Rethinking Digital Technologies in the Middle East

In 2003, while a graduate student working on my dissertation, I wrote an article on the Internet in postrevolutionary Iran that looked at the politics of the emerging technology in a country undergoing major political changes. In the context of political rivalries between reformists and conservatives, the Internet, I argued, “as an advancing means of communication,” played a key role in the struggle for democracy by opening up a virtual space of dissident activism. Euphoric in spirit and utopian in outlook, the article ended with the following quotation from an Iranian dissident: “At night, every light that is on in Tehran shows that somebody is sitting behind a computer, driving through information roads; and that is in fact a storehouse of gunpowder that, if ignited, will start a great firework in the capital of the revolutionary Islam.” These “information roads,” I concluded, could play a significant role in the emergence of a new form of political society in Iran and beyond.