages, etc.-clue others into who we are or who we want to be perceived to be in today's verbally-dominated cyberspace. Already, in physical reality, « our buildings, neighborhoods, and cities are cultural artifacts shaped by human intention and intervention, symbolically declaring to society the place held by each of its members. Logically, those who have the power to define their society's symbolic universe have the power to create a world in which they and their priorities, beliefs, and operating procedures are not only dominant, but accepted and endorsed without question by the vast majority. » 35 Although infinitely more malleable than physical space, virtual space is no different. Computer users themselves, as designers and participants, are the virtual equivalent of real-life architects and planners. 36 The space within which we interact when we use the Internet is constructed on the values and priorities of those who make it. websites The perception of space crucially depends on understanding the relation between lengths, heights, depths, and locations ; but in cyberspace, the lengths, heights, depths, and locations depend on one's perception. Websites seem extensive or small to use depending exclusively on how much of them we've explored-largely, this is because there is never anyway to view a site in its entirety, simply because there is no vantage point within cyberspace to do so (we're already immersed in a site, looking within, or at an unknown distance from it, unable to see without-but never just close by where we might survey the whole site). And our perception of relative location depends entirely on the available hyperlinks were are aware of. 37 Moroccan Internauts on the World Wide Web are often lost when it comes to navigating through the seemingly infinite amount of sites available. While some take advantage of this disorientation, others seek ways in which to orient themselves in the new space and visit « places » they would never before be able to access. Spatial familiary is revolutionized as information and connections that are unknown (outside of perceived space) can immediately become familiar and brought within one's control. The nature of this new medium is « vast, unmapped, culturally and legally ambiguous, verbally terse, hard to get around in, and up for grabs. In this silent world, all conversation is typed. To enter it, one forsakes both body and place and becomes a thing of words alone. It is of course a perfect breeding ground for both outlaws and new ideas. » 38 E-commerce will prove difficult to adapt to present conditions in Morocco because of the strict regulations on audio-visual equipment and technologies that are allowed in the country. Taxes on merchandise entering the country is prohibitive to many who might pay more import tax for something they have bought than the worth of the product. Free trade will affect the country only in 2010, so until then taxes will continue to dissuade people from material consumption on the Web despite the fact that music and technological products are extremely difficult or impossible to find in the country. Those craving such items are continually reduced to accepting whatever comes into the blackmarkets of Northern Morocco from Spain. Finally, all but the élite are generally unable to have bank debit or credit cards so that they might be able to buy on the World Wide Web. It is not surprising that some young Internet users are exploiting cyberspace to be able to have access to what is offered within it. Hundreds of years ago, Rabat was known for piracy. Today, it is no different. The lack of an established Internet policing system in Morocco has allowed Moroccan hackers and so-called Internet pirates the ability to do a certain amount of damage with the use of fake credit cards and stolen credit card numbers to traffic a certain amount of merchandise into the country under the noses of customs officials. A recent report on Médi-1, a Moroccan radio station, says that such piracy activity totalled approximately 1,000,000 FF (200,000 USD) last year. A Rabati informant has been buying audio-visual equipment and software from Internet sites with fake credit cards for the past year. He goes to the customs office to pick up his merchandise and pays the high tariff on imported goods, saying that his brother is sending him the merchandise from North America. Internet pirates can go to hacker sites and download programs that create credit card numbers. They then try the card numbers on major credit card sites to see if they already exist, and if they do they go to e-commerce sites and use the generated numbers of totally unsuspecting card holders. One Rabati hacker receives credit card numbers from a hotel desk employee at a hotel in France who does credit card transactions. The difficulty and confusion involved with tracking hackers in countries whose Internet practices are not greatly developed allows Internet pirates a certain freedom to play up the weaknesses of others in a new space. In Moroccan society, the issue of sex is very hot and controversial especially as conflicting practices-due to media, modernization, and increased mobility-- are challenging traditional morality. All audio and video recordings are subject to strict governmental censors once they physically enter the country, and customs officials confiscate « questionable » materials without warning. The National Center of Cinematography in Rabat burns all of the films that do not pass its tests for being acceptable for the Moroccan viewing audience every few weeks. Pornographic films and printed matter are available only only the black market and are often smuggled in from Spain. However, as there is no governmental censorship of the Internet in Morocco, many people are exploiting the opportunity and coming to cybers or accessing the Internet at home to visit porn sites. On the World Wide Web, access to porn is not only much cheaper than it is in real-life but also better quality and choice expands almost infinitely. While male interviewees who I have known for a reasonably long time have confessed to having had explored pornographic sites, other interviewees who I did not know as well denied visiting such sites entirely. One interviewee says, « If he's a Moroccan male and he's used the Internet, he's visited porn sites. » Perhaps, if I would have been a male asking such questions, telling the truth might have been less uncomfortable for interviewees. Being caught looking at a porn site is terribly embarassing and bordering on the realm of societal hshuma (shame) because of the importance of modesty and strict sexual rules in Islam. I have observed young men looking at porn sites, all the while having the mouse positioned on the button that closes the window so that, in case of an emergency, they could quickly get rid of any evidence with the click of a button. Precautions are taken by porn viewers so as to be as discreet as possible by choosing computers whose screens are out of the direct view of others. Indeed, if one looks at the Microsoft Internet Explorer's website log in the tool bar, « Historique, » that remembers every site visited by users for the last three weeks of use, one can immediately see that such computers hidden from sight are places of higher pornography site visits. Sites that are most often visited tend to be sex-related words that are written with a « .com » or « .fr » (indicating a French site) added to the end. 39 Perhaps porn site visitors are embarrassed to actually research for sites specific to their interests on search engines or that, since pornography access is relatively new to the public, users are not familiar with the wide breadth of sites available. Most likely, it is a mix of the above reasons and the fact that most users' English skills are not advanced enough to be able to accurately specify for what they might be looking. Although such sites offer a freedom to explore a societally taboo subject in relative privacy, users themselves exhibit a certain amount of uncertainty about playing in a field that is outside of their real-life experience. As can be seen from these examples of social deviance, Internet users are taking advantage of the newness of the space to challenge real-life restrictions and inadvertently bring into question why they must use cyberspace to have access to products, images, and interactions that they want. But they are also « travelling » to « places » they would not otherwise realistically be able to visit. Users are visiting websites of universities in Europe and North America to initialize their dreams of finding jobs and success, believed to be found abroad. Two friends who will receive their license (equivalent to American bachelor's degrees) are planning on doing their MBA in the United States or in Canada next year. For the past few months, they have been going to the cyber regularly to explore websites of universities and directly request information to be sent to their homes. They, like other students wanting to study abroad, have more power than their predecessors in choosing where they want to go and having direct connections to those with information. Oftentimes, students will base their decisions entirely off of the website presentations available to them because of the impossibility to visit the physical sites themselves. Similarly, in real life, Moroccans are often subject to lengthy and bureaucratic processes, waits, or delays. Accessing information or getting recognized by « important » people is usually a process surrounded by a good deal of pomp and circumstance, usually requiring some sort of coup de piston (bribe or connection) to make it happen in a timely fashion. Where information has formerly oftentimes been a commodity for profit, the great access to a wealth of different kinds of information democratizes what used to be a series of hierarchies. People are now able to possess knowledge about almost anything they please. Young people say that they are using the French Yahoo ! site more than any other search engine for information and most seem pleased by it. 40 However, others who are able to navigate in English have the ability to use search engines that are currently much faster and more comprehensive than the French Yahoo! They prefer Google for its speed and directness. In the last month, a Moroccan search engine, Wanadoo, came into existence and offers for the first time a very comprehensive lisiting of Moroccan sites. 41 Search engines are being created that respond to the needs and interests of their users. The creation of Moroccan engines offers a localized anchor to people's navigations that treats contemporary issues and avails people to information pertinent to their lives. People are using these engines to access a wide breadth of sites, as can be seen in each computer's site logs (Microsoft Explorer's History or Historique) that remembers all sites and pages seen within the sites accessed. One can see web-based email and chat services, academic inquiries, current events inquires, personal interest/hobby inquiries, and travel inquiries. Their explorations allow them to cross national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries with one mouse click. Interestingly enough, a great volume of websites visited by Rabatis tends to be web-based free email sites. email Increasingly, when a young techno-Moroccan meets a girl on the street or in school, instead of asking for her phone number, he asks for her email address. Not only is this supposed to impress the object of his affection with his technological knowledge (indicative of a socio-economic position that avails him to such knowledge) but it offers a viable solution to a contemporary problem for young people who are interested in one another. Even today, it is considered disrespectful to her parents for a young woman to receive phone calls from young men unknown by the family. Such instances can indicate to parents that their daughter is « permiscuous. » Sometimes, boys will get their own sisters or other female friends to place the call for him to the girl he is interested in and, once the girl is on the phone, the boy takes the receiver and begins to talk to her. So, exchanging email addresses is considerably more comfortable. The girl also has more personal control than she might in a real-life meeting or a phone conversation, having the ability to compose her thoughts and feelings, and exercise her will in the situation by choosing whether or not to write back to him. In email correspondence, both parties control whether or not they wish to respond and when they do if they choose to do so. Email is the most popular and accessible form of computer-mediated communication (CMC) available today. Electronic mail lets users send messages to one another, either bilaterally or in the form of mass email lists which reach several people at one time. By nature, because this form of communication is asynchronous, it does not require that users be on their computers to receive the messages but allows them to access it whenever they want. Messages can be created and received at any time, allowing users to take their time in thinking about and responding to messages. Email is closest in relationship to letter writing in that it is text-based and asynchronic. However, because one does not have to pay postage costs or wait days or weeks for the message to be delivered, it is more timely and efficient. Email allows the written (typed) word to reach others quickly, cheaply, and meaningfully. Sent messages can be stored and infinitely reproduced ; words can easily become immortal. Email practices among interviewees were concentrated on correspondence with friends and family members, within and outside of Morocco. To a lesser extent, emails were written to virtual friends or to people they had never physically met before, but it could be concluded that communcation with virtual friends was mainly an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) practice. Interviewees tended to be rather serious about email. They spent a great portion, if not the entire time, writing emails while they were at their cybers. Rabati users are expected to write one another back and maintain a virtual correspondence that supplements their real-life interactions with one another. A typical situation is one in which a friend writes an email to another friend. Immediately after sending the email, s/he goes and visits the friend to whom s/he has sent it, saying, « I sent you