This study examines the use of Facebook by recent college graduates from the most prominent English-instruction university in Morocco, Al Akhawayn University. Though youth have long embraced internet technologies such as email and chatrooms, often enjoying the ‘freedom’ the relative anonymity it promises, the more public and pluralistic nature of Facebook has implications for traditional communication rules between the sexes. This study examines how its use by educated women from a variety of family backgrounds both reinforces and challenges social mores for gendered communication (female-female as well as female-male; within family vs outside family; intracultural vs. intercultural). I am particularly interested in this group because, though they come from cities and towns throughout the country, and represent a wide range of social and religious beliefs, they have the following similar characteristics which make them uniquely qualified to maximize the social potential Facebook offers: 1) all have spent several years away from their families in order to pursue higher education—thus, they have relied on alternatives to face-to-face communication to maintain social networks both during and after university; 2) they have similar levels of technology training and experience due to the emphasis on technology in the AUI curriculum, 3) they are at an age period where many women are more like to be engaged, newly married, or under pressure to do so, thus engaging in intense cross-gender relationships and discussions; 4) many are either pursuing advanced degrees or are in the workplace, thus they continually engage with relationships beyond the family sphere and have easy access to the internet (ie they are less likely to have to go to a public cybercafé and thus have more freedom to communicate on line without navigating possible social implications of using the internet in a public, and thus possibly gendered, space). Through this case study I examine the following questions: 1) In what ways are ‘traditional’ taboos on cross-gender communication either reinforced or challenged through their use of Facebook; 2) Does marital status/relationship status effect their online communication?; 3) How, if at all, does social status and/or religion effect the way they use Facebook?; 4) How do the women themselves articulate their own attitudes towards such issues?

From the basic web to web 2.0, communication through the web is in a permanent and rapid state of evolution. From simple websites to communication through social networking sites, the web was mainstreamed into civil society. Some Arab women – and especially the younger generations – have found their individual and collective voices in new and innovative ways. They have leveraged computer and web power to make their voices heard and have created new and anonymous online identities. As the web now moves towards what is termed web 3.0, new technologies and hence new methods of global communication are taking shape. Web 3.0 features three primary characteristics: it is semantic [meaning intelligent], it is mobile [with ‘smart mobbing’ and other new mobile devices replacing computers], and it is three dimensional [virtual worlds and communities and metaverses]. This paper will focus on the third of these characteristics. It will examine the portrayal of self and identity in a virtual world – in other words, the digital representation of self, the use of anonymous ‘avatars’ and the extent of self-disclosure. It will examine choice of clothing, virtual world relationships and the realities of this new type of social interaction, expectations and motivation, values, trust and confidentiality. The paper is based on interviews conducted with women wearing what I term the e-hijab in a virtual world called Second Life.

In nearly one decade of mobile phone commercial viability, more than two thirds of the Moroccan population has leapfrogged from no telephone ownership to ownership of mobile phones. This staggering rate of mobile phone penetration underscores the degree to which it has become part of everyday routines and has been tinkered with to serve various communicative and social needs regardless of time and space constraints. Based on ethnographic research among maids and other urban laborers, I argue that mobile telephony is a resource for human agency and action, not jut a force for culture change in itself. Second, I contend that mobile phone use has resulted in higher revenues by enlarging the circle of economic activity and by enabling supplementary informal income-generating possibilities. Third, I explore ways in which the mobile phone has allowed maids not only to bridge the urban-rural divide but also to escape the suffocating and confining conditions of their work place. Finally, I provide a theoretical framework for a better understating of the transformative qualities of mobile telephony.

The new calls for change in Muslim family laws have energized debate about women’s issues across the Arab Muslim world. In my paper, I will discuss how Arab Muslim feminists have deployed Facebook and blogging in recent years as a tool for networking with other feminists, organizing conferences and forming different groups. This "new way" of networking is used among young as well as well-established feminists among sociologists, doctors, university professors and politicians. These women have agitated for women’s rights by setting up groups at the local as well as international level. Each group has its own focus and agenda. Facebook and blogging, which allow these women to speak freely to one another and encourage them to form groups, are platforms that are useful not only for coalescing around key social and political issues pertaining to women, but also for initiating social change. Using Morocco, Egypt and Saudi Arabia as my main case studies, I argue how Arab feminist bloggers and Facebook uses emphasize the centrality of religion to social change for women. Western feminists have always wondered why Muslim women who are outstandingly successful in a world dominated by men take such a position, and how their views relate to the religion in which they were reared, and to which they remain attached. Arab Muslim feminists do not want to be pigeonholed; they have overlapping memberships and specific identities, and may rightly prefer not to be fitted into compartments. These women also know a great deal about the history of Islam and do not wish to be the target of assumptions made by those not well informed about the extent of their knowledge and the inferences they draw from it. Furthermore, their Islam may not be the Islam of today's front pages in al-Jazeera, Le Monde, or in The New York Times. All these women live in Muslim communities where the state and religion are one. They have also experienced the slow modernizing and secularizing processes of their communities.