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   8(2) January 2003                  Margaret McLaughlin and Sheizaf Rafaeli, Editors

   Young women of the United Arab Emirates stand as examples of users who can consciously chose what elements of global cultures they wish to appropriate while they simultaneously insist on preserving their own cultural values and practices.

   There have been distinct changes in the use of CMC and ICTs among the Palestinian Israeli minority in Israel which serves to maintain the existing political and social disenfranchisement of this group within the larger Israeli society.

    The stories told by Kuwaiti university students suggest that Internet use by youths is creating new forms of communication across gender lines, interrupting traditional social rituals, and giving young people new autonomy in how they run their lives.


   Recent technological advances offer opportunities for victims of genocide, ethnic cleansing, or other enacted hate to bear witness under the gaze of a global audience on the Internet.

   The visual anonymity associated with online interaction offers people with disabilities the potential to participate in social interaction beyond the stigma of a disabled identity. But the online medium also can become a deceptive social space where people with disabilities become victims of malevolent acts.


Technologies of Despair and Hope:
 CMC in the Middle East
A Special Issue of JCMC Edited by Charles Ess and Fay Sudweeks

   The simplistic view of a monolithic Islamic world pitted against an equally monolithic West disappears quickly into much more complex local histories and politics that provide as many counter-examples to, as examples of, these broad categories. Articles in this special issue provide us with a careful, detailed, and nuanced look at the diffusion and impacts of CMC technologies in the Middle East, with reports on Afghanistan, Israel, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates.

    After 9/11, the voices of otherwise silenced women in Afghanistan were significantly amplified on the Internet. RAWA.org demonstrates how a Web site contended with discourses of war and fundamentalism while envisioning democracy and constructing new leadership identities for women.