Are we doomed to live on the fault lines of misconceptions and a lack of understanding, or can new technologies empower individuals to make their voices heard across borders, asks Raed Rafei The sight of Sunni Muslims storming a Christian neighbourhood in Beirut in 2005 gave me the shudders. They were expressing their outrage because of a series of Danish cartoons denigrating the Prophet Mohamed, and they ended up attacking churches and torching the Danish embassy. Whether their anger was justifiable or not was not the issue. What horrified me was the idea that millions of viewers across the Western world would be watching these images on television, images which I believed would only confirm distorted clichés of a violent Muslim and Arab world. I felt frustrated at the thought of how the coverage of this event by the Western media would inevitably reinforce the idea of the "civilised us" versus the "barbarian them" in Western minds. As a secular Arab, I have always tended to believe that the boundaries between cultures and civilisations are negotiable, that one can be a free spirit, a citizen of the world, not readily confinable into a well- defined box. Unfortunately, this impression often proves to be wishful thinking on my part. On a recent visit to Copenhagen, I armed myself with a guidebook and a camera and headed towards the historic town just like any regular tourist. Suddenly, I found myself facing a Hollywood-type scene. The police was rounding up what seemed to be a group of youths with dark complexions. I didn't quite understand what was happening, but my stereotype- infested mind could only see thugs of Arab-origin being arrested. My immediate reaction was fear. I have a fairly dark skin. I would certainly be mistaken for one of them and soon arrested, I thought to myself. In a pathetic act of self-protection, I unfolded my map and tried to stick closer to the herds of mostly European-looking tourists. But panic got the better of me, and I finally decided to run away from the scene. All I could think of was that with my looks, convincing some over-zealous policemen that I was a tourist would not be a simple task. My suspicions that the world today thrives on simplistic categorisations of individuals were confirmed a few days later. I was walking out of a tube station in London, when a policeman stopped me and asked politely to search my bag. Why was I singled out in a large, heterogeneous crowd? The subtext of the policeman's carefully formulated request did not read, "you look like a suspicious terrorist who might have a bomb in his bag," but more simply, "you look like a Middle- Easterner." Are we doomed to live with this fault line of misconceptions and lack of understanding between the East and the West? While the mainstream media seems to package cultures into simplistic news products for supposedly apathetic audiences with short attention spans, some believe there is a way out through new social media networks. These new technologies are empowering individuals to make their voices heard across borders and outside the framework of political and commercial agendas. In the post-9/11 world, and after the cartoon crisis subsided, the idea of bridging the gap between East and West by focussing precisely on the use of new technologies by young people has been gaining popularity. With this perspective in mind, the Swedish Institute, a public agency that promotes cultural links between Sweden and the rest of the world, launched a project targeting young leaders from the Middle East, North Africa and Sweden over the summer. One of the aims was to help them consolidate their leadership and networking skills, in order to help shape opinions in their countries and build constructive ties with Sweden and the rest of Europe. The final seminar, held in November in Paris, centred particularly on the role of social media in lessening the divide between the European Union and the Middle East and North Africa region. The focus was on innovative initiatives from programmes enabling young people from different parts of the world to share information directly on online platforms for bloggers in the Arab region. A particularly daring enterprise discussed at the seminar was Soliya, a non-profit organisation that enables university students from the Middle East, Europe, North Africa and the US to communicate in real-time and offer viewpoints on global issues. The idea is to give a Palestinian student the chance to voice his perspective on events affecting him, without intermediaries, to his peers in the US, who would otherwise most probably only see the Palestinian plight and struggle through the limiting scope of the mainstream media. Another laudable project is Global Voices, which is an online community for bloggers from around the world, including the Arab region. The website offers reports from blogs and citizen media so as to give voice to those seldom featured on international mainstream media. When Israelis were preventing foreign journalists from covering the events in Gaza on the ground during their offensive earlier this year, Global Voices enabled Palestinian bloggers to describe their daily ordeal under the bombs to millions of readers everywhere. Even individual initiatives could help challenge widespread pre-conceived notions about the other. In his novels, Jonas Hassan Khemiri, one of the presenters at the seminar and a young author from both Tunisian and Swedish backgrounds, pushes his readers to question the meaning of cultural identity and the categorisation of immigrants, for example. It is heartwarming to believe that such projects could drive the world to move towards a global participatory culture, even if sceptics remind us that it is only a cultural and intellectual elite, a tiny fraction of the world, that is ready to shrug off superficial stereotypes about others. I would prefer to be optimistic and believe that difference can arouse curiosity and genuine interest and not only hostility and fear. A day after the seminar on my way out of a cinema in Paris, I was stopped by a middle-aged lady. She wanted to know if I was "oriental". She said that my eyes were very oriental and they had reminded her of the warm and hospitable culture of the Levant that she had once experienced.
