Bedouin youth using IM to bypass customs and prohibitions

Adnan Gharabiya, 34, lives in Wadi al-Na’am, a Bedouin community adjacent to Ramat Hovav in the south of Israel. The place is not connected to the electricity grid or to running water. While working on his thesis, Gharabiya discovered that the Internet, and in particular instant messaging programs, are extremely popular among Bedouin youth, the poorest, most neglected segment of Israel’s population.

As part of his work, Gharabiya distributed questionnaires to 200 Bedouin youths, and interviewed some of them. He found that 60 percent of the youth from permanent communities have an Internet connection. “In the past, these youths surfed the Web mainly at school and at the community center, or via cell phone,” he says. “Now there are homes with wireless Internet. Some homes run their computers via a generator or through a solar receptor. The Bedouin population is young, and young people are more open to new technologies.”

Like many young people around the world, from Beijing to Kiryat Bialik, Bedouin teens use instant messaging programs mostly to communicate with friends their own age. But in Bedouin society, searching for friends has a unique meaning.

“The tribal structure is very strong, and a teenage boy up to age 18 is almost constantly around the tribe and the community,” says Gharabiya. “The Bedouin are usually isolated and cut off also from the rest of Israeli society, from the rest of the Arab sector, which lives mostly in the north, and from Arabs in other countries. Chat rooms open a window.”

The Internet made the greatest change in the lives of young girls. “In Bedouin society there is rather strict separation of the sexes, and a chat room is the only place where they can talk with members of the opposite sex,” says Gharabiya. “It is especially significant for the girls, because their social circle is even smaller, and their freedom of movement is limited. Not all of them can leave their parents’ community. Unlike the boys, girls are not allowed to go to town after classes, or to visit friends. In this respect, technology is very important.”

“In our society, the girl must be respectable and act moderately, because what’s important for a girl in this society is her reputation,” said A., one of the girls interviewed for the research. “In Bedouin society, it is forbidden to talk to a boy, to send him letters and to fall in love with him … but in a chat room, no one knows if you’re talking to boys there. They think you’re a good, respectable girl, and that’s the main thing. You write to people while no one sees you, but you and your real-life behavior are always under scrutiny.”

Chat rooms let them bypass customs and prohibitions, and overcome the strict limits in traditional society, primarily the separation of the sexes and the severe restrictions imposed on women. “There is a lot more freedom in a chat room,” says Gharabiya. “Among the family, it is not common to discuss all subjects, primarily when the children are adolescents. In a chat room, you can discuss everything, if you find someone who is receptive.”

“The Bedouin population is comprised of several tribes that do not have a very centralized leadership,” says Gharabiya. “Apart from that, the Internet symbolizes progress in Bedouin society, and parents are proud when they have Internet access at home. Usually they don’t have tools to monitor what their kids are doing there.

(summarized from this Ha’aretz article)

[tags]bedouin, IM,chat, internet,ethnography,israel[/tags]