Youthful Moroccan Identities on the Internet

D2 presentation notes for a talk at the 10th EARA conference in Antalya, as part of a symposium on globalization and adolescence.

Overview. We adolescence researchers have been doing it the hard way: modifying each other's questionnaires for our own samples, administering them to captive audiences of intro psych students or kids hustled at the local mall, rotating correlation matrices of the data and hoping that variables around which we can spin a convincing story at the next convention will drop out of the factor analysis. We do recall other ways of looking at adolescents, though: a time when it was about our own nascent identity struggles as we searched for self-relevant stories in a literature that was actually literary. Our own life stories include narratives of youthful selves we may have inhabited in decades past and, while few of us have actually written out those narratives, we've probably imagined doing so; and we responded powerfully to the examples of other young people who had done so.  To recall the most famous example, Anne Frank did it for us, up there in her Amsterdam garret. She wanted to be a writer, and she wanted her writing to express honestly and powerfully the strange beauty of her prison life, her rage at her long-suffering and uncomprehending mother, her empathy for a father suddenly reduced to negotiating for vegetables and praying that he could buy his family some safety, her admiration and disdain for sister Margo, her lust for Peter. It wasn't about the war, really. It was a story she spun chapter by chapter for imaginary Kitty, who took on the role of confidant and chum.

Now imagine a million Annes sprawled with laptops in quiet bedrooms, or headphoned at the corner computer at the nearby cyber, telling us their stories, contextualized at the moment of typing with setting and ambient sound, literally giving voice to all the themes we've been writing about in our professional journals. They're doing it for free, and leaving the manuscripts were we can find them -- not in a hidden drawer in a secret attic, but broadcast to the world as blogs, and searchable on Google.

Theses. I contend (a) that the Internet is now the single most engaging venue for adolescence and early adult self-expression, (b) that the ready availability of personal data on millions of young people through the medium of the Internet allows -- indeed, compels -- major changes in our methodology for understanding youthful psychologies, supporting both richly qualitative and broadly quantitative data-collection, and (c) that the globalized production and universal availability of personal data on the Internet is about to allow adequate comparative studies of populations differing greatly on socio-cultural, religious/ethical, and socioeconomic dimensions never adequately or consistently addressed by the existing literature. I hope to explain and illustrate, but not to corroborate, these contentions with respect to a seemingly remote corner of cyberspace, the colloquial Moroccan virtual "street" in which chat, hip-hop, and a first glimmer of blogging and podcasting may be about to articulate a 21st-century adolescent discourse.

"Darija." The Internet has captured the imaginations of Moroccan youth, as of their peers around the world. But what is this network of networks of individuals that beckons from cybercafés, private tech schools, and vendors of "informatique" on every block in Casablanca and from four small shop fronts in Zawiya? What is it that persuades 100,000 youths to spend much of their evening at a smudged keyboard before a dusty screen constructing a verbal image of themselves, sending it off to the person they imagine hiding behind another MSN nickname, and hoping that the jerky image of the camera into which they peer appeals to that someone who likes their music, shares their frustration at school, and just might be their ticket to someplace better? How do they feel as they wait 20 minutes for a track of "H-Kayn" (a Moroccan hip-hop group) to download to their flash drive so they can fall asleep listening to it and perhaps quote from it tomorrow on the walk to school? I can only guess the answers to these questions for a handful of young acquaintances, but I have a growing conviction that "The truth is out there," just out of reach, beckoning to us from the blogosphere.

This short presentation will touch on several aspects of youthful behavior in relation to personal computing and the Internet. I do hope to engage your interest in one or more of these topics, and by finding your way back to this blog you will be able to explore the topics touched on in more depth and, if you wish, to contribute your own thoughts to the discussion.

I will quickly report on a dozen years of Moroccan Internet history, focusing on the rapid emergence of satellite, cell phone, and cybercafe resources available to most young Moroccans. I will state my own convictions, some of them supported by data, about the ways these new resources compel us to revise the picture of Moroccan adolescence presented by Davis & Davis (1989), and I will briefly compare Moroccans' activities in cyberspace with those of the relatively affluent English-speaking children and adolescents my students and I have been studying on the Web for the past decade. I will conclude by sketching a picture of vernacular Moroccan self-expression on the Net as it exists in 2006 and as I hope and expect it may develop over the next few years.

Pertinent links:

• Sidi ROM (1994) (audio) (the ethno-personologist's fantasy)
• "Millenial Teaching": NITLE: Arabworld site: Al-Musharaka (2002- )
• A sample Internet study (RAS, 2003) (illustrating the Haverford data-gathering server)
• Darija and Dante (2006) (on the importance of speaking in a different voice)
• “What’s Up?” and “The Night Horse” (Moroccan hip-hop online)
• Blog Search Engine (finding the data)
• Blogger, LiveJournal, myspace, Skyblog, xanga  (adolescents in the blogosphere)
• Weissglass, Keith. (2003). Form and Function of the LiveJournal Community:
  A Study of Online Journal Use Utilizing Internet Research Methodology. Paper prepared for Haverford College Psychology 314, Adolescence lab.
• Doug's Moroccan podcasts (this presentation)
• Justin's links (1994) (the ur-blog)
  
• www.nickyee.com (2001- ) (self-emergence in role-playing "games")
• asswat-achabab.com (2006) (sample podcast)
• The Wikipedia (2003 - ) (collaborative scholarship, e.g., Ibn Khaldoun/بن خلدون)
• Davis, S.S., & Davis, D.A. (1989). Adolescence in a Moroccan Town: Making Social Sense. Rutgers. (Chapter 2 draft html; searchable Google copy)
• Davis, D.A., & Davis, S.S. (1993). Sexual values in a Moroccan town. In W.J. Lonner &      R.S. Malpass (Eds.) Psychology and culture. Needham Heights: Allyn and Bacon, pp. 225-230.
• Davis, D.A. (1987). Formal operational thought and the Moroccan adolescent. In J. Valsiner (Ed.) Cultural context and child development: Towards a culture-inclusive developmental psychology. Hofgrefe, 1988.
• Davis, D.A., & Davis, S.S. (1993). Sexual values in a Moroccan town. In W.J. Lonner &      R.S. Malpass (Eds.) Psychology and culture. Needham Heights: Allyn and Bacon, pp. 225-230.
• Davis, Douglas A. (1995). Modernizing the Sexes: Changing Gender Relations in a Moroccan Town. Ethos: Special Issue on Adolescence, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 69-78.
• Davis, D.A., & Davis, S.S. (1995). Possessed by love: Gender and romance in Morocco. In W. Jankowiak (Ed.) Romantic passion: A universal experience? New York: Columbia      University Press. pp. 219-238.
• Davis, S.S., & Davis, D.A. (1995). "The mosque and the satellite": Media and adolescence in a Moroccan town. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 24, 577-593.