Habitus in Transition? CMC use and impacts among young women in the United Arab Emirates

Abstract

This paper considers the impact of computer-mediated communication on the culture of the United Arab Emirates via the results of a brief study. The larger question being asked is if the very culture of the nation might be recast through the use of computer-mediated communication. While my survey was limited and thus the results preliminary, they contradict the view that CMC technologies will inevitably reshape "target" cultures as these technologies impose especially Western cultural values and communication preferences. Rather, my analysis suggests that UAE women students are more directly affected by consumerism as a culture dominating the Internet. More broadly, my students 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.

Introduction

“The unprecedented rate of change we observe today is creating a new reality, one that affects each and every one of us politically, economically, socially and culturally. Therefore, we realize that the challenges we face are difficult” (Mohammed, 2001).

The United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) was created in 1971, with the federation of seven Emirates, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ras al-Khaimah, Ajman, Umm al-Qaiwain and Fujairah. The rate of complex social, economic and cultural change in the U.A.E. is phenomenal. The U.A.E. is not only the world’s fourth largest oil-producer, but also its richest state per capita, and the undisputed new commercial hub of the Middle East. ¹

In this context of rapid change, my research focuses on whether or not computer-mediated communication (CMC) and specifically electronic mail have begun to alter the thought processes of a group of female U.A.E. national university students in Dubai.

I begin by considering the complex issues of defining culture, followed by a brief discussion of the notion of habitus as elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu. I then turn to an examination of the influence of computer-mediated communication on the cultural foundations of a group of female U.A.E. national students. In terms of Bourdieu’s cultural theory, I suggest that what is being manifest in these young women is the recasting of their habitus.² Clearly, the culture of the U.A.E. cannot avoid being affected by the rapid technological changes taking place. At the same time, however, these students demonstrate that users of CMC technologies in diverse cultural contexts are not simply the hapless victims of globalization via CMC; rather, they are able to determine for themselves what elements of the local and the global they will accept, preserve, or reject in an active process of self-development in dialogue with the multiple cultures surrounding them.

What is Culture?

A problem which is continually returned to in any study that involves the issue of culture, is how is it being defined? There is endless debate about what culture is, where it starts, and where it ends. It is difficult to pin culture down to a single unproblematic definition. Culture might best be regarded as a site of convergent interests, a place where the convergence of dissimilar ideas takes place (Hall, 1986).

Tony Bennett in his musings on popular culture suggests that if an empty definition approach to culture is employed then it will become defined abstractly as a site that is ever changing, which might not be far from the reality of a young country like the U.A.E. (Bennett, 1986). The suggestion that is being made by Bennett, put simply, is that for any definition of culture to be useful it must be flexible at the conceptual level, allowing for change to take place over time in the constitution and organization of the term since culture is always caught up in a struggle to determine how it represents the ideas of the group it is being applied to. The struggle to define what culture is, as Bennett suggests, in a state of continual manifestation and re-manifestation as a society itself is re-cast by its population. The question that needs to be asked is how broad and flexible can a definition of culture be while still embodying some form of meaning?

Raymond Williams’ definition of culture, although controversial in its own right due to the openness it suggests, advocates the adoption of a broad encompassing definition. A broad definition of culture according to the reading of Williams would seem to satisfy the need for flexibility leading to, at least on the surface, some practical utility of the term.

Williams himself suggested culture might best be understood, in its primal sense, as the cultivation of a psychological being; the democratization and socialization of a society; and the ideas that are the mortar of society. Culture in this sense might be comprehended, singularly, as a representation of the development of a state of mind, the process of this development and the means of this process, or more likely, a combination of all three (Williams, 1981).

Culture, by design, must be understood as being threaded throughout all of a society’s practices, making it the sum of a society’s inter-relationships. This point becomes interesting in the context of the U.A.E. where the society that was the basis of a very strong group culture has dramatically changed over the last three generations, largely because of the embracing of technology. At issue in the U.A.E. is understanding how culture is manifest in the individual and then transferred to the foundations of the society, of which the individuals are ultimately a part.

Culture and the Individual

Daniel Bell, like Williams, asserts that culture is a process through which the individual undertakes to cultivate the self. Culture, in Bell’s interpretation, can be understood as an internal logic, a dialogue within one’s self. The point that Bell, and ultimately Williams, are making is that culture, while often defined in a very specific manner, should not be (Bell, 1976). Culture might better be understood as an evolution of the spatial and temporal situation to which the individuals of society are privy (Morley, 1992).