an email, write me back. » Writing email is not done instead of seeing the receipient but done in addition to it. Virtual greetings are thoughtful reminders that although the person is not physically nearby, s/he is remembered and considered even in one's interactions in cyberspace. The vast majority of emails that friends will write to one another in Rabat consist of only a handful of lines that are imbued with salutations and kind wishes. This tends to mimic the ingrained systematic greeting practices of urban Moroccans. Whether a Moroccan sees a member of his/her family, a friend, a colleague, or even an acquaintance, it is societally unacceptable (or hshuma) to pass by silently or ignore them. The greeting usually begins with a handshake and/or cheek kisses for both men and women, then salutations are exchanged. After personal greetings and well-wishing, each person asks how their respective parents, spouses, children, and friends are. This is what I refer to as « leh besse-ing, » as leh besse (literally in Arabic, « no harm ») is asked for each person involved, often even lisiting off names, and the reply are the same words, leh besse, indicating that each person is fine and healthy. (The result being a continuous line of the same two syllables being repeated again and again.) Regardless of whether this practice is done sincerely or not, it is an indispensible part of greeting people within one's own social network. It is done every time people see one another, sometimes several times in one day. Maintaining connections between people in Morocco is a vital activity to maintain friendships and positions in social networks. This is just another proof that although young people are more mobile than ever before, they continually reinforce connections to a community of people that are meaningful to them. One male admitted to being rather frustrated at the fact that an American friend of his ad not written an email message to him since she left Morocco three months ago. He noted that she had sent email to other people within his social circle in Rabat, but his In Box remained empty of her messages. Over the past months, his opinion of her has declined and he wondered about the sincerity of her friendship to him. He noted, « She could have simply sent a quick hello, at least ! » Perhaps the situation above had to do with different cultural definitions of interconnectedness. In this case, such differences manifested themselves through the medium of electronic mail. Currently, there exists no globally understood Netiquette for social interactions on the Internet although there are groups who sponsor the creation of such customs on the Internet, as is the case for the Association démocratique des femmes du Maroc who published a website on acceptable etiquette. 42 Since public educational institutions do not provide access for students and the private and public sectors are slow to provide access for their workers in Morocco, those wishing to have email accounts typically use web-based domains. All interviewees had email accounts on web-based domains ; the most popular were hotmail.com, yahoo.com, usa.net, and caramail.fr. Interviewees often had more than one email account. Having more than one account is pragmatic in that it allows users to be able to have the maximum amount of space that they might need for messages and images. Internet-based domains restrict the amount of space available to users, often 2-5 MB. Also, many times web-based domains get slower at peak-times, making it difficult to access email quickly. Having multiple addresses offers users the option to check their messages in other accounts while they are waiting for a certain account to finish downloading. Certain interviewees used their multiple accounts for specific functions. One 21 year-old male has an account that he uses for formal correspondence with businesses and academic institutions, another account for email from both real-life and virtual friends, another for receiving messages from certain news groups and porn sites, and an account that he uses for correspondence with his girlfriend. He has given her the password to this account so that she can survey what he is doing, read his messages, and not feel like he is hiding anything from her. In reality, she has only been clued in to one part of his many compartmentalized identities on the Internet. The great freedom email users have to create accounts with providing only minimal personal information allow users a certain amount of anonymity. Such anonymity encourages experimentation into certain aspects of one's own identity and greater, freer self-expression. The young man described above allows certain parts of his identity to be catered to, separating these aspects into different virtual territories and effectively privatizing them from those with whom he wishes to share or not to share these aspects. Each aspect of his persona that he has separated has a corresponding virtual place, complete with a personalized eletronic address for each account. Each account is journaling and archiving his discoveries, feelings, and progress as he evolves over time. internet relay chat (irc) « IRC is a virtual meeting place where people from all over the world can meet and talk; you'll find the whole diversity of human interests, ideas, and issues here, and you'll be able to participate in group discussions on one of the many thousands of IRC channels, or just talk in private to family or friends, wherever they are in the world, » so goes a mIRC advertisement of the joys of Internet Relay Chat. 43 Internet relay chat (IRC) is different from email in two main ways : it is syncronous and multi-user. IRC does not store messages but transmits one user's typed message directly to the screens of one or more other users who are on at the same time and participating in the same channel. Created in 1988 by the Finnish Jarkko Oikarinen, this form of CMC is less widely-available and practiced today than email and news lists (usually academically-related mass email lists). To understand IRC behaviors and practices, it is important to be able to understand the framework in which users are operating when they participate in IRC. Reid has written a very clear and all-encompassing descripition that will be included here to familiarize the reader with this new form of communication. 44 IRC differs significantly from previous communication programs. Fundamental to IRC is the concept of a channel. 'Talk', 'chat' and 'voice' had no need of such a concept since only two people could communicate at one time, typing directly to each other's screen. On IRC however, where two or three hundred users is the normal population, such a system would create chaos. It was therefore necessary to devise some way of allowing users to decide whose activity they wanted to see and who they wanted to make aware of their own activity. 'Channels' were the answer. On entering the IRC program, the user is not at first able to see the activity of other connected users. To do so he must join a channel. Channels are created or joined by users issuing a command to the IRC program to join a channel. If there is already a channel of the specified name in operation, then the user is added to the list of people communicating within that channel; if such a channel does not exist, then IRC opens a new channel containing the name of the user who invoked it, who may then be joined by other users. The user can issue a command requesting a list of the users connected to IRC and which channels they are attached to. IRC keeps track of who has joined which channels, and ensures that only people within the same channel can see each others' typed messages. IRC can support an unlimited number of channels. Channels can have any name, but generally the name of the channel indicates the nature of the conversation being carried out within it.... The user who initially invokes a channel name is known an a channel operator, or 'chanop', and has certain privileges. He or she may change the mode of the channel - may instruct IRC to limit usage of the channel to a certain number of users, may limit entry to the channel to people specifically invited by him or her to join, may make the channel invisible to other users by specifying its exclusion from the list of active channels that a user may request of IRC, may kick another user off the channel, or confer chanop privileges on another user. IRC supports numerous other commands. Once a channel has been joined, everything that the user types will be by default sent to all other occupants of the channel. It is possible, however, to alter that default setting by issuing commands to direct a message to a particular user, users, channel or channels. A number of other commands - the ability to send messages to all users or to kick a user off the IRC system entirely - are reserved for IRC operators, or 'opers', the people who run and maintain the IRC network connections. Opers also have access to special commands related to the technical implementation of IRC. Rabati users tend to connect to the IRC using mIRC, one of several client programs written for Windows serving IRC written by Khalid Mardam-Bey. 45 Although web-based chat programs exist and are regularly used by Rabati users, like www.amour.fr and www.caramail.com, we will not examine them here. Their architectures are different from those of mIRC and, thus, different sorts of interactions take place within them because of their design. Most interviewees who chat use mIRC. DALnet-serving 45,000 people globally at any given time-was the preferred main server by interviewees. DALnet is one of the larger main servers ; it surpassed its smaller siblings, Efnet and Undernet, handle 15,000 and 10,000 users respectively at any given time. 46 Within DALnet, the smaller servers, liberty.dal.net and hebron.dal.net, offered the fastest, most populated, and most stable connections according to interviewees. Choosing a specific small server within DALnet avails users to be able to participate in the channels that exist on it. Certain channel names exist throughout IRC, but the number of participants in each of these channels changes because participants can seemingly only interact with those on the same small server (i.e., a user on liberty.dal.net cannot communicate with a user on glass.dal.net). The smaller server is either referred to by the city in which it is located (i.e., « hebron » for Hebron, Indiana) or by a server nick (i.e., « liberty » for Parsippany, New Jersey, or « sahara » for Fremont, California). A user does not need to connect to servers that are located geographically closest to him/her in reality. The vast majority of servers exist in the United States, Western Europe, Israel, and in Australia. Choosing a big server (i.e., DALnet or EFnet) is a matter of connection speed normally, while the important social factor is choosing the correct small server on which friends are and possible relationships are perceived to be. It appears, from observation and interviews, that most IRC users in Rabat are learning how to use IRC from their friends or siblings who are passing on their IRC practices. This is evidenced by the volume of channels that are Morocco-related (i.e., #maroc, #agadir, #rabat, #casa, etc.) which are used by Moroccans themselves and people interested in Morocco throughout the globe. Most users have been clued in by others that the greatest majority of Moroccans are on the small servers, liberty.dal.net and hebron.dal.net. Also, we can assume that Moroccan users are learning from others who are knowledgable about IRC because of the small amount of participants in Morocco-related channels that have no individualized nickname and appear as « Guest # » on the list of channel participants. (See Table 2.) Those using « Guest# » nicks are often teaching themselves how to use IRC and are alone before their computers, without someone to advise them. Thus, where Moroccan IRC users are guided in the beginning, they appear to continue to frequent in the future, creating a loose, semi-stable cyber community as witnessed in the great Moroccan populations in the Moroccan-related channels on liberty.dal.net and hebron.dal.net. community « Learning your way around IRC is a lot like learning another language, finding your way around a new town, or playing blind man's bluff. » 47 Besides learning basic commands, there exists a certain etiquette that one ought to learn if one wants to interact successfully with others in the Morocco-based channels. In Western-based channels, like #AllNiteCafe, users tend to interact in English-often asserting English-only policies in the channels-and have a rather large amount of interaction in the common-public-space that is manifested as the channel's main screen, where users are listed in a scrollable column and where the verbal interactions and information about who is entering and leaving the channel constantly change. By contrast, in Moroccan-based channels, the common-public-space screens for the channels tend to remain rather blank with the exception of the automatically evolving list of comings and goings and a small amount of random advertisements with which commerical users, floating from one channel to the next, spam the screen. My first attempts at socializing in Morocco-based channels were pitiful. I tried to apply the same etiquette rules from the Western channels and established myself on the common-public-space screen of the #casachat channel with a friendly greeting, this time speaking in French instead of English. When no one replied or wrote anything on that screen for several minutes, I received a private message from one of the channel creators. He immediately located me as a first-timer, and said that if I was interested in talking with people I needed to do it privately. People on Morocco-based channels prefer talking in private to participating in the common-public-spaces. Private messages manifest themselves in mIRC as windows separate from the common-public-space of a channel. Just as users can participant in a countless number of channels, they can do the same with private messages. Such messages can be sent to anyone on the small server at the time. All one needs to know is the nick of the person they want to chat with or click twice on their nick that is on the list of participants in the certain channel in which the user him/herself is also. Private messages are only available for two users at one time and create certain amount of