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8. Conclusion
- LANGAA RPCIG
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- Additional Information
8 Conclusion (8) ramdan krim ramaDHaan kariim ‘Generous Ramadan’ It is now six months since I have returned from Sudan and the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims around the world fast during the daylight hours. It is a custom which unites people in practice at a global level, although its exact dates are determined by moon-examining mullahs or religious committees at the national level while exact prayer and break-fast times are coordinated at the community level up to ‘as far as the eye can see from the edge of town’. Therefore, Muslims in the diaspora belong, at least, to communities of Muslims in the geographic sense, as well as the global umma, in the imaginative sense, in this way. I learned of the first day of Ramadan in the Netherlands, not through local authorities in the Netherlands, since I don’t know who that is, but through the Moroccan merchants at the farmer’s market, showing how my own sense of orientation to the Arab-Muslim world is transnational, not locally based. In confirmation of this, my mobile phone, along with my Facebook page since the start of Ramadan, has been echoing the above text message greeting. Some, true to their skills, write me emails as well, in English, carrying the same wishes. I am absent from Sudan, but present in the minds of people as they are in mine. Through choice, I participate in such a “community of practice”, sending and receiving holiday greetings, I share a sense of belonging both to a place, Sudan, but also the larger Muslim community. While I hear church bells in the distance, rather than the Imam’s call to prayer, I am nonetheless exposed to the echoed public presence of Islam through several interpersonal interactions. My identity as an English speaking, non-Arabic person is targeted in the above text message, Chapter 8 168 written in Sudanese Arabic in the Latin Alphabet. I also received a similar greeting from Tunisia, but written in Tunisian dialect, the Latin alphabet but a French orthography: ramadan mabrouk! Such are the globalizing effects of the mobile phone for me. These interactions are clearly an extension of real-life relationships , although these relationships are more than just interpersonal. That the message is repeated to me across people who do not know each other emphasizes their lateral function, and the sense of larger belonging to which I am invited. As I set out in the Introduction, I was interested in how the mobile phone, as an electronic form of “small” or interpersonal media, functions in the creation of communities, or collectivities of people with shared identities, ideologies and behaviours. I was curious as to how language and interactional uses of the mobile phone may mark a departure from old ways of communicating, allowing for the creation of alternative social spaces than those that are designated by the sociopolitical and cultural mainstream. I have presented several chapters in which I have attempted to answer these questions. In this conclusion, I address how this data in sum speaks with respect to my question, and the claims of earlier research . Does it support the modernist ideas about globalization – that the mobile phone is allowing for open access to information, empowering and connecting people to global circuits? Or, is the phone wholly immersed in local existing relations and interactions? Is it creating a society of individualized persons, or can this be understood as new forms of virtual connectivity? As the stories and data in the various chapters have illustrated, such processes are indeed occurring in some ways while not others, as well as in ways that differ from one another in different contexts and relationships. Some of the data support the conclusions of earlier research, some point to different trends, thus the mobile phone is functioning in ways that are much more ambiguous and complex. Several questions can be asked which hopefully clarify some of these ambiguities and complexities in the data. First of all, concerning communication and its central role in this thesis, what is the role of language in how are people talking or connecting via the mobile phone? The act of connecting itself via the mobile phone is only part of the picture. Differently from most research on mobile phones, this thesis has looked closely at the linguistic content of phone interactions, namely text-messaging. It is thought here that the discursive functions of text-messaging would contribute to a sense of “community...