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Report of the Study day “Web and micro-transformations”

The Internet and Social Micro-Transformations
Pantheon-Sorbonne University

By Claire Lebrun (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne Univ.) – 9.02.2018

The term Social Network was first used by the British sociologist and anthropologist John Barnes in his article « Class and Committees in a Norwegian Island Parish », published in 1954. If social networks became a huge part of our environment, are they reshaping human relations on the Internet? A reunited group of linguists, ethnographers and historians, from France, Greece, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Belgium and Tunisia, presented micro-studies focused on micro-transformations of societies throughout the digital era, and built a general view of communities’ behaviors on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Instagram. This international seminar was led by Leda Mansour (Chair of Dialogue Between the Cultures – Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne Univ.) who has been working since 2016 on the role of Twitter and online media in the creation of a Saudi public space.

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Call for paper : Web 2.0. Places of perception of the transformations of societies

Read the original french version (English translation by Irina Kalderon, French original version by Léda Mansour)

Coordination: Léda Mansour, University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, France

This issue hosts special case studies on the web, analyzing and describing unusual and new phenomena in order to grasp the transformations of societies. The choice of the web as a place for the perception of transformations is strongly linked to its capacity to represent a field of research filled with pluralistic, diverse and sometimes opposing sources in sociological terms.

Indeed, the literature in information and communication sciences and in the sociology of digital uses has highlighted one of the novelties of the Internet and subsequently of the interactive web: the creation of a space of expression belonging to all different voices without any restriction, hence creating an effect of democracy (Cardon D., 2010).

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Where civilizations meet, by Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd

Original text in French : http://orientsoccidents.hypotheses.org/19 (translation by Sami Mebtoul)

This book of Y. Courbage and E. Todd could be a classic one on the history of the demographic transition in countries where the population is largely Muslim (“Muslim world”). a phenomenon that Philippe Fargues has already begun to study in detail, questioning several clichés about the “Arab family” or the birth rates in Muslim countries. This is the approach, combining a demographer and an historian, the “empirical” method (p. 39) of following demographic indicators in several countries over the long term to compare and to identify a general trend, and its thesis that make this book a stimulating essay.

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