Review: The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam

摘要

A besetting weakness in writing about the Internet in the Muslim world has been sampling on the dependent variable. Interested in democratization? How does the Internet promote democracy? Civil Society? How does the Internet foster civil society? New media literacies, broader intellectual horizons, online activism: How does the Internet break old molds and bring liberation? To be fair, elementary failures to distinguish between sample and universe are not entirely the fault of analysts. Engineers who developed the Internet consistently promoted it as a liberating technology, since that is what it was to them, which Ithiel da Sola Pool, observing the early development of networking at MIT and writing at the tail-end of the generation, and project, that produced Daniel Lerner’s?The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East?(1965), passed into political science thinking about information and communication technologies (ICTs) as technologies of freedom (1984). But analysts do have to answer for meager empirical grounds on which they cast such interpretations – actually, speculations that generalize from premises more than reasoning from findings – and then, of course, the inevitable counterarguments about how ITCs either don’t matter so much after all or don’t have enough dynamic inertia to overcome the static inertias attributed to Muslim and Middle Eastern politics.?The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy?effectively closes this chapter by systematically putting speculations and arguments from single cases to the test – actually, to a quite rigorous test of modern comparative political analysis.