private space that cannot be threatened or accessed by others. This aspect makes them the most popular way to interact with others on Moroccan-based channels. Users have total control over whom they choose to communicate with and are able to momentaneously switch from one conversation to another, from private interaction to public as well. « There is no way to interact with IRC without being a part of it. It is interaction that creates the virtual reality of channels and spaces for communication. » 48 Channels (such as the regulars-- #maroc, #casablanca, #cheers, or #AllNiteCafe-- on liberty.dal.net) are socially-made public spaces whose existence relies upon the interactions of their users. When the space is empty of users, it ceases to exist until it is re-entered. Some channels exist (like multiple Brigadoons) only at certain times, like weekends, when more people have time to be connected, as have been the recent cases of #agadir and #sale, both actual names of cities in Morocco, on liberty.dal.net. Private message interaction, however, do survive beyond membership to the channel in which users have met one another. For instance, if users meet on #maroc and begin to interact privately, they do not have to continue to interact in #maroc to continue their private conversations. Still, interactivity is what makes public and private spaces work on IRC. IRC is, today, the only place where Jones's definition of virtual settlements can occur. A virtual community's cyber-place is a « virtual settlement ». The four conditions of a virtual settlement are 1. A minimum level of interactivity, where « a number of persons who communicate with one another often over a span of time, and who are few enough so that each person is able to communicate with all the others, not at second hand, through other people, but [one to one] » ; 2. A variety of communicators, where there are more than two individuals who write their messages in the common-public-space ; 3. A minimum level of sustained membership, where members are rather stable in their participation ; and 4. A virtual common-public-space where a significant portion of a group's CMC interactivity takes place, where « social relationships [are] forged in cyberspace through repeated contact within a specified boundary or place that is symbolically delineated by topic of interest. » 49 However, in terms of the interactions that take place on Moroccan-based channels, such channels do not surfacely appear to be virtual settlements because of the seeming avoidance of the common-public-space that is fundamental to points 2 and 4 in the above description. It may be, in fact, that Jones's requirements for a virtual settlement may be Western-based because of the assumption that common-public-spaces are required for higher-level interaction to take place. It may not be taking into account the practices of public and private spaces in non-Western environments where private « inside » interactions are often more powerful and important than public « outside » ones. Certainly, as one can see today, the notion of « public » space maybe not be a utopic democratic forum but mass dispersion of information through the media. The often strong connections to certain Moroccan-based channels are founded because of a feeling of alliance with them, where people from similar real-life geographic areas can arrange themselves together in cyberspace. Do they necessarily have to interact in a channel's common-public-space for them to feel as if they are allied to the channel, connected to the virtual space of the channel ? If private relationships are forged because of belonging to a channel, they may not have been able to happen otherwise. Moroccan-based channels are frequented by regular users, their names appearing on the scrollable lists daily or weekly. They are choosing to belong to a channel but not to actively participate in its public sphere. Such interaction in public space that to Jones constitutes a « settlement » assumes a certain amount of democracy where all voices are able to be heard ; this is not the case for daily interaction in urban Moroccan life where the vast majority of public discourse comes from those situated in élite hierarchical positions. Perhaps many young urban Moroccans are simply not familiar with the notion of democratic interaction in public space because it is not available to them in reality. Perhaps even virtual public space is too chaotic and uncomfortable. Young people are choosing where they are, what they choose to consume, and with whom they choose to interact as evidenced by their appropriation of physical space in Rabat itself. It is not surprising that young people, assaulted with conflicting images and philosophies in daily life seek that specialized « inside » that has been denied to them due to the societal mutations of the past few generations. Young people, familiar with their power of choice due to their familiarity with mobility and consumerism, are practicing a deal of selectivity when it come to trying to find places where they can create a community of young people with « experiences similar » to their own. « The restlessness of young people. is shaping their needs. We don't want to relive the story of our grandparents. Before the community was a big family- which means one is limited by place. We want a community not of blood but of spirit, » said one 18 year-old male. An example of this in Rabat is the growing number of young people attracted to Agdal who live in the middle and upper middle class areas of Hay Riad, Soussi, and within Agdal itself. These young people have left their own areas to participate in, or selectively consume, an urban public space that fits into their ideals. A 21 year-old male acknowledges, When I go to the centre-ville, I just pass through. if I have something to do there, like buying something, I go but I wouldn't stay in a café there. Usually, it's Agdal-it's more lively, younger and there's less traffic than in the center. Maybe it's because that here [in Agdal], there are young people. In the center, there are some young people but they come from Salé and I don't feel at ease with people from Salé. It's education, I think, the majority of people in Salé aren't educated, or are but in a very popular manner. Most of the time, they seek out arguments. I don't want that. « The coexistence of heterogeneous elements and different levels of life make the centre-ville a place where social distinctions are not clearly displayed » and renders the space chaotic and even threatening to those who do not feel a sense of cohesion to a community or social group within it. « Meetings in the public space correspond to a sociability between 'strangers' where the exchange in uncertain and fluctuating. » 50 Young people that were interviewed craved places to go that were more secure and offered alternatives to the anonymous and "uninteresting" mix that is the centre-ville to them. They perceived Rabat to be separated in specific geographical areas most often perceived by them as « Soussi, Hay Riad, Agdal, and 'the other quarters.' » This perceived geography indicates their subconscious practice of socioeconomic spatial segregation. They know that they do not feel comfortable in areas like centre-ville but cannot fully express why. Instead, they resort to stereotypes and generally sweeping statements to explain at least surfacely the sources of their discomfort, as is the case with the interviewee who reasons that the centre-ville is not a good place to be because of the presence of the « uneducated » and « argumentative » people of Salé. In their appropriation of urban space, young people have adopted a new center of town geographically as well as socio-economically closer to their own homes. Those interviewed preferred what is referred to as « High Agdal, » or the area along avenue Fal Ould Omeir, between avenue France and place Ibn Sina. An 18 year-old male explains : Everyday, it takes me five minutes to get to the center of town. the center that I have created, that we've created. The youth has changed it from the traditional one with the grand avenue Mohammed V. That is no longer the center, no, the new one is on avenue Fal Ould Omeir-that's a Saudi Arabian prince! Before they named the street whatever because they didn't think it would be important, and now everyone knows it. The thriving physical monuments to youth culture in Agdal, McDonald's and the Macarena café, are the landmarks most commonly used amongst friends to orient one another when giving directions and the like. A quick glance at McDonald's at 5:30 on a Monday night, where thirty young people of both sexes were standing outside socializing, reminds a passerby that this is where the young people are. Sitting in one of the five cafés clustered together on the corner of avenue Fal Ould Omeir and ruelle Bou Iblane on a late Sunday afternoon, surrounded by numerous fashionably Western-dressed students and young adults, participants in this space are clearly aware that they have a community-- be it as it may a community of consumption. However, this phenomenon of Agdal as the new centre-ville for middle class youth is relative to time. If one was to pass through Agdal during the work day or late at night after the buses have stopped running, one might find it odd to note that these very centers of youth culture once again belong to the traditional keepers of public space, adult men. Perhaps, in the near future, this trend will change and move toward a greater presence of youth as the power of their consumption is realized. Those interviewed receive pocket money generally whenever they want and, in fact, it seems as if these young people are actually looking for places to spend their money. Handing over 40 dirhams for a combo meal at McDonald's (where 3 dirhams can buy a bowl of harira and bread in the medina) seems like no big deal to them. Agdal was once a sea of villas for the upper middle class. By the late Sixties, people from the area began to move to Soussi and in the direction of Hay Riad, leaving Agdal to be developed into a new sea of four story white apartment buildings whose rez-de-chausses became public commercial spaces. It has the possibility to change its image yet again as those who consider it an acceptable and respectable place to see and be seen revisit it. « The importance put on objects in Morocco translate into the birth of a society of consumption and, much more, the emergence of the individual. Free time, cultural practices, and social spaces constitute a field of experimentation, fabricating social norms for the self. » 51 It is interesting to note the construction of luxury apartments, the incidence of expensive Western clothing boutiques (i.e., Chevignon and NafNaf), the presence of Western chain restaurants (i.e., McDonald's, Pizza Hut, and Dairy Queen), and the explosion of cybercafés into the area. identity When a user enters IRC through mIRC, s/he must respond to and fill in a series of blanks (Name, Email Address, Nickname, and Alternative Nickname) before s/he can truly enter. The nickname and alternative nickname blanks are the only information needed to allow the user to become an IRC citizen. Giving one's name and email address allows them to be traced by anyone wishing to know more about them. Because IRC is largely an anonymous space, users are not very willing to provide identifying information unless it is necessary. All of the information given in these spaces stays there unless the user deletes it when s/he is finished. Most do not erase their information. I have only witnessed one instance where someone, a female in this case, actually used her real name and email address. The vast majority of observed users simply type in an unintelligible stream of letters to fill in the blanks. Furthermore, once connected to an IRC server, one can easily change one's nick in a matter of seconds. IRC, to a much greater extent than email, is a strucure in which anonymity can take place. « IRC enables people to deconstruct aspects of their own identity, and of their cultural classification, and to challenge and obscure the boundaries between some of our own most deeply felt cultural significances. » 52 Information that is usually available to us in face-to-face interactions, such as sex, approximate age, skin color, and even socio-economic status, is out of reach in IRC. Because one cannot see the speaker or obtain even minimal information, the nickname, or « nick » in IRC slang, is the critical way we introduce ourselves in IRC. One interviewee logged on to IRC, entering the nick that he has used for the past two years, « le_dragueur » (« the flirt »). He was shocked to discover that someone was using his nickname. As a rule in the IRC program, no user can have the same name as any other user currently using the system. Using a quickly-chosen and meaningless nick, he logged on to DALnet to immediately begin searching for the user who was using his name. A few weeks later, when he wrote an email to one of his virtual friends that he met on IRC, he told her, « I will be using another nick from now on. Somebody stole mine. » Bechar-Israeli explains IRC culture as being one « with a strong affinity for technology, which develops in relation to, and despite objective anonymity. It is a culture which provides freedom in abundance to engage in identity games through the use of nicknames. However, most people tend to keep to one nick and one identity for a long period of time, and to become deeply attached to it. Thus, although IRC provides its participants with the freedom to play with identities, people usually prefer the social attributes of a permanent, recognized identity. » 53 To compare Moroccan-users to Bechar-Israeli's findings on Israelis and Americans, we shall list a quick study of nicknames that was done on 24 March 2000 on the Moroccan-based channel, #maroc, on liberty.dal.net. (See Table 2.) Of the 170 users in #maroc, their nicks were classified as such : first names and variations on first names, 42.9 percent ; self-descriptors, 27.1 percent ; names of famous people, place and things, 11.2 percent ; names related to sex and love, 6.5 percent ; objects, 4.1 percent ; unknown origin, 4.1 percent ; word/sound play, 2.4 percent ; unpersonalized, 1.8 percent. Bechar-Israeli found in her study that 6.9 percent of users were using first names ; 46.2 percent were using self-descriptors ; 6.9 percent were using names of famous people, places, and things ; 1.9 percent were using names related to sex ; 12.4 percent were using names related to objects ; 10 percent were using names related to word/sound play ; and 11.2 percent were using names of unknown origin or were unpersonalized. 