A new post at Thick Culture provides commentary on Jeffrey Fleishman’s recent report in the Los Angeles Times on the growing use of social networking sites like Facebook to publicly debate “Islam’s role in the new century.”
The story notes that young Muslims in the Middle East, in particular, have been using Facebook as a means to dialogue with others about religion and politics. Many are using the site to create a space for public argumentation largely denied in the social and political structures of their societies. Some are using Facebook to dispel myths about themselves and their faith with Westerners. Most want to know whether cyberspace could potentially act as a tool that might create change in their own social contexts.
While these questions remain open, and I think that scholars examining Web 2.0 have often been far too celebratory about its potential, these online debates and deliberations on Facebook appear to be a largely positive social phenomenon. Many young Muslims seem to be finding their rhetorical selves by engaging in an online dialectic between the local and the global. Facebook is becoming a means to traverse the very human constructions of borders and boundaries which have traditionally enveloped their lives. At the same time, Facebook is being used in these examples as a way to create attention structures that highlight the existence of both multiple viewpoints and embodied others.
Continue reading this post at Thick Culture.