The Al Jazeera Effect book by Philip Seib

The Al Jazeera Effect

Philip Seib   2008 Potomac Books  ISBN-10: 1597972002

Seib defines the “Al Jazeera Effect” as the superseding of the traditional political connections that have brought identity and structure to global politics by the connectivity of new media, a “rewiring of the world’s neural system” (p.175) that is happening at great speed, one which changes the way states and citizens interact with each other, and which offers the individual a chance at a new kind of autonomy. The Arab satellite channel, Al Jazeera, is merely the most visible player in this new universe.

The book is not only nor even primarily about Al Jazeera and indeed, there is not a great deal about Al Jazeera in it that is new. There is a useful summary and discussion about many recently emerged satellite channels including, for example, Al Arabiya, Al Manar, Al Aqsa, Telesur, and emerging new online news sources such as OhmyNews, iTalkNews and Global Voices (a pity Seib did not encounter more acerbic possibilities such as Brasscheck TV, Globalvision or Real News Network). In addition to a discussion about the possibilities of state censorship of new media, especially in China (much of this material now very familiar) and resistance to the global “quest for democratization,” much of the book engages with “clash of civilization” discourses, examining the role of new media in helping generate or sustain the “virtual state,” the virtual Ummah,” (i.e. the collective sense of religious identity uniting Muslims around the world), Jihadi websites, and the prospects for transformations of the Middle East.

The book contains a lot of useful information about new media, much of it gleaned from interviews with senior media practitioners, and the discussion of the Ummah will likely enlighten many non-Muslim readers. This could usefully have been framed with reference to the substantial scholarly literature on alternative media and social movements. But this is not an academic book. There is no systematic analysis of media coverage, only anecdotal reports of particular programs. The book as a whole is cast within a relatively un-nuanced framework of “war on terror,” threats from (particularly) Jihadi terrorism, the self-evident virtues of western democracy and, as part of this last discourse, the equally self-evident virtues of “transforming” the Middle East (even though much of the Middle East today has been shaped by western political engineering and support for authoritarian regimes). This is a universe, then, in which Western states have no part in “terrorist” acts and no responsibility for creating the conditions and even sometimes the actual vehicles of the “terrorism” that they publicly abhor, and whose democracies are not feeble shells whose substance was long ago commandeered by corporate interest and the military industrial complex.

There are interesting insights and discussion here, but the basic thesis of an Al Jazeera effect is handled in too imprecise and anecdotal a way to convincingly demonstrate that, as a result of new satellite and online programming, we do indeed inhabit a world that is significantly different from the recent past. One might even conclude that the Al Jazeera effect will prove as ephemeral of the once touted “CNN” effect. We cannot meaningfully proclaim Kurdistan to be an example of a “virtual state” on account of new media, since the political and socio-cultural imaginary of Kurdistan long predates such technologies and would likely persist without them. In the case of “Al Qaeda” as exemplar of a virtual state, there are problems relating to the murky origins of “Al Qaeda” as a meaningful entity, and to evidence of manipulation of so-called “Al Qaeda” elements for the pursuit of nation-state objectives (even, in reverse, use of fictitious “Al Qaeda” links by the US as a pretext for invasion of Iraq in 2003). Is it not in the very nature of such a loose entity that it is highly penetrable by its enemies, and is it not the business of intelligence to penetrate and perhaps redirect the enemy?

While we should be impressed by the number and array of religiously-related web-sites (and this applies to any religion, not just Islam), we need more sophisticated analysis of site users and consumers before risking historical judgments or future predictions. World religions have endured astonishingly intact for thousands of years without new media. Furthermore, their relationships with territoriality and nation states were no less fluid or complex in the past than they are today. As for patronage of web-sites, this in itself tells us nothing about their relationship to the intensity and direction of belief. Certainly, new media may help “re-shape” Islam, but Islam has been re-shaped in many ways throughout history, rarely less curiously than when western and Pakistani intelligence forces were reported to have collaborated in helping nurture a toxically militant form of Islam in their manipulation of mujahedin during the campaign to expel occupying Soviets from Afghanistan. Further, conclusions as to the character of web-sites requires systematic content analysis based on the appropriate language skills or, alternatively, recourse to existing scholarly or other reputable sources, and this is not consistently the case here on either count.

The author offers an unfocused discussion in which he ponders whether the Ummah can ever be more than a fiction, whether new media can help it become less of a fiction and whether, if new media did make it less of a fiction, such a development might stoke the hot embers of jihadism. On this basis he advises the United States among others to develop a policy toward the Ummah. To energize anxieties about such themes with a focus solely on Muslims, in the absence of a sound politically-grounded analysis of the complex origins of “war on terror” discourse, and of the universe of religious and political web-sites generally, might be construed as an insalubrious form of grandstanding that unhelpfully leverages the simplicities of “clash of civilizations” theory.

Seib cannot quite reconcile his celebration of the egalitarian possibilities of new media with his fear that these will be abused, principally by Jihadi terrorists. Yet some components of this new universe look remarkably similar to an older universe of state- and movement-supported propagandistic international and regional radio. The threats may look exotically sinister if one blanks out, as does Seib, long-established western equivalents including, for example, evangelical broadcasting and some of its bizarre political meddling and if one does not acknowledge the overwening tide of western media imperialism through Hollywood and other popular culture exports. Other parts of the new media universe look more impressive if insufficient account is taken of the conservative tendencies of mass audiences to patronize the sites with which they are most familiar and that tend to have superior resources in the business of attracting eye-balls: sites generally controlled by the old gang of western media conglomerates. There is a lot of hand-wringing about the dangers of a less professional “blogosphere”, but these dangers should be evaluated against an old media system that persistently rented out its influence to the tropes of power, including the foreign policy objectives of host governments and the interests of oligopoly capital. There is certainly merit in considering whether there is such a thing as an “Al Jazeera effect” and how this might best be characterized, but this is an endeavor that might yield more durable insight if undertaken with greater detachment from a “war on terror” framework.
Review by Oliver Boyd Barrett