54 Comparing findings, one is immediately struck by the high volume of first names appearing in the Moroccan-based channel, #maroc. This could indicate a lack of playfulness on the part of Moroccan users or a desire to be recognized as being a Moroccan, Arab, Muslim, and a specific gender by other users because of their assumed familiarity with such names. One can never be sure that these first names and identifiers are actual descriptors of real-life users, however, because of the ability to create one's identity on IRC. But the sheer number of first names indicates that many users are often logging on to be attractive and recognized by others. Often they indicate their age or sex with their names to desrcibe themselves more fully. Only one user indicated his geographical wherabouts/alliances in Morocco. We can assume that the reason for this is that most users are either going to the channels that are specific to their geographical whereabouts/alliances (i.e., a Rabati going to the #rabat channel) or that the question of geographical location is cleared up almost immediately with the first private exchanges between users when each user asks « a.s.v. ? » (age, sexe, ville -- age, sex, city) to orient themselves to one another. Self-descriptors were often flirtatious and geared towards being attractive to other users. The utilization of famous people, places, and things indicates to other users one's interests and how one chooses to see oneself in IRC. Western music- and film-related words were the most popular in this category, indicating that interest in Western things is an attractive attribute. Love- and sex-related names were direct invitations to others that they were interested in some sort of romance, be it real or virtual. Object names were often symbolic and in English or French, while no Arabic words were used. Word play was a small category that one might think would have been bigger because of the playfulness of IRC. And, finally, nicks (« Guest# ») that were unpersonalized were comparatively smaller in percentage than in Bechar-Israeli's study, perhaps indicating-as before mentioned-that users tend to learn how to use IRC from others and actually want to be identifiable to some extent while on IRC. In the case of nicknames on Moroccan-based IRC channels, it appears that users are not only protective of their nicks but also using nicks that refer to parts of who they are in reality. « Chat programs deal in a form of synchronous communication that defies conventional understandings of the difference between spoken and written language. » 55 Reid explains that until the development of the IRC structure, physical contact was assumed to be a necessary part of meaningful human communication. (We shall ignore here official business and other kinds of emotionally-distant situations in which meaningful communication does not require physical contact.) Even alternative modes of communication, like letters and telephone calls, were and remain largely between people who have physically met each other before. With IRC and computer-mediated communication (CMC), this is no longer the case. The virtual world is a room of mirrors and one can never be sure if the reflections of people they see within them are distorted or real. Innately, our understanding of what is real is connected to our senses. For some people, escaping the physical form plays a fundamental role in their attraction to virtual reality. A few times a week, a crippled, unmarried young woman in her mid-twenties comes to a cyber in Agdal, a more upscale area of Rabat popular for young middle- and upper-middle class young people « to be seen. » She cannot walk without her crutches and, even with them, she has a considerable amount of difficulty moving. Her clothing smells of urine, as if she is unable to wash herself properly and is not being taken care of by her family. She chats on IRC for one to three hours each time she comes. She can entirely escape being judged by her physical form by participating in a structure of communication in which she can be entirely anonymous or create an identity corresponding to who she wants to be, because « in cyberspace, you are a figure of your own creation, existing nowhere and everywhere. Unrestrained by the physical body, 'movement' becomes both unnecessary and undesirable for participation and interaction. » 56 This young woman and other handicapped Moroccans, without the aid of anti-prejudice legislation that helps the physically-challenged in the United States, likely deals with unfair treatment daily because she is in Morocco. It is only in the virtual realm that she can transcend that which is held up against her. Though be it escapism, she is able to experience a « virtual social mobility » that would never be available to her otherwise. 57 amour virtuelle Like the young woman's ability to escape her physical disabilities and render them pointless in cyberspace, young people are interacting freely in cyberspace in ways that real-life society disables them. This manifests itself most strongly in the arena of love and sex for young people. « Morocco's peculiarity is that the vast majority of internauts connect only for finding amorous relationships.» 58 This should come as no real surprise when, in Moroccan society today, girls (benet) are expected to remain virgins until they get married. A traditional Muslim marriage was not complete until the night of consommation where the groom deflowered the bride and proof of her virginity was displayed to all the next morning as a bloody rag. Although this practice today in Morocco is almost entirely reserved for rural people, a young wife who is discovered to not have been a virgin by her husband before her wedding night can still legally be immediately repudiated by him. For males, this is not at all the case. Young men are socially pressured by their peers to become sexually experienced in order to become « real » men. Society at large silently accepts this reality, claiming that young men are naturally sexually-charged beings that need to satisfy themselves somehow. Consider the case of a female teenager who has been dating her boyfriend of the same age for a couple of years. Nothing beyond hand holding and kissing has happened between them. The girl fears a situation where her boyfriend will ask her to have sex with him. If she does not, he might be angry. If she does, then she is « ruined » and he may leave her because she was not strong enough morally to hold out until marriage. When she discovers that her boyfriend has been going to a prostitute regularly for the past year, she does not feel betrayed but elated that he cares for her and has enough respect for her so as to not pressure her into having sex. Of the males interviewed, all of whom had sexual experiences, only one did not have his first sexual experience with a prostitute. Many are comfortable with having sex with girls before marriage but expect that their future wives be virgins. They differentiate good or serious girlfriends from girls they find just to have sexual relations with and then quickly abandon-one type is marriage material, the other is primarily perceived as a prostitute. In urban middle- and upper-class Moroccan society, it appears that sexual practices are slowly changing. Shows of physical affection, like hand-holding, are becoming more common practices in the streets. Bennani-Chraibi found that 65.3 percent of urban females had had some sort of non-penetrative sexual relationship by the time they were 19 years old and that 38.6 percent had had sex by the time they were 21. 59 This figure is somewhat surprising, given the intense societal stigma about feminine sexual purity. It indicates that while young women are choosing to be somewhat sexual, they remain obsessed about the preservation of their hymen-the physical symbol of innocence. Young women are caught between wanting to have sexual experiences and wanting to respect their family and their religion. Finding private space for intimate encounters is a big problem for young people when they decide to have sexual experiences. They cannot be with one another in either of their homes and it is practically impossible to get a hotel room for young Moroccans without proof of marriage. The alternative is using a friends' houses while their parents are not at home, the friend whose house it is guards the couple from « intruders » into their encounter. Friends tend to help each other out in this arena. In fact, the desire for private space is so strong that some young men interviewed are planning on renting an apartment together, sharing all the costs equally, so that they might be able to have a place to bring girls back. All of them are financially dependent on their parents and have no other ways to finance this venture-- but they are seriously planning to do it as soon as they can. What it all boils down to is the fact that the great confusions about sexual expression is heightened by the rising age of young people living at home until they get married. Moving out of the family space would allow them to experiment in this realm. The anonymous qualities of cyberspace allow meetings and situations to exist for young people of both sexes that would never be able to take place in their homes or neighborhoods. « Adolescents coming to terms with their sexuality in the 'real world' find that the freedom of 'virtuality' allows them to safely engage in sexual experimentation, » such as flirting, gender role reversals, and so-called, « compu-sex. » 60 Mourad, a 21 year-old Rabati, was rather shy around girls. He had never had a girlfriend and hated hearing his friends' stories about their encounters with girls. Two Ramadans ago, he was chatting on Internet Relay Chat with people from throughout the world in a chatroom called, #maroc. There he, nicknamed « l_amoureux, » met « bambina, » a 19 year-old girl in Lebanon. At first their conversations were playful flirtations ; then it got much more serious. At one point, they were chatting everyday on the Internet Relay Chat and he was spending all of his pocket money on their cyber-dates. Each one confided in one another and a great intimacy developed despite not knowing each other in real physical life. When I first met him six months ago, they had been cyber-dating for almost a year. Their cyber-dates were pre-arranged times that they would meet on a specific channel on IRC and create a private discussion room. They talked about the events of their daily lives, debated about philosophical issues, dreamed of their future together, and even fantasized about making love to one another. They shared everything. She « met » his brother and his close friends on the IRC, growing friendly and familiar with members of his real life. At one point in our discussion, he sincerely referred to her as « the other half of his being » and claimed that no one could understand him as well as she did. « Safety of anonymity can 'reduce self-consciousness and promote intimacy' between people who might not otherwise have had the chance to become close. » 61 Mourad noted that he had always been more able to better express himself in written form than face-to-face, it was only then that themes and pieces of his daily life began to make sense and were allowed to be verbalized. Talking with « bambina » offered him a certain amount of free expression that was unavailable in real life. Turkle asks a poignant question in « Life on the Screen, » when she asks, « Is the real self always the naturally occuring one ? » 62 When the distinctions between the real and virtual become hazy, « do we gain a better understanding of our real emotions, which can't be switched off so easily, and which we may not even be able to describe ? » 63 A few weeks after our first discussion, his mood had entirely changed. He was brooding and pensive. They had been exchanging phone calls for a long time, and he had regularly been scanning in photos to send to her. However, she refused to send a photo of herself. One day, after months of him begging her to do so, she sent one. The photo portrayed a beautiful girl, almost model-like. He was elated ! He was in love with a not only mentally but physically beautiful girl ! A few days later she wrote him a short message, explaining that she had lied-the photograph was not her. She simply did not feel comfortable sending a photo of herself. He was deeply hurt by this identity game she played with him and, as a result, he cut communication with her entirely for a month or so. Meanwhile, he met a girl in real life and began to date her, claiming that he was ready to give up virtual romance for good in favor for the real thing. Meeting a real-life girl and being disgusted with the identity games, he broke up with « bambina. » However, after some reflection on the importance of her in his life, he recommenced a friendship with « bambina » weeks later because their friendship meant so much to him. To this very day, he has often expressed the extreme frustration about not knowing what she looks like. In July, he will be able to find out. She will be visiting Morocco for three weeks this summer. and staying with her new cyber-boyfriend who lives in Casablanca. being female Increasingly, Moroccan women are going out into the workforce, into universities, travelling abroad, and establishing themselves into what was-even a generation ago-cultural space reserve for men. Many traditional rules have been broken and new ones are in the making. But while these new rules are evolving, there exists a gray area for people today in relation to gender issues. Indeed, one could note a strong similarity between the struggle of women and the struggle of youth to be recognized as important players in Moroccan society. Certainly, identity crises of young women in this society ought no be surprising when women are bombarded by so many double standards practiced daily in the homes, workplaces and streets surrounding them. Despite the push for girls to be educated in schools, their experiential education in the classroom of the outside world is often quite limited. Girls are, more often than their male counterparts, restricted to the home and nearby familiar surroundings from very early childhood right up through the time they get married out