Culture in this sense may be understood as a form of change and adaptation within the self perpetrated through what Williams called the two aspects of culture: first, the known meaning and directions to which members of a society are trained, and, second, the new observations and meanings that are continuously offered and tested.

Culture as a Social Foundation or Habitus

Pierre Bourdieu through his discussion of the theory of the mode of the generation of practice offered a compelling logic for the continued acceptance of culture as a systemic social construction based on the combination of the ideational, actionable and material elements within society. As has already been suggested societal systems are based on a specific constellation of value orientations that are defined by the constituents of that society.

Bourdieu clearly lauded the current state of the definition of culture as it is being used within contemporary society. Bourdieu suggested that culture may be best understood in systematic terms with the individual as a primary constituent player in the societal system itself. The basis of Bourdieu’s support for the conceptualization of culture as a system of durable transposable dispositions or organizing actions is found in his discussion of societal structures which are constitutive of particular types of environments that instill predispositions, tendencies, propensities or inclinations which produce habitus. (Bourdieu, 1972)

Habitus, as outlined by Bourdieu is culture,

…systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively “regulated” and “regular” without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor. (Bourdieu, 1972, p. 72)

Bourdieu’s account of habitus emphasizes that culture is not a mechanistic application of structures and forms to society. Rather, culture is socially embedded and citizen-based. In light of this account, at issue here is whether computer technology might be the first step in changing a socially embedded culture by altering the "…systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures" (Bourdieu, 1972, p. 72). While it is difficult to deny that technology or education do not have a role in the "strategic calculation" that takes place and manifests itself as habitus, the reality is that the role of these influences on the individual is not clear. Society works as a system and from that system emerges culture due to the simple fact that habitus,

is precisely immanent law, lex insita, laid down in each agent by his earliest upbringing, which is the precondition of practices but also for practices of co-ordination, since the corrections and adjustments the agents themselves occasionally carry out presupposes their mastery of a common code and since undertakings of collective mobilization cannot succeed without a minimum of concordance between the habitus of the mobilizing agents (e.g. prophet, party leader, etc.) and the dispositions of those whose aspirations and world-view they express. (Bourdieu, 1972, p. 81)

I will try to show below that the group of Emirati students considered in this project were consciously negotiating a “strategic calculation” with CMC, weighing its positive and negative impacts on a culture that is in transition (to say the least). (As we will see, a first problem in the U.A.E. is that the acquisition of culture and the way it comes to be defined and understood, within society, is wholly contingent on how societal systems have come together and in that process how they have come to influence one another. The U.A.E. society is a society under siege in that it is run, in effect, by foreign nationals who in fact constitute 80% of the national population. Just through its minority status in its own country, the Emirati population is being forced into varying degrees of change.)

An Application with Students

When generally talking about the impact of technology and specifically computer technology on the citizens of the U.A.E., it is important to point out some of the distinguishing characteristics of the U.A.E.. First, it must be noted that the actual number of citizens, those people who are passport holders of the U.A.E., is relatively small:

The population of the U.A.E. is estimated to be 2.94 million, with a growth rate of around 6.5 per cent a year. This is expected to slow to 2.9 per cent by the year 2005, when the population will number around 3.48 million. U.A.E. citizens account for a little over 20 per cent of the population, with the rest coming from the rest of the Arab world, the Indian sub-continent, the Far East, Europe and elsewhere. (United Arab Emirate Government Information Service, 2002)

What makes the study of this group of female students and the effect of computer-mediated communication on their culture significant is the fact that for the most part it is the women in Emirati society who are the primary caregivers for children - but Emirati women have only recently gained access to education beyond the home. If it is accepted that habitus is a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which integrates past experience and functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions, it is this group of the population that will play a primary role in habitus being modified in the next generation of Emirati.

This particular piece of preliminary research involved a class of twenty-two U.A.E. national, female university students who participated in an e-mail exchange with a group of students in London, England. The e-mail exchange lasted for two months and was prefaced by a series of guiding questions that the students were expected to incorporate into their weekly discussions.

