DALE F. EICKELMANAND JON W.ANDERSON, ED., New Media in the Muslim World: The EmergingPublic Sphere (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999). Pp. 199.$39.95 cloth, $15.95 paper.

Abstract

The debate about the Internet revolution has been marked by a double dystopia. One comes from the Scandinavian cybernauts who are far more extensively wired than their West European, or even North American, counterparts. In “Digital Arrogance,” the Swedish media scholar Andreas Kitzmann laments that the global expansion of multimedia technology and cyber-culture “is motivated not by the promise of human emancipation and enlightenment but by fantasies of power and complete control.” The South Asian cultural critic Ziauddin Sardar is even more harsh. “Cyberspace is social engineering of the worst kind. . . . The supposed democracy of cyberspace,” he writes in Cyberfutures (1996), “only hands control more effectively back to a centralized elite, the ideology of the free citizen making everyone oblivious to the more enduring structures of control.”