CyberResistance: Saudi Opposition Between Globalization and Localization

Abstract

The information society, late capitalism, and globalization raise serious questions about many tidy categories through which the world has conventionally been understood. Resistance, the subject of this essay, is one of these categories. The proliferation of globalizing means of communications such as the satellite dish and the internet has added new dimensions to our world. One is the collapse of premodern conceptions of space and time. Our phenomenological world is one that compresses time and in turn annihilates space, as Harvey suggests,David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989). or delineates space and time and liberates them from their local markers, asGiddens argues.Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 21. As space shrinks phenomenologically, people in different places experience the same events at the same time.The globalized world and modernity and their impact on our understanding of the social phenomenon are not tied to the works of Harvey and Giddens alone. Other theorists such as Roland Peterson, Ulrich Beck, and Scott Lash are central to the globalization debate. For a good summary of the Globalization debate, see Malcolm Walters, Globalization (New York: Routledge, 1995). In light of the confusion stemming from the increase in global political, economic, and social activities, the world seems beset by the paradox of homogenizing and fragmenting impulses. Complicating this picture even further is our increasing dependence on the mediaFor a debate on the media, information society, and globalization, see Karamjit S. Gill, ed., Information Society: New Media, Ethics and Postmodernism (London: Springer-Verlag London Limited, 1996); Lance Starte, Ronald Jacobson, and Stephanie B. Gibson, Communication and Cyberspace (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc., 1996); Sandra Braman and Annabelle Mohammadi, Globalization, Communication, and Transnational Civil Society (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc., 1996); and Andrew King (ed.) Postmodern Political Communication: The Fringe Challenges the Center (Westport, CT: Braeger, 1992). to bring world events to our homes, giving us the illusion that we were taken there to witness these events. In this heavily mediated world, the “signs for the real,”This is Baudrillard's argument. For more, see Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations,” in Mark Poster, ed., Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 166–84. text and image alike, seem more real than the real itself. Nowhere has the impact of globalization been felt more intensely than in the Middle East. Data from the Gulf states in particular raise new questions about our understanding of resistance, national boundaries, and territoriality as well as other social science concepts such as sovereignty, the nation state, and citizenship.