The Emirati students share very similar demographic characteristics. All members of this group are between the ages of 20 and 22 and are the first females in their families to receive a university education. This particular group of students is also characterized by the fact that they all have personal laptop computers, which facilitate a high degree of Internet connectivity while working on campus where the majority of this exchange took place.i.e., without the proxy server restrictions of the national service provider. These young women also study English as a foreign language. For the most part, they are taught by an expatriate, largely Western, faculty. The women are different from their mothers, who in most cases are unilingual Arabic speakers, do not have any exposure to computers, and have not received post-secondary education. Indeed, in some cases these mothers have not had any secondary school education.

The issue being confronted here is to what degree the culture, the very habitus of the United Arab Emirates, is being altered by computer-mediated communication and in this case by the use of e-mail to communicate with Western students. As Armand Mattelart has suggested, globalization, which is often attached to the flow of unifying technologies such as computer-mediated communication, is a reality as our societies are increasingly linked by communication networks which promote the idea of operating in what he calls a “universal mode” (Mattelart, 1995, p. 11). Mattelart has a point, but only if the members of the societies in question completely subscribe to the technologies in a universal manner. From this preliminary research, however, it is unclear whether what Mattelart describes is taking place.

Once the members of a society are using universal modes of communication the question then becomes how the community, or better yet the culture, is specifically adapting the communication that is taking place to its own needs. What this preliminary research has shown is that the globalizing effect of technology may not be as strong in this society as the theoretical literature might suggest.

In general it is difficult to measure the degree to which universal modes of communication are affecting a culture because there are so many overlapping modes. In the U.A.E. a rather interesting situation has emerged which makes the investigation of the impact and effect of technology on the society, in general, possible. In the U.A.E., universal modes of communication tend to be clustered around the activities of the specific generation I am considering. As this preliminary research suggests, Emirati under the age of twenty-two are far more inclined towards even the most basic adoption of technology into their lives than their parents’ generation.

In the group under study, 94% suggested that they were comfortable using computers in general. When asked if their mothers used computers the unanimous answer was “never.” When asked about their comfort using the Internet, this same group of young women responded that 94% were comfortable using it, and again indicated that their own mothers did not use the Internet. (This entire group has been using the Internet for between 3 and 4 years depending on their year of study. Before commencing their studies 98% of the students polled did not have access to computers or the Internet.)

While it is clear that the parents of the students in the study group are very concerned about the impact of technology on their daughters’ culture, it is becoming clear that the worldwide interconnections that are facilitated via the computer are also serving as a daily reminder of what differentiates groups. These interconnections force this particular group of students to clearly think about their culture and what it means as they engage in e-mail exchanges with Western students and more generally survey global media.

As William Radecki pointed out in his study of laptop usage in Zayed University classrooms, "there is very little empirical evidence that supports or denies the positive contribution of laptops to the learning environment" (Radecki, 2001, p. 71). But as Radecki demonstrated, there is no doubt that the students in question are apt to be influenced by their exposure to technology and its corollary effects as these displace their tendency to work in their first language both academically and for pleasure. Radecki's (2001) data on student usage of laptops over a three-day period demonstrate vividly the amount of time spent consuming English-language content, whether for academic or non-academic purposes. The usage profiles of the six students in the Radecki study provide an indication of the degree to which CMC is becoming a factor in the evolution of a student’s language disposition, especially in the context of the U.A.E., where they are only now being exposed to English-language content electronically en masse.

What we are trying to ascertain, at least in preliminary terms, is how CMC technology affects the durable transposable dispositions that are the basis of the culture of the young women I surveyed. My first finding is surprising: through conversations with these students about their e-mail exchanges, it would appear that the general ideals of these young women are not being challenged, but possibly reinforced by CMC. At the same time, my survey suggests that this body of students is challenged more by the consumer culture around them than the technological culture (Foster, 1999).

My second finding can be best appreciated in light of Bourdieu’s suggestion that culture is simply a manifestation that has an endless capacity to engender products, thoughts, perceptions, and expressions. By students’ accepting the use of CMC technology and its trappings on a daily basis, they are simply participating in a most rudimentary sense in the natural evolution of their own thought processes and ultimately culture. In fact, Bourdieu’s thesis has been tested in another context, namely, in South Africa, where members of Zulu tribes left the Homelands to be educated and returned with their culture intact. The South African study yields findings similar to the results of my survey on CMC and culture in the U.A.E. In particular, Strelitz, in his observation of the South African example, suggested that what is taking place is simply the integration of some cross-cultural aspects and the rejection of others (Strelitz, 2001).