of fear that they and their honor [translated as virginity] will be threatened by strangers. Familial and societal institutions instill fear into girls from the very beginning that the outside world is looming with threats that they themselves cannot control. Kanes-Weisman notes that this encourages fear on the girls' behalves of travelling alone and of unfamiliar places. « Women are taught to occupy but not control space. » 64 Without a sense that they can control their interactions, women are rendered as visitors to public space and permeable to others' whims. This manifests itself in many ways. Although women are participants in public space, their participation is limited. While women are increasingly present in the work and school environments and even in the streets to more limited extent, they are oddly absent from areas of leisure time activities in public space, like the beach or cafés. Oftentimes, it is women themselves who choose to avoid these places because of associations they make with them, thanks to popular societal perceptions. A woman can be perceived as something she is not because of the anonymity of public space. « In the streets, » one interviewee says, « there are prostitutes and then there are others. sometimes all women look the same walking out of a restaurant at 10:00 pm. » In a society in which sexuality is one of the most sacred, private, and restricted manners of expression, the vast majority of Muslim women perceive the preservation and impermeability of it to be one of their greatest sources of pride. The avoidance of places in which they perceive their sexuality [pride] to be threatened or in question makes a great deal of sense when seen through this lens. « Armed with society's tacit approval, men can turn allegedly public streets into a private male jungle where women are excluded or. stalked like the tame pheasants who are hand-raised and then turned loose for hunters to shoot, an activity called sport. » 65 Because of the responsibility to guard one's sexual honor lies in the hands of women, men are free of the responsibility themselves. Traditional seclusion and covering practices by Moroccan as well as a great deal of Muslim women elsewhere were enforced upon women to protect themselves from the eyes of strange men but also to protect strange men from the perpetual seduction of womanly ways. The traditional segregation of private space as feminine and public space as masculine allowed bother communities to escape the fear and supposed temptation of one another. But in these past couple of generations as the barriers segregating space have lessened, women emerge into the space long reserved for men. Men, shaken perhaps by the new element, try to re-establish « their » territory from time to time. This re-establishment has most commonly taken the form of harassment in the streets, where men physically follow, make comments or sounds, and stare at the « gazelles » that they are passively or actively pursuing. « They are reminded that they are women and deserve compliments, » says one 23-year-old male. In fact, this kind of behavior reminds women that they are unable to control their own privacy in public space are often left feeling startled and humiliated. Men look at women and women watch themselves getting looked at. 66 Women, however, are finding ways to create their personal boundaries when they enter into public space. The adoption of the hijeb (head scarf which covers the hair and shows only the face) by some women is a very illustrative case. Women today have adopted it as a symbolic visual proclamation of their morals as well as a barrier to the disrespect they have found in their participation in public space. Indeed, ever man with whom I spoke felt that it was wrong to flirt with a woman wearing hijeb in the street. « She has made the choice not to participate, » says the same 23 years old man. Thus, the presence of mobile private space guarded by physical barriers functions despite its defensive foundation. The practice of public space by women is changing the way in which they perceive their environments and themselves. The creation and re-appropriation of public spaces that correspond to and affirm women's changing practices are, even if very slightly, in the works. Davis-Taieb notes that the McDonald's restaurants in Casablanca and Rabat are becoming frequent hang-outs for women, young and single or married with children. 67 Because of the "familial" nature of the restaurant with play areas for children and staff that is trained to be friendly, women feel comfortable spending time there with their children, alone or with friends. She counted more women than men in the Agdal restaurant-a situation unheard of in any other kind of public leisure-time establishment besides the cyber, interestingly enough. Consuming a bite of American McCulture also offers the experience of an entirely different system of ordering and eating from that of a traditional Moroccan setting or establishment, as well as to experience a place that is associated with Western ideals and values. In this case, a new public institution, McDonald's, offered an alternative to existing public spaces in architecture, food and philosophy. Women have been able to find comfort and a sense of security here that they have not been able to find in pre-exisiting institutions. Young Moroccan women are similarly able to experience a type of freedom never before possible when participating in cyberspace. « In contemporary reality, even if females in our society are starting to make an important place for themselves in public space, in school, and in work environments, gender mixity is still not a wide-spread phenomenon. The Internet plays a role in hazing the separation between men and women. » 68 In cyberspace, women have unchallenged freedom to explore what they wish and when they wish to do so. They effectively are able to escape a huge amount of societal oppression in cyberspace. A woman is equal in cyberspace, able to have equal access to information and interactions in cyberspace as any other user. Virtual spaces are places of resistance to the many forms of alienation and to the silences that are imposed upon women daily in the country. Such power should not be underestimated. A recent article in L'Economiste, a Moroccan weekly, discussed new opportunities available to women because of the Internet. Two million women, or 32 percent, of the French Internet population are women, an inspiring figure to many Moroccan women who look to France as a significant model to aspire to. « The Internet brings with it a dimension of community, favoring exchanges between women and allowing direct responses to their questions. » 69 Moroccan women, who are permanent minors according to Moroccan law, are unable to apply for visas without the consent of their male guardians. Women on the Internet are experienceing a trans-national, trans-societal, trans-gendered space that allows them to make connections and relationships that might never be available to them otherwise. mutations of language The official State language is classical Qur'anic Arabic, or Fus'ha. Despite a camapign of Arabization started in the late 1980s, the majority of official government discourse continues to be either in French or in both French and fus'ha. Governmental functionaries have been retrained in Fus'ha so that they may entirely switch over to the langauge of the state in the workplace. The Moroccan baccalaureate exam was modified in 1988 to place more emphasis on the apprehension of Fus'ha by students and most classes in public schools are taught solely in this language. An uninitiated observer might conclude that this seems entirely reasonable because the first language of most Moroccans is Arabic. well, not entirely. Every Arab country, indeed every region, has its own dialect of Arabic. Fus'ha is the holy language of the Qur'an, and its can be likened to Shakespearean English for Anglophones. The television news broadcasts, weekly sermons in the mosque, and all print media are in Fus'ha. Although media in Fus'ha exists, only a percentage of it is really understood by normal Moroccans that have not gone to a Qur'anic school or been specifically trained in the holy language. Despite every Muslim's familiarity with the Qur'anic text and, thus, with classical Arabic, they speak dialects derived from the language that are often mixed with the earlier languages of the people that had originally lived in the region before the Arabs came and converted people to Islam. Such is the case in Morocco where darija, the Moroccan dialect, is a regionalization of Arabic that has been blended with words of Berber, French, and Spanish origins over time. Darija is not a language that can be easily learned through memorizing grammatical rules but is a constantly evolving language that varies from city to city. Every country has its own dialect ; the most recognized dialects of the Arab world are those of Egypt and Lebanon, sources of the majority of popular films, music, and television shows in the Arab world. Moroccans can often understand these dialects because of the frequency in which they are exposed to them, but it would be very rare for Egyptians or Lebanese to be able at all to understand Moroccan darija. If two Arabs from different countries meet one another, most often they will resort to speaking with one another in the language of their colonizer, French or English. Such is the extreme case of two Arab university students in studying in Spain, a Moroccan and a Palestinian--one whose country was colonized by the French and one by the British-who speak to one another in Spanish. Forty percent of the Moroccan population speaks one of the three main Berber dialects as their first language. 70 Those who speak one of these dialects are most often located in rural areas throughout the country or are recent immigrants to the cities. It appears rare for children of immigrants from the countryside to the city to be as fluent in their parent's native language. Berber is not only spoken but has a written script as well. In recent years, many Berberist movements throughout the country have been pressuring the government to teach Berber in schools. However, it is doubtful that this will ever happen. With the Arabization campaign underway, many people refuse to consider themselves Berber at all and choose to connect with their Arab identity even though almost all Moroccans are able to trace their ancestors back to both Berber and Arabic roots. To deny the Berber identity is often to deny one's ties to rural areas and villages, areas perceived to be « backward » by people seeking to ascend the urban socio-economic class ladder. As a result, only five minutes of daily broadcasted news time is devoted to the large population of monoingual Berber speakers who are only familiar with Fus'ha because of the Qur'an and not at all familiar with French. Morocco was colonized by the French for 44 years. Within a year of the establishment of the Protectorate in 1912, all official governmental, social, and juridical business was conducted in the language of the colonizer. Schools taught exclusively in French and observed the dominating coutnry's system of education. Forty-six years after the end of the Protectorate, the importance of the French language has not dissipated despite efforts by Arabists. French language instruction begins in the third year of public school for children, and ability in the language is tested in the baccalaureate exam that terminates high school for Moroccans. 71 However, all other subjects in school besides French and the three-year foreign language requirement are taught in Fus'ha. Unless a student regularly has people with whom to practice French, his/her ability in the language often goes into decline despite the ample amount of French that can be heard on television, on the radio, in the printed media, and accessed by the Internet. Although most subjects are taught in Fus'ha in public school, students wishing to enter university must be prepared to study almost entirely in French. An example of this are fourth year economics students who study only one of their five subject areas in Fus'ha, the other four are in French. In 1980, 26.6 percent of the population was French-speaking. 72 This population is almost entirely urban. Utilization of the French language is largely a practice of the socioeconomically priviledged in Moroccan society. As explained above, those who daily use French are either the French-educated elite, those who have reached the level of university education, or those in frequent direct or indirect contact with other Francophone populations or sources. This translates almost exclusively into the educated middle and upper-middle classes. Naturally, French-speaking Moroccans have an advantage because they are enabled to communicate and participate in a bigger linguistic community that spans the globe. The three-year foreign language requirement in Moroccan public high schools avails students to choose English, Spanish, or German. In recent years, English has not surprisingly been by far the most popular language because of its being a lingua franca of business and technology throughout the world. Those with monetary means wishing to ameliorate their language skills can go to the American Language Centers available in every major city in Morocco for classes. Recently, certain governmental Ministries have begun to pay half of the course cost for children of governmental functionaries, indicating that knowledge of English is recognized as a need to be able to participate in the promised global future. Spanish is to a lesser extent practiced by Moroccans but nevertheless existant, especially in Northern Morocco as it once belonged to Spain and is in such close geographical proximity to it. Those who take Spanish in school are often preparing themselves to be able to begin their university education in Spain. Language ability is largely individualized. It is based upon one's age, wealth, family origins, geographical location, level of education, and plans for the future. As Bennani-Chraibi notes, even « a family is far from being culturally or socially homogenous. » 73 A young, university-educated urban female may peruse the Internet in English, study in French, read the newspaper in Fus'ha, watch an Egyptian soap-opera on television, speak with her friends and parents in darija, and switch to Berber with her grandparents all in the course of a day. Language