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:: Archive > MB in International press | ||||||||||||
![]() Virtual Brotherhood
The National's Matt Bradley has a story on the Muslim Brotherhood's Facebook clone:
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Saturday, July 10,2010 11:04 | ||||||||||||
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The article then wonders why the Ikhwan bothers: IkhwanBook is after all technologically extremely inferior to the real Facebook, and the other sites are not that sophisticated either. And there are plenty of young Brothers on Facebook — anyone who's ever met them can expect to be friended within 24 hours, after all. Brian Whitaker, noting the story, writes:
I think both Matt and Brian miss the point slightly. The first reason for having all these sites — and believe me, there are a LOT of Ikhwan sites out there, practically one for every governorate of Egypt plus many more on specific issues before you reach the Facebook and Wikipedia clones — is that there simply is enthusiasm to build them. Beyond the apparent correlation one notices between tech-savvy and religious inclination (just visit any of the computer malls on Midan Sphinx in Cairo), there are a lot of young talented programmers in Egypt who would love to show their enthusiasm for the gamaa by building websites for it. And there are a lot of young people in the Brotherhood, no matter how elderly the leadership is, for whom these websites may be a way of expressing their views as well as gain practice in the art of political and religious rhetoric. The second reason is that this resonates with the groupthink and in-group mentality that the Muslim Brotherhood cultivates. These sites won't replace Facebook or Wikipedia, they are a virtual gated community (gated, that is, by strong symbolic references and imagery that are likely to alienate those not already versed in the Ikhwan universe) for like-minded people, where they can create a more orderly version of the sites that they copy and where the membership is self-selecting. The Muslim Brothers tend to socialize together, marry within each others' families, work together (or for each other) and a whole lot more. It's a support group as much as a political organization. It makes sense that, online, they will tend towards a closed ecosystem — alongside the open internet, not instead of it. It's just the way online forums thrive: through community-building. That's true for computer geeks and religious geeks. |
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tags: Moderate Islamists / Facebook / Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood / Muslim Brotherhood Youth / Moderate Muslim Brotherhood / Moderate MB / Ikhwanwiki / Ikhwantube / Ikhwanbook / Ikhwanfacebook / ikhwanscope / ikhwanophobia
Posted in MB in International press |
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