Revisiting Palestine Online
Revisiting Palestine Online
In these times of unprecedented genocidal violence and destruction, TITiPI decided to translate and recirculate materials from Palestine Online. Transnationalism, the Internet and the Construction of Identity. In 2008, Miriyam Aouragh published her research on how diaspora and exile communities used the internet as a medium for the formation of Palestinian national and transnational identity. In the context of an issue on "the active composition of presence" it seemed useful to revisit this work.
More than fifteen years ago, Miriyam carried out fieldwork in Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon camps as part of her PhD research. While unfolding ethnographic work across different locations, she chased material evidence and concrete case studies of the emergence, implementation and popularisation of internet connectivity as a technosocial arrangement. In her own words: "diasporic communication is often expressed as collective interaction vis-à-vis national identity, and community often reflects the merging of the online and offline. Social practices are virtually mediated as well as actually experienced. Communities include some form of virtuality and online sociability" (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011).
Palestine Online included two cultural devices which we decided to revisit and reconnect here. One being a timeline of the first decade of internet in Palestine, starting in 1996 and ending in 2007, the year she finished her dissertation but also a fundamental turning point in the internet culture as a whole. 2007 marked the beginning of the sociotechnical regime of service-based platforms, social media and the Web 2.0 era. The other device was a set of amateur pictures and screenshots captured by Miriyam during her fieldwork. We find it especially urgent to translate this material in Spanish and to revisit these two devices, fifteen years after their first appearance while the realities they speak from and about continue to be under an ongoing and ever growing nakba executed by the State of Israel. First of all, the translation makes this material available to other publics and new reflections on how we can resist and contest this violence. Secondly, by paying attention to these materials now we hope to contribute to the thickening of the visual culture in circulation about Palestinian diaspora and resistance realities, as well as to a refusal of the universalist simplifications that are produced by the smooth, easy, agile and expanding connectivity of commercial social media production.
The image collection is reproduced from the thesis, keeping their original order and arrangement. Experiencing the images and descriptions nowadays, catapults us back to another epoch, when Miriyam engaged in a resistant capture in anticipation of erasures that indeed took place [eventually did happen]. Through the distance in time we relate differently to the awkward aesthetics of the 2007 internet culture, made evident through a set of screenshots of differently flavoured sites. We can backproject the impact of visual production and its consequent identity manufacture, before it became almost totally infused by the self-representational, flattened and privative culture configurations of instagram and tiktok. The fact that these vibrant websites, the hardware and software articulations of the time but also how the mundaneity of the internet cafes operated during pre-social media, might open up another prism on the contemporary avalanche of visual production during this trans-generational genocide. They are also snapshots of lives and hopes that have moved on, have been transformed or destroyed.
The timeline Miriyam initially circulated to accompany her anthropological account of the Palestinian online conditioning is reproduced integrally. It brings together a select set of items, including: major geopolitical events, specific software and hardware popularisations, cost of telco services, names of key stakeholders in the connectivity business. We imagine that reading the timeline now facilitates a critical understanding of the implications of the events, techniques and economies listed in the timeline, and how they both deepen damages of many sorts as well as show inventiveness, solidarity and survival. Second, we hope that reprinting the timeline activates the desire to extend and thicken the set of items and its method of meticulous accountability.
Many clues about the political context can be detected indirectly from the images, but only to a certain extent. In order to make sense of this epoch, we also need a historical materialist analysis that is offered in the timeline. At the same time the images put in tension and nuance those historical events, bringing mundaneity in conversation with infrastructural transformations.
This contribution opens up a longer process as part of TITiPI's activist para-academic research praxis. We aim to inhabit the timeline by means of adding to it's genealogical complexity, extending the modes of reading those images and extending the bridges between these two devices. Revisiting Palestine Online honours the Palestinian's people resistance within, accross and despite the infrastructures of empire (Aouragh and Chakravarti, forthcoming). The process of unfolding these two devices can be followed - and contributed to - on this wiki