practices in Morocco rapidly adapt to certain people, spaces, and situations. In daily conversation with someone on the street, one can move effortlessly from one language to another or blend words from perhaps three languages to express oneself most optimally. Many Moroccans pride themselves on their capacity to learn new languages in relative ease. Multilingualism is a way of life in Morocco, a part of its great cultural pastiche. Despite the growing number of Internet users who speak their own native languages throughout the world, English, Spanish, French, Japanese, and German remain the most popular languages used, forcing a large amount of global users to revert to the languages of their colonizers or to learn entirely new languages. Apply the multilingualism of young Moroccans to the Internet today and we are able to see that this population, already daily bathed in multiple languages, has been able to adapt their multilingual abilities rather quickly to this new technology. Moroccan users are reading, writing, and chatting in French, English, Spanish, and-- to a lesser extent-in Arabic. Despite being able to physically have access to a site, those without the knowledge of the site's language are effectively excluded. Should one language prevail in cyberspace or should places in cyberspace become multilingual ? Global Reach, an Internet marketing company that surveys global Internet usage, published on-line figures about who was accessing the Internet and in what language. They claim that 10.9 million people world-wide access the Internet in French (only 3.9 percent of the Internet population), however, thay said, « We will not count the French-speaking users in Africa, although there are a good 7 to 10 million Africans who speak French there. Internet access is simply not readily available in most African countries. » 74 Indeed, this is currently the case ; but ignoring a developing user population in statistics only makes this population more invisible in the eyes of developers of the Internet who are creating telecommunications architecture that will thus inherently not respond to all of its users. Global Reach refers to a survey by DIT Net that counted 945,000 Internet users in the Arab world, to which Morocco with its 30,000 users belongs in this study. Egypt had 207,000 users, the United Arab Emirates 204,000, Lebanon 132,000, Saudi Arabia 113,000, Kuwait 63,000, Oman 40,000, Bahrain 33,000, Qatar 28,000, Tunisia 15,000, and the Yemen 6000. Only 0.11 percent of the Arab world is on-line. 75 Because of the lack of widely-available Arabic software and the relatively small number of people who natively speak the language in the world, it appears that most Arab Internet users tend to access the Internet in the language of their former colonizers, namely in English and French. Computers that are « Arabic-enabled » are starting to be more wide-spread in cybercafés throughout Rabat. However, it appears that the system software and hardware (dual-script keyboards) are most often used for word processing and rarely for material on the Internet. Although a great amout of French-language sites exist, Moroccans who are able to speak in English have the easiest time accessing information. English is the lingua franca of the Internet. It is not only the language most used on the World Wide Web but it is the language used for most software, like IRC. IRC's terminology and commands are all in English. Moroccan users are left to se débrouiller with what knowledge of English they have or to play around with IRC until they are able to connect specific English words to the functions they signify. The government is beginning to realize just how powerful knowledge of the English language is in the global sphere. One recent effort comes from the Ministry of Finance in Rabat who has offered to its employees an incentive to get their children to learn English ; they will pay one-half the cost of tuition for English lessons at the American Language Center or at the British Council located within the city. Knowledge of English is believed to ensure that young Moroccans will have a place in the future, enabling them to interact in the global setting of tomorrow. Moroccan darija reflects such trends with the adoption of English words into daily vocabularies when discussing technology, business, and aspects of globalized popular culture. Furthermore, email and IRC have engendered a new linguistic genre, combining written and oral aspects of language. Verbal interactions in cyberspace are ones of « linguistic virtuosity on the one hand, and of contempt for the rules of language on the other. » 76 Lower-case letters and shorthand are commonly used, languages are mixed , and punctuation rules are thrown to the wind. In the realm of French expression, pourquoi becomes pkoi, qu'est-ce que c'est becomes qsq, and tout simply becomes tt. Written words are shortened to make conversation faster. Confusingly-spelled words (where words which are not confusingly-spelled are the exception in French) become simplified, often written as they are actually spoken. The Academie française, in this realm, has no control over the evolution of the French lanuage. Although the Arabic script itself may not be used or available, only hinders people slightly from using their native language when writing emails and chatting. They simply write it in the Roman alphabet. This process of changing scripts is a somewhat labor intensive one, so Arabic often finds itself used in religiously- and culturally-imbued traditional greetings while chatting or in email openings and closings instead of being the main language of communication. The use of Arabic can become a novelty in some cases, allowing people to play word games in a relatively exclusive language almost only understood by other Moroccans. Take the case of a subject whose email is anahouwa@soandso.com , literally « I am him at so-and-so.com» in techno-Arabic. To the uninitiated, his email address is a series of letters without significance. To a select group of others with a similar linguistic background, he is showing his wittiness. Oral and written communication is affected in both virtual and real life, and will constantly evolve. Young Moroccans already familiar with multilingualism will no doubt adapt very quickly to linguistic changes and will probably play a part in making that evolution happen. the cyber : a link between the real and the virtual Hargraves, in Culture Shock: Morocco, listed participation in the « café society » of Morocco as one of the finest leisure time activities in which to partake. He explained that while Moroccan men like to go alone or with friends, women do not go to cafés. Although, he notes, foreign women can « fortunately » enjoy this « pleasurable » activity as long as they are prepared to deal with harassment while they are in the cafés. 77 Traditional cafés are dotted with old men who orient themselves towards the street and sit for hours, nursing their singular drink, passively watching the action going on in front of them. The popular perception of the café, inspired by the centuries-old French model, is an intellectual refuge and community space for creativity, inspiration, and discussion. Although the architectural model is French, Moroccan cafés do not have this idyllic atmosphere. Indeed, traditional Moroccan café-goers rarely even speak to one another outside of daily pleasantries, and going with friends does not mean that any kind of sharing occurs. The traditional café legitimizes the presence of a man in public space. In effect, buying a drink is the equivalent of buying a ticket to watch the street in a space in which it is respectable for men to be as often as they please. Becoming a regular at a café and familiarizing oneself with the waiter and other clientele is a way in which men actually create a comfortable yet public second home. Being at a café is a way in which practitioners of the space can legitimize their idleness by being somewhere. People tend to perceive men who practice the traditional café as representing the problems in their country, unemployment and laziness. 78 « The person who goes to a traditional café is one who has no real sense of time, he just has a desire to watch people, very passive. He is watching others move and absorbing their activity. I feel that is a very negative image, » says one 18 year old male interviewee. According to those interviewed, the traditional café is dépassé. Most educated, middle-class young people will physically avoid even being near cafés like those described above out of discomfort with the way space is practiced there. Some interviewees feel trapped by the traditional attitudes associated with the institution. Fortunately, some cafés are opening up that correspond to the level of comfort and interaction they desire. An example of this is L'Entr'acte in the « Café Row » of Agdal, an area where more than 20 cafés fill a few blocks of space. There is no outside seating. The windows are protected from views of the street, and instead the windows open out onto a pedestrian walkway around which are situated other cafés and bouquinistes. The seating is a variety of comfortable chairs and sofas arranged around one another to encourage intimate social interaction in a respectable setting. Waiters are younger than the average found in other cafés. The clientele is young and upper middle class, at whose pockets the prices on the menu reflect. The development of cafés such as this is encouraging to the many young people like those who flock to L'Entr'acte. However, the development feels slow to those who continue to feel unsatisfied. A recent addition to the entertainment scene in Rabat has been the opening of Rock Legend, a Moroccan-owned spin-off of the Hard Rock Café. The place itself is a visual mix of a night-club and the McDonald's down the street. Every night of the week, there is some sort of musical entertainment to be found. The idea for the place is wonderful : live entertainment geared towards a young crowd and inexpensive food. .However, there is a catch-instead of offering free entertainment to customers, they charge 50 Dh (5 USD) for watching. this price is largely out of reach to young people to do even once a week. In effect, the place-so promising an idea-is failing because of their refusal to lower prices for the entertainment. There are few socially-legitimate public places for young people to meet one another, unless they pay the high price of admission for participation. An 18 year-old interviewee proclaimed several times throughout his interview that there was "just no place to go!" He avoids traditional spaces because of the associations he makes with them and is frustrated that he must create things to do, « We look for places where we can stay for longer than a few minutes and buy things, turn our heads and see people we know. I tell myself that I don't know all of Rabat, that maybe there exists an imaginary world here, but I don't know where it might be. [His best friend, 19, interjects, "The Internet."] So, every Saturday, I go to McDonald's and hope that something new opens up.» Cyber (pronounced si-berre) is a general term that signifies the variety of cyber cafés, clubs, and spaces that are encompassed by the term. The only requirement for a place to be a cyber is for it to have computers available for use by a paying public or a subscribed group. Unlike the cybercafé phenomenon in the United States and other developed countries whose populations have ample computer access, a Moroccan cyber does not necessarily need to serve drinks and food to attract clientele. The cyber may be partnered with a téléboutique or book store, have a café or snack bar, or be a one-room physical component of an Internet provider. Moroccans go to the cyber first and foremost because they do not have Internet and/or word-processing access at home, work, or school. Because information accessed on the Internet is the same everywhere, people are not limited to one certain cyber. Those who come from certain areas of Rabat, like Souissi, are financially more able to have home access to the Internet than those coming from other parts of the city. Although home access prices are decreasing steadily, they still remain out of reach for many. Cybers are popping up throughout the city, but there are certain areas with a much higher volume of cybers, as is the case of the Agdal region that is-not surprisingly-located centrally between the middle- to lower-middle class quartiers populaires and the residential areas and suburbs of the middle- and upper-middle to élite classes. While the élite and upper-middle classes likely have computers at home, one finds that their middle-school and high-school aged children will displace themselves to Agdal to be in cybers to play games spanning the local computer network with their friends. Others who access the Internet at cybers are in a middle-class range and come from all different parts of town to the cybers that they have chosen. Choosing a cyber is often first and foremost economically-based : where is the least expensive and fastest, highest quality access ? Cybers are often used by people who do not live nearby the establishments. People may displace themselves with a half-hour bus ride each way to get to their cyber. Many places will have specials, where a month of access is significantly cheaper than normal, where mornings are free to those with subscriptions, etc. Users are typically very eager to change from one cyber to another when they see that a better price exists, correlating with a strong cultural desire to always get the best price when buying something. In the course of a day, several daily discussions can revolve around asking one another about their skills of consumption : asking a friend how much he paid for a pair of Italian shoes, how difficult the barganing process was for a qaftan at a hanoot in the old medina, how low a man at the market who was buying his sheep for Eid al-Kebir got the middle man's offering price before he finally bought the animal, etc. Getting access to the Internet is no different. Because of this common exchange of information and notification of new offers, if a good deal exists it is likely that young Moroccans will go for it. However, this does not mean that there are not regulars at cybers. At a very frequented cyber in Agdal, regulars run into each other constantly, often knowing one another by first name and always shaking hands or