Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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I believe I am the only one among the Weekly staff who does not use a computer or the Internet. I am what Naguib Mahfouz describes as "illiterate" when it comes to information technology.

But this illiteracy will probably be cured soon. The reason is that I have just finished two books -- The Internet in Egypt and the Arab World, by Dr Rasha Abdallah, assistant professor at the American University in Cairo's Mass Communication Department, and The Keys of the 21st Century, the Technique of Computer, Programming and Information by Mohamed Nooman Murad, a friend from Iraq and highly qualified computer expert -- which have managed to dissolve my apprehensive aversion to this medium.

Both books are written in Arabic, and both start by providing an overview of the history and development of new communication techniques, culminating in computers and Internet. Rather than concentrating on the technicalities present in the two works, my focus is rather on what I might call their premises. Despite both writers' enthusiasm for modern technology, their approaches remain significantly different. Abdallah concentrates on what I believe to be the political value of the Internet and its contribution toward the development of freedoms, democracy and human rights.

The Internet, she believes, affords the peoples of the Arab world the opportunity to converse regardless of their respective government policies, creating an opportunity for the exchange of experiences which would, eventually, bring about political and social reforms. In this context, she discusses the means used by some Arab countries to censure programmes for religious and political reasons -- Saudi Arabia, predictably, having developed the most rigid system. Other countries, like Iraq, require users to procure a government permit in order to reach the world wide web. Only in Egypt, Jordan and Morocco do users have free access to the Internet.

Abdallah presents some statistics: within four years of its invention, the Internet had claimed 50 million users; this number has now risen to 800 million, and by 2010, predicts Abdallah, 80 per cent of the world's population will be using the Internet. The book is certainly a must-read, not only for computer literates, but even the "illiterates" like myself.

Mohamed Nooman Murad devotes a long section of his work to the Internet and its users, explaining the information superhighway, which allows the instant transfer of information. Murad sees the strongest impact of this information revolution in the field of culture. He goes on to compare the state of the "cultured" or "intellectual" individual before and after the invention of the Internet, which suddenly placed all cultural manifestations at any user's fingertips. In Murad's opinion, those who benefit the most from the Internet are academicians, writers, journalists and artists, as they now have access to the cultures of the whole world.

The author then devotes a number of pages to the publishing process through the Internet as countless encyclopaedias -- dealing with subjects as varied as history, religion, literature, medicine, agriculture, economics and the arts, to mention but a drop in this ocean of knowledge -- are stored on CD- Roms, and can now be attained within minutes and often at no cost whatsoever.

Computers and the Internet have become, in the writer's words, "the language of our time, replacing pen and paper and the book". While I agree with Murad about the manifold uses of modern technology, I beg to differ on the death of the book. There will never be anything like the intimacy one feels when holding a book, relaxing in an easy armchair and enjoying flipping through those pages, one by one.