Author: Jon W. Anderson

Online and Offline Continuities, Community and Agency on the Internet

10 May 2013

Online and Offline Continuities, Community and Agency on the Internet
Jon W. Anderson Article How the Internet spawns community and gets its features into offline life is a recurring problem met in searches for “impacts” of its successive iterations in the Middle East and arises particularly in assessing equivocal findings most recently about social media in the Arab Spring uprisings. But the problem is more methodological than ontological: it lies in viewing the Internet through a media lens on…

Article

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

10 May 2012

Review: The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam
Jon W. Anderson Book Review Howard's book The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy focuses on the relation between ITCs and civil society and democracy in the Muslim world. It assembled a database of indicators (for Internet availability, access, policy, ownership, structures and uses) cross-referenced to common standard measures of democratization and development for 75 countries with substantial Muslim populations.

Book Review

Transnational Civil Society, Institution-Building, and IT: Reflections from the Middle East

10 May 2007

Transnational Civil Society, Institution-Building, and IT: Reflections from the Middle East
Jon W. Anderson Article The important connectives of information technology will come with institutions that successfully merge IT, transnationalism, and 'civil' society such that each conveys its properties to the other. How to conceptualize and understand these properties is a compelling need for social theory. Comparative study of the Internet in the Middle East, including its supporting and related technologies, points to the crucial role of alliance-building and coalitions…

Article