The Culture of E-Arabs

Abstract

This article scrutinises the linkage between ethnicity and people’s behaviour on Twitter. It examines how offline culture manifests itself online among Arabs. The article draws upon the literature to identify the offline ethnic characteristics of Arabs, and through interviews with and observations of Arab social media users, discovers their online ethnic characteristics. It then compares these online and offline characteristics and, through this comparison, finds that offline culture has been enacted online among Arabs, sustaining expressions of generosity, religiosity, traditionalism, female privacy, over-flattery, collectivism, tribalism, pan-Arabism, and social contracts; however, in other ways, offline culture has been counteracted online, which has led to the destabilisation of power relations between genders, elites and non-elites, and majorities and minorities. A further finding is that online culture has been enacted offline among Arabs in that online performance has exerted influence over offline ethnic identity expectations. In short, there are three main findings: offline culture has been enacted online, offline culture has been counteracted online, and online culture has been enacted offline. The take-home finding of this study is the existence of ‘e-ethnic culture’, that is, although ethnic activity online tends to be based on and reinforces offline realities and may alter offline realities as well, not all online performances have roots offline.

Keywords

• Arab sociology
• digital sociology
• digital anthropology
• Twitter
• Arab social media