exchanging kisses each time. Regulars also tend to become friends of the workers at the cybers who are liberal with their friends and often give free access time « on the house. » They tend to have more and more priviledges over time, being allowed to use certain controlled equipment (i.e., scanners and printers) themselves. Accessing the Internet in a cyber is not always a solitary endeavor. Imagining a room full of computers connected to the Web, one might think that there would be one person per computer absorbed in the activity on the screen. However, this is not the case in Rabat. Often users will share a computer with one or two friends, typically of the same sex while mixed-gender groups also do the same albeit more rarely. They enter IRC and all chat together on the keyboard that is rearranged to be in a more central location for several hands wishing to type. They talk, laugh, and exclaim different commentary to one another about what is unfolding on the screen. When this kind of group activity happens, it is often quite loud and festive. It is as if groups are watching television or playing a video game but at the same time developing the story right then and there. Its interactivity makes it infinitely more humorous and exciting than watching television, however. If they are not using IRC, each user might take a turn to check his/her email or coach one another about computer use or helping each other navigate for certain sites. More rarely observed, users may be doing research together for a school project and surfing the Web for information. One of the reasons for sharing the Internet experience is because because they only have to pay for one computer not as two or more separate users. Accessing the Internet with others renders it a playful and unserious novel social event, done from time to time, and as a supplement to daily life not instead of participation with daily life. Clearly, the Internet is not always accessed by groups of users simultaneously. From observations, about 3/5 of Internet users at CyberInfo, an extremely popular and almost always full cyber in Agdal, access the Internet alone. They may, however, not come to the cyber alone but in a group of friends, each of whom takes a place before a computer and checks email, surfs sites, and chats on IRC simultaneously. Friends coming to the cyber will arrange themselves nearby one another and discuss what they are seeing or with whom they are chatting while they are engaged with the activity on their screens. Their level of virtual anonymous interaction is balanced out by real interaction with physically-present friends. Such activity again sponsors a deal of playfulness between the real and virtual spaces in which users are interacting with one another. Such is the case of one interviewee who went to the cyber one day with two of his friends. Each sat before a computer and began to engage in activity on their screens, each one accessing IRC. The interviewee, Tariq, peered over his shoulder to see what nick his friend, Ali, was using. Tariq changed his own nick to a feminine one and began to virtually flirt with Ali. Ali was very responsive to « her » overtures and he began to get very involved in trying to seduce « her, » calling out to his friends that he had found a real woman on IRC. The « girl » told Ali that she wanted to see him. They arranged to meet at McDonald's in a half an hour. « She » said that she would be wearing a red dress. When Ali left for the date, Tariq clued his friend in on the situation. They left the cyber and walked to the McDonald's in Agdal, not far from the cyber, and there stood Ali, waiting for his cyber-queen. Little did he know that when Tariq arrived, so did « she. » Tariq never tole Ali what happened and the joke has remained one of his favorites to tell with the other friend that went with the to the cyber. Identity games are not restricted to the anonymity of cyberspace but easily shift to reality in practice thanks to cybers. Those who go to the Internet alone do so more frequently than those who go in groups and tend to take the experience more seriously, often having connections and friendships online that mean something to them. One interviewee explained that he never goes out alone except when he goes to a cyber. It is his own personal time to explore anything that interests him and he does not have to share with others. Such practice allows individuals to get much more involved with what they are doing in cyberspace in comparison to when they are with others in the cybers. The whole notion of « alone time » is a relatively new one in Morocco. Oftentimes, if someone is alone, s/he is perceived to be mad or suspicious. However, the action of going to a cyber alone is not perceived as being odd because of the interactivity that can be found in cyberspace. Activity in a cyber is caught between the borders of real space and cyberspace. The cyber itself is a harbor for information and interaction that can be found no where else. It is the dominated domain of young people in a society where young people have no other place to enjoy themselves except out on the streets and in front of their television sets. The rare person entering a cyber thatis over thirty years old is a novelty. In this space, popular young music is played loudly for all customers to hear, expression is relaxed, and chairs and keyboards get manipulated without asking to get better access to what is found in cyberspace. Young people who come to the cyber infuse the place with a unique mixture of of the Maghreb and a global culture, where societal rules are bent and a balance between conflicting tensions might be found. a new year The NewYear's Eve of 2000 was not a very exciting event in Rabat for most people. For Moroccans who follow the Muslim calendar for religious purposes and the Christian one for business and academic ones, the year could be 1378 or 2000-it did not matter all that much. The Y2K issue, referred to in Morocco as « La Bogue, » was no big deal because not many people have computers. Y2K only created a curiosity for the Moroccan public who was fascinated by the great panic that the Western world seemed to be struck by. A cyber in Agdal, Interplanète, held a Y2K party for anyone interested in paying 60 Dh (6 USD) for all-night Internet access-that is, if no problems were to arise at midnight that would disturb the system. And no problems did arise in the end. Perhaps more important than the fact that it was New Year's Eve was the fact that it was a night during Ramadan, the sacred month of fasting for Muslims. Fasting takes place from sunrise to sundown. During the day, Muslims must avoid food, drink, sexual thoughts and actions, as well as behaviors that may hurt or threaten others. The entire month is one of contemplation of Allah, and interactions between people become a great deal more respectful than normal because this is the month of pentinence. Images of sexual behavior are to be avoided during the day, and young people will turn off the television, avert their eyes, or fast-forward films to avoid seeing things that are not supposed to be seen during the day. Although the days are strict and sometimes difficult to get through, the night are festive times characterized by a great amount of social activity in public space. Bus schedules are changed, lengthened for people's more nocturnal behaviors during this times and cafés and special book markets are packed with people until midnight almost every night. Ramadan changes social behaviors and relaxes social rules. Certainly, if the New Year was not during Ramadan, the event at Interplanète would not have been as popular as it was. A group of ten young Moroccans and I showed up at Interplanète about ten minutes before midnight. They had spent the last two hours debating about what they were going to do for the evening. My plan being the only solid one out of all of them, they all chose to join me. We walked in the door right at midnight and exclaimed a Joyeuse Nouvelle Année ! to everyone in the cyber. The place was already full of people at computer posts, sitting on the high bar stools characteristic of this cyber. A few minutes later, employees gathered everyone around a long table decked out with celebratory cakes and finger foods in the café part of the establishment. Everyone grabbed their food and practically ran to grab a computer post and install themselves accordingly. For the first three hours, everyone was engaged with checking their email, connecting to IRC, sending electronic greeting cards to their friends who were at the cyber with them at the time, and surfing the Internet. After they finished their normal Internet activity, their initial excitement relaxed, and the first round of finger foods had been finished, people began to wander around to look at each other's cyberspace explorations. The cyber changed from being almost silent when everyone was engaged in their own activity to being a lively, festive atmosphere only a few hours later. Some young men abandoned their computers to get their electric guitars and amplifiers out of their car. They hooked up their instruments in the video game room and played popular Western music as well as their own creations for the next few hours. Another round of finger foods were snatched up by the group at the cyber, a group entirely made of up similarly-aged young people. While at my computer post watching the screen and the activity surrounding me in real-life, I was reminded by the remarks of an interviewee : We look for places where we can stay for longer than a few minutes and buy things, turn our heads and see people we know. I tell myself that I don't know all of Rabat, that maybe there exists an imaginary world here, but I don't know where it might be. [His best friend, 19, interjects, "The Internet."] So, every Saturday, I go to McDonald's and hope that something new opens up. Something new has opened up, something combining all of the elements of his ideal place. Interesting enough, it is a cyber, a borderland between the real and the virtual. A few hours later, New York City passed into the 21st century, and we all watched the ball drop in Times Square through a RealPlayer digital version being played on someone's screen. More food was passed around before dawn when the fast would be resumed again, and a group of friends gathered around my computer post to say hello to my mother with whom I was chatting. Every one of the ten people with whom I came to Interplanète « spoke » with my mother who had not yet experienced the New Year in Colorado. Her final hours of the old millenium were spent talking with young Rabatis in their first few hours of the new millenium on the Internet that she will probably never physically meet in her life. That is the power of cyberspace, blurring time, borders, languages, and allowing people to interact when they would have never have had the chance before. notes 1. Giddens, in Marian Adolf, Pietro Paganini and Roberto Ruggiero. Cyberspace bite, http://www.kk.kau.se/mct/mct0299/virtual_space/index.html 2. David Zgodzinski. 1996, http://www.internetworld.com/print/monthly/1996/12/thirdworld.shtml 3. Marian Adolf, Pietro Paganini and Roberto Ruggiero. Cyberspace bite, media, culture, technology, http://www.kk.kau.se/mct/mct0299/virtual_space/index.html 4. Sherry Turkle. Winter 1996, http://www.prospect.org/archives/24/24turk.html 5. Elizabeth M. Reid. 1991, http://people.we.mediaone.net/elizrs/electropolis.html 6. Royaume du Maroc. July 1999: pp. 9-10 7. Mounia Bennani-Chraibi. 1995, pp.14 8. Ibid., 18 9. Ibid., 163 10. Ibid., 14 11. Ibid., 136 12. Ibid., 62 13. Ibid., 64 14. Ibid., 61 15. Ibid., 64 16. Ibid., 79 17. Ibid.,180 18. 2M, http://www.tv2m.co.ma 19. Mounia Bennani-Chraibi. 1995, pp. 40 20. Ibid., 36 21. Ministry of Communication, http://www2.mincom.gov.ma/cmrtv/fr/introduction.html 22. Susan Ossman. 1994, pp. 102 23. « Diversité des modèles culturels et attentes des jeunes, » Jul.-Dec. 1996 : 81-86. 24. « Les jeunes de Tunis et la vidéo, » Jul.-Jun. 1995-96 : 85-95. 25. Mounia Bennani-Chraibi, pp. 44 26. Ibid., 43 27. CyberAtlas. http://cyberatlas.internet.com/big_picture/geographics/article/0,1323,5911_1 66081,00.html 28. Le Matin, 23 Feb. 2000. 29. Human Rights Watch. June 1999, http://www.hrw.org/hrw/advocacy/internet/mena/morocco.htm 30. Ibid., June 1999, http://www.hrw.org/hrw/advocacy/internet/mena/int-mena.htm 31. L'Echo du Polisario (www.arso.org/echopo.htm) Website of the World Amazigh Congress Tamazgha (www.worldlynx.net/tamazgha/index_eng.html) 32. Axel Bruns. 1998, http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/village.html 33. Michael Keith and Steve Pile, 1993, pp. 6. 34. Sherman Young. http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/hetero.html 35. Leslie Kanes-Weisman. 1994, pp. 9-10. 36. J. Preece. Dec. 1999, http://www.cisp.org/imp/december_99/12_99contents.htm 37. Axel Bruns. 1998, http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/village.html 38. John Perry Barlow, in Elizabeth M. Reid, 1991, http://people.we.mediaone.net/elizrs/electropolis.html 39. For example, http://www.porno.com, http://www.sex.com, and http://www.live.sex.fr 40. Yahoo ! France (http://www.yahoo.fr ) 41. Wanadoo Morocco (http://www.wanadaoo.net.ma) 42. Association démocratique des femmes du Maroc, http://www.techno.net.ma/ai/netiquette.htm. 43. mIRC, http://www.mirc.co.uk 44. Elizabeth M Reid. 1991, http://people.we.mediaone.net/elizrs/electropolis.html 45. mIRC, http://www.mirc.co.uk 46. DALnet, http://www.dal.net 47. Badgett and Sandler, in Haya Bechar-Israeli, http://jcmc.huji.ac.il/vol1/issue2/bechar.html 48. Elizabeth M Reid. 1991, http://people.we.mediaone.net/elizrs/electropolis.html 49. Quentin Jones. 50. Françoise Navez-Bouchanine, pp. 136 and 138 51. Mounia Bennani-Chraibi. 1995, 27 52. Elizabeth M. Reid. 1991, http://people.we.mediaone.net/elizrs/electropolis.html 53. Haya Bechar-Israeli. Introduction, http://jcmc.huji.ac.il/vol1/issue2/bechar.html 54. Ibid. Table 1 : Frequency of Different Types of Nicks, http://jcmc.huji.ac.il/vol1/issue2/bechar.html 55. Elizabeth M Reid. 1991, http://people.we.mediaone.net/elizrs/electropolis.html 56. Adam Dodd. Bite 2, 1998, http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/truth.html 57. Sherry Turkle. Winter 1996, http://www.prospect.org/archives/24/24turk.html 58. Aurore Chaffangeon. Dec. 1999, pp. 50 59. Mounia Bennani-Chraibi, 1995, pp. 120 60. Elizabeth M Reid. 1991, http://people.we.mediaone.net/elizrs/electropolis.html 61. Ibid., 1991, http://people.we.mediaone.net/elizrs/electropolis.html 62. Sherry Turkle. Winter 1996, http://www.prospect.org/archives/24/24turk.html) 63. Ibid., Winter 1996, http://www.prospect.org/archives/24/24turk.html 64. Leslie Kanes-Weisman. 