In the case of the U.A.E., Strelitz’s findings suggest the question: is technology and its message challenging or reinforcing the habitus of the receiver? My interviews and survey suggest, in fact, that technology is not necessarily challenging but more likely reinforcing the traditional culture through a virtual extension of the majlis, a traditional meeting environment where people gather to talk, exchange views and seek guidance. In particular, in the view of this group (88%), the Internet is actually a means through which they might become more or equally connected with people like themselves.

To make this point slightly differently, in the case of the ongoing e-mail exchange, as was the case with Steriliz’s research into media exposure, this set of students has actually found that CMC has brought into focus the differences that exists between them and their partners. It is also interesting to note that when using their computers for general surfing, the majority of my students seek Arabic-language sites and not sites that necessarily originate in the West. (The tracking records of Radecki and Mitchell (2001), however, might suggest the contrary, given the volume of English-language content being consumed.)

This preliminary research makes the clear point that "the people on the receiving end of globalization... have a choice of what to accept—and very often they choose bits and pieces that they mix with their own forms of expression" (Strelitz, 2001, p. 10).

Concluding Remarks

Thus is it possible to say definitely that habitus is in transition? No. But what is clear is that there are many factors influencing the fundamental thought process of a whole generation of yet-to-be parents. And, if it is accepted that habitus does exist and that it is an integration of past experience with a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions which effect cognition of the present, it is very clear and possible that the habitus of the Emirati young women in question is in a fundamental state of transition and as much as computer-mediated communication might empower a generation it might also forever change generations to come.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the students of my media and society class for their insightful comments and open minds. I also wish to thank Charles Ess for his insightful editorial suggestions.

Footnotes

1. United Arab Emirate Government Information Service, http://www.uae.gov.ae/. Only fifty years ago, before the unparalleled change due to the discovery of oil, the U.A.E. was little more than pockets of struggling inhabitants. The U.A.E. was characterized by its lack of Western conveniences such as electricity, plumbing or even simple telephone service. In the 1950s there were no public hospitals, or schools as we know them. Generally speaking “life in the Trucial Coast - as it was known until the 1970s - and in its hinterland, was one of considerable hardship” (ibid.).
2. Habitus can be initially understood as the fundamental building blocks, realized or not, of a person’s socialization.

References

Bell, D. (1976). The cultural contradictions of capitalism. New York: Basic Books.

Bennett, T. (1986). The politics of the popular and popular culture. In T. Bennett, C. Mercer & J. Wollacott (Eds.), Popular culture and social relations (pp. 6-21). Philadelphia: Open University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1972). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Foster, R. (1999). The commercial construction of a new nation. Journal of Material Culture, 4(3), 263-282.

Hall, S. (1986). Cultural studies: Two paradigms. In R. Collins (Ed.), Media culture and society: A critical reader (pp. 33-48). London: Sage.

Mattelart, A. (1995). Unequal voices. UNESCO Courier, 48 (2), 11.

Sheikh Mohammed, H. H. (2001). Speech at the World Economic Forum. Retrieved December 3, 2002 from http://www.sheikhmohammed.co.ae/english_htm/idiscussion3.asp.

Morley, D. (1992). Television, audiences, cultural studies. London: Routledge.

Radecki, W. (2001). Laptops as language learning tools. In Z. Syed & H. Heuring (Eds.), Tools of the trade: Teaching EFL in the Gulf (pp. 71-84). MLI: Abu Dhabi.

Strelitz, L. (2001). Where the global meets the local: Media studies and the myth of cultural homogenization. Transnational Broadcasting Systems, Spring. Retrieved December 3, 2002 from .

United Arab Emirate Government Information Service (2002). Retrieved December 3, 2002 from http://www.U.A.E..gov.ae/.

Williams, R. (1983). Culture. Glasgow: William Collins Sons & Co.

About the Author

James Piecowye is an instructor in the College of Communication and Media Sciences at Zayed University in Dubai, United Arab Emitrates. He has been involved in the creation of Zayed University’s Center for Media Research and Training and is currently working on a project to introduce media literacy to the United Arab Emirates KG-12 education curriculum. He has recently been researching and writing about the changing role and structure of the mass media in the United Arab Emirates. He will defend his doctoral dissertation on the conflict of culture and commerce in Canadian feature film policy at University of Montreal this coming April.
Address: Zayed University, College of Communication and Media Sciences, Zayed University, Box 19282, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Ph. +9714 2082455 Fax +9714 2640854.

JCMC 8 (2) January 2003

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