1994, 20 65. Ibid., 67 66. Ibid., 68 67. Hannah Davis-Taieb. 1997. 68. Aurore Chaffangeon. Dec. 1999, pp. 50 69. N.B. 15 Mar. 2000. 70. Mounia Bennani-Chraibi, 1995, pp. 29 71. Those going to the schools of the Mission française are required to take the French baccalaureate exam, not the Moroccan one. The Moroccan baccalaureate is considered to be more difficult than the French one, and is often retaken until the student can receive an adequate grade to pass the exam that is based on a 20 point system. 72. Mounia Bennani-Chraibi, 1995, pp. 29 73. Ibid., 32 74. Global Reach, 6 Mar 2000, http://www.glreach.com/globstats/index.html 75. Ibid., 6 Mar 2000. 76. Elizabeth M Reid. 1991, http://people.we.mediaone.net/elizrs/electropolis.html 77. Hargraves, 1997, 223-224 78. Hannah Davis-Taieb. 1997, pp. 217 tables Table 1. Total of Internet Users Globally (as of March 2000, http://www.nua.ie) World Total: 275.54 million 1. Canada & USA : 136.06 million 2. Europe : 71.99 million 3. Asia/Pacific : 54.90 million 4. South America : 8.79 million 5. Africa : 2.46 million 6. Middle East : 1.29 million (the category to which Morocco belongs) Table 2. Nicknames on IRC. (#maroc, liberty.dal.net, at 9.30 am on 24 March 2000 with 170 participants) First Names and Variations on Them (73/170) 42.9 percent Sali, brahim, Younes, Anouar27--, HaKeEM, majdouline, amir20, chahine, badre28, soraya33, samo21, hatim99, said28, IsAaK_, samih, BAAKRIM, houda, sarahedstrom, Susie`-`, +DIna24, adnan-40, +l7louwa, samirsmolf, Macky, ANTONIO__, clohee, said23, adil32, rabee1, chraibi23, asmaa21, ahmed99, saloua, MissDaniaa, abdou88, alessandero-, ^paola^, hamis, fatiha, khalid01, youssef30, jasmineee, kurty_, MouMouNNe, rachid32, mouna83, chakib37, hich1, youssamine, samiro17, Niennaa, Moham23, edwarda, said, ekim_, nasser27, wafae31, azzahra, Kas-H40, adle, Bahaa, sihame, hosna88, ricardo17, sihammm, amal31, [s][i][m][o], joseph20, aikas33, Kurt_, coriana, abelabbas, braam, anousse_rasse_el_fanousse Self Descriptors (46/170) 27.1 percent rabat30m, {\\psyko\\}, ZoOMGuY, genius_oc, BLACK-HEART, enfant, ContreTous, The_Artist, TheFLBoy, smi22, dally, gentille19, HommeDeCasa, canada-- m42ans, AnGeL, ReMoRsE, tres_belle, lolita_25, Rifia_Girl, LwA3R^20^, romantic_ meriem, prety, OFFShOrE, belleza, Lumineux, TLOUP, spiritgirl, ManManMan, volont, AMI_fidel, girl01, scapine, ayour, poete, coolmecs18, yellow_, darkmain, le-rebel, ARTISTEESC, ambi, megagod, simou, Machghoula, Ramo_ Names of Famous People and Things (19/170)11.2 percent DJEM, Dead-Man-Dreaming, KuRt-Co`, osmos, TRAV0LTTA, ROOOOCK, scorpion_1245, @CitiZen_X, snoop17, _LeMasque, METALLICA4EVER, karamella_2000, bon_007, Suede, m_matrix, madmax1^^, Tonny-Montana, edhunter__, clinton-you Names Related to Love and Sex (11/170)6.5 percent M^FOR^U, t_amour, Amoureuxx, play-boyX, L-Homme_A_Tout_FaiRe, Casanova2000, le-romantique, ROMIO, amoureux23, Amoureux Objects (7/170) 4.1 percent sun_40, el-cuervo, dinar, cornia, flower_moon, mirror81, LEVIS524 Unknown Origin (7/170) 4.1 percent Tifala, quenns, Tiktake, acemar, kokito, kolimor, parietale Word Play (4/170) 2.4 percent ps2copy, +wzup, mmmmmm, tactac Unpersonalized (3/170) 1.8 percent Guest04951, Guest14100, Guest44699 printed sources consulted Agger, Ben. The Decline of Discourse, New York : Falmer Press, 1990. B., N. « Gros succès des sites féminins sur Internet, » L'Economiste, 15 Mar. 2000. Bennani-Chraibi, Mounia. soumis et rebelles : les jeunes au maroc, Casablanca: Editions Le Fennec, 1995 Chaffangeon, Aurore. « Amours virtuelles sur le net, » Citadine, Dec. 1999 : 50-54 Davis-Taieb, Hannah. "'Là, où vont les femmes': Notes sur les femmes, les cafés, et les fast-foods au Maroc," Espaces publics, Paroles publiques au Maghreb et au Machrek, Davis-Taieb, Bekker, and David, ed. Lyon: Maison de l 'Orient mediterraneen, 1997. « Diversité des modèles culturels et attentes des jeunes, » Revue tunisienne de communication, no. 30, (Jul.-Dec. 1996) : 81-86. Jankari, Rachid. « Wanadoo préare une seconde offensive mais une polémique démarre, » L'Economiste, 15 Mar. 2000. « Les jeunes de Tunis et la vidéo, » Revue tunisienne de communication, no. 28-29, (Jul.-Jun. 1995-96) : 85-95. Kanes-Weisman, Leslie. "The Spatial Caste System: Design for Inequality" and "Public Architecture and Social Status," Descrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 9-66. Keith, Michael and Steve Pile. Place and the Politics of Identity, Routledge: London, 1993. MAP. « Les Cyber espace à la rescousse des bacheliers, » Le Matin, 24 Dec. 1999. Ossman, Susan. Picturing Casablanca, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Navez-Bouchanine, Francoise. "L'Habitat residentiel," Habiter la ville marocaine, Paris: L'Harmattan, 1997, pp. 215-245. Royaume du Maroc. Le Terroir, Ministry of Agriculture, (July 1999): pp. 9-10 « Tous les établissements secondaires seront équipés en matériel informatique, » Le Matin, 23 Feb. 2000. Wikan, Unni. Tomorrow, God Willing: Self-made Destinies in Cairo, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1996. on-line sources consulted (All sites accessed between 29 February-30 March 2000) Adolf, Marian, Pietro Paganini and Roberto Ruggiero. « Virtual Spaces : A Journey into the Realm of Cyber Worlds, » Cyberspace bite, media, culture, technology, www.kk.kau.se/mct/mct0299/virtual_space/index.html Arunchalam, Subbiah. « How the Internet is failing the developing world, » Information Poverty : The Story, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1999, http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/infopoverty/story.htm Association de l'Internet au Maroc. « Netiquette, » http://www.techno.net.ma/ai/netiquette.htm Association démocratique des femmes du Maroc. « Presentation of the socio-situation of Morocco, » Parallel Report of Moroccan NGOs on the Application of the Convention on Eliminating all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), Dec. 1996, http://magnet.undp.org/Docs/gov/arab/Engcedaw.htm Bechar-Israeli, Haya. (mshava@pluto.huji.ac.il) « Nicknames, Play and Identity on Internet Relay Chat, » Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Department of Communication and Journalism, http://jcmc.huji.ac.il/vol1/issue2/bechar.html Benkirane, Réda. « La métaphore du village global, » 24 Mar. 1998, http://www.archipress.org/press/village.htm ______. « L'Ere des reseaux, » from the Fondation de Bellerive (Sadrudin Aga Khan) Conference : Policing the global economy: why, how and for whom? Geneva, 23-25 Mar. 1998, http://www.archipress.org/press/reseau.htm _____. « Lies and dreams about Cyberspace, » http://www.archipress.org/press/cyberspace.htm _____. « Mégalopoles, un phénomène irréversible, » 13 June 1996, http://www.archipress.org/press/megapoles.htm Bruns, Axel. "The n-Dimensional Village: Coming to Terms with Cyberspatial Topography." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 1.4 (1998), http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/village.html Critical Art Ensemble. « Utopian Promises, Net Realities, » http://www.well.com/user/hlr/texts/utopiancrit.html CyberAtlas. « More than 30,000 Internet Users in Morocco, » http://cyberatlas.internet.com/big_picture/geographics/article/0,1323,5911_1 66081,00.html _____. « Tunisia Lacks Internet Users, » 21 Jul. 1999, http://cyberatlas.internet.com/big_picture/geographics/article/0,1323,5911_1 66071,00.html Dodd, Adam. "'The Truth Is Over There': Is There Room for Space in Postmodernity?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.4 (1998), http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/truth.html Ess, Charles. « First Looks: CATaC'98, » Proceedings Cultural Attitudes Towards Communication and Technology '98, University of Sydney, Australia, http://www.arch.usyd.edu.au/~fay/catac/ French Embassy. « Cyber Espaces, » http://www.ambafrance-ma.org/public/webmaroc.htm Global Reach, 6 Mar 2000, http://www.glreach.com/globstats/index.html Gomez,Ricardo. The Hall of Mirrors: The Internet in Latin America, Current History Journal, Feb. 2000 http://www.currenthistory.com Green, Lelia. « Relating to Internet 'audiences', » M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000) http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/ Higley, Sarah L. "Audience, Uglossia, and CONLANG: Inventing Languages on the Internet." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/languages.html Human Rights Watch. « The Internet in the Middle East and North Africa : A Cautious Start, » June 1999, http://www.hrw.org/hrw/advocacy/internet/mena/int-mena.htm ______. « Morocco, » June 1999, http://www.hrw.org/hrw/advocacy/internet/mena/morocco.htm Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Channels on the liberty.dal.net and hebron.dal.net servers : #agadair, #casablanca, #casachat, #maroc, #rabat, #sale. Jones, Quentin. « Virtual Communities, Virtual Settlements, and Cyber Archaeology : A Theoretical Outline, » Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Department of Business Administration, http://jcmc.huji.ac.il/vol3/issue3/jones.html#virtual La Vie économique, « Maroc Telecom casse les prix, » http://www.marocnet.net.ma/ve4055/p26.html Longan, Michael W. (longan@ucsu.colorado.Edu) « Geography, Community, and Cyberspace, » University of Colorado at Boulder, Department of Geography, presented at the 1997 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~longan/geogcommcyber.htm NUA. « Email Now Primary Reason People Go Online, » 1 Oct. 1999, http://www.nua.ie _____. « IEC Marketing: Moroccans Ready to Embrace Ecommerce, » 1 Dec. 1999, http://www.nua.ie _____. « Nua Ltd: Meeting Generation Y, » 19 July 1999, http://www.nua.ie _____. « One Third of All Spam is Pornographic, » 3 Nov. 1999, http://www.nua.ie _____. « SIQSS: Internet Use Has Social Side Effects, » 17 Feb. 2000, http://www.nua.ie _____. « Webchek: South African Teenagers Surge Online, » 12 Dec. 1999, http://www.nua.ie _____. « woyaa: Africa's Beleaguered Internet Struggles On, » 30 Dec. 1999, http://www.nua.ie O'Toole, Kathleen. « Study offers early look at how Internet is changing daily life, » http://www.stanford.edu/group/siqss/Press_Release/press_release.html Pisani, Francis. « L'après-télévision. Multimédia, virtuel, Internet, » Le Monde diplomatique, Jan. 1998 : pp. 31 http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1998/01/PISANI/9829.html Preece, J. « Usability and Sociability, » Information Impacts Magazine, Access: Where, Who, How, Why? Dec. 1999, http://www.cisp.org/imp/december_99/12_99contents.htm Reid, Elizabeth M. (elizrs@mediaone.net) «Electropolis : Communication and Community on Internet Relay Chat, » thesis, University of Melbourne, Department of History, 1991, http://people.we.mediaone.net/elizrs/electropolis.html Rheingold, Howard. http://www.well.com/user/hlr/texts/mindtomind/IBM.html Sedgwick, Mark. « Marginal Muslims in Cyberspace : The implications of the Web for Traditionalists, and of Traditionalists on the Web for Islam, » American University in Cairo, presented at The fourth Nordic conference on Middle Eastern Studies: The Middle East in globalizing world, Oslo, 13-16 Aug. 1998, http://www.hf.uib.no/smi/pao/sedgwick.html Strangelove, Michael. (mstrange@fonorola.net) « The Internet, Electric Gaia and the Rise of the Uncensored Self, » from Essays on the Anthropology of Cyberspace, Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine, 1 : 5 (1 Sept. 1994) : 11, http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1994/sep/self.html Tajri, Wafaa. Email Interview, 7 Mar. 2000. _____. « Le droit au rêve, » 29 Dec. 1999, Al Jarida Al Maghribia, http://jarida.8m.com/Magazine/Wafaa2.html Turkle, Sherry. « Virtuality and its Discontents : Searching for Community in Cyberspace, » The American Prospect, no. 24 (Winter 1996), http://www.prospect.org/archives/24/24turk.html Wallace, Walters, and Blume. « Cyber Cafés : A Field Experience, » paper for Dr. Carl Cuneo, McMaster University, http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/soc/courses/soc4j3/stuweb/cybercult5/cafe gu~1.htm Wanadoo http://www.wanadoo.net.ma Willey, Chris and Perry, Danny. « Cyber Café Reality Check, » Horizons, HTTP://WWW.HORIZONMAG.COM/9/CYBERCAFE.ASP Young, Sherman. "Of Cyber Spaces: The Internet & Heterotopias." M/C: A Journalof Media and Culture, 1.4 (1998), http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/hetero.html Zgodzinski, David. « Third World Internet, » Internet World, 1996, http://www.internetworld.com/print/monthly/1996/12/thirdworld.shtml useful sites and links for more information Bubl Link. http://bubl.ac.uk/link/c/communicationstudies.htm Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine. http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1994/index.html Cyber-Geography Research Bulletin, 1 :11, 2Mar. 2000, http://www.cybergeography.org/bulletin-1-11.html L'Echo du Polisario, www.arso.org/echopo.htm Electronic Journal of Communication, The. Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication, Vol. 8 : 3 and 4 (1998), http://www.cios.org/www/ejc/v8n398.htm Geography of Cyberspace Directory. http://www.cybergeography.org/whats_new.html Global Communication Internet Showcase. http://www.uwsp.edu/acaddept/comm/391/showcase.htm Information Impacts Magazine. « Access: Where, Who, How, Why? » Dec. 1999, http://www.cisp.org/imp/december_99/12_99contents.htm Islamicity. http://www.islamicity.org/ Jclic. http://www.jclic.net.ma/magazine.htm Kirkwood H.P. « Internet Surveys, Statistics and Geography, » ONLINE, Sept. 1999, http://www.onlineinc.com/onlinemag/OL1999/kirkwood9.html M/C : A Journal of Media and Culture. http://english.uq.edu.au/mc/archive.html Veldof, Jerilyn. Internet Sites for Communication, University of Arizona, Department of Communication, http://dizzy.library.arizona.edu/users/jveldof/comm.html The Website of the World Amazigh Congress Tamazgha, www.worldlynx.net/tamazgha/index_eng.html Wheeler, J.O., Aoyama, Y., & Warf, B., (Eds.), 2000, Cities in the Telecommunications Age: The Fracturing of Geographies, Routledge: NewYork, http://www.routledge-ny.com/cgi-tin/catalogdisplay.cgi?0415924413 Zook, Matthew. http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~zook/pubs _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold