Gilbert Ramsay, a PhD student at St. Andrews in Scotland, recently penned an essay entitled "Conceptualising Online Terrorism." Ramsay struggles with the implications of his own field of study, "terrorism", turns Gabriel Weimann into something of a straw man, and after a rather circuitous route offers up two final paragraphs that are worth quoting:
...the focus on jihadism as an ideology with its attendant online community as opposed to terrorism as a course of action reflects the effective rout of ‘terrorism’ as a useful concept in ordering understanding a category of online material. The security focused literature on ‘terrorist use of the Internet’ which as I have suggested, traces its roots back to grand concepts of cyber war and information war has been quietly routed almost at the very instance of its fullest flourishing. In its place, an approach has been adopted which, because it seeks to understand the phenomenon in terms of online communities of interest, is far closer to the mainstream of Internet studies.Can the concept of ‘terrorism’ be rehabilitated as a guiding concept for studies of online material? If there is any place for it, it will be necessary to demonstrate that there exist ‘communities’ or ‘cultures’ online for which the inspiration of terroristic violence is so central to their purpose that they are, to all intents and purposes, directly linked to the carrying out of terrorist acts. This is, interestingly, actually quite a good description of ‘jihadism’, an Arabic neologism which is dedicated to the elevation of a particular militant component of certain political Islamic ideologies into virtually a means to an end. Indeed, my own studies in jihadism online appear to suggest the possibility that inbuilt characteristics of the online environment previously theorised by ‘cyber-sceptics’ such as Beniger, Jones and Stoll are helping to create a truncated online community in which Internet users who may, in their own lives, subscribe to more complete and diverse versions of Islamic fundamentalism congregate online around a common interest in, specifically, violence. If so, then perhaps looking for terrorism on the Internet may not be so paradoxical after all.
That Mr. Ramsay takes issue with Dr. Weimann is ironic, because for his part Weimann is working on a major research project that adopts precisely such a "focus on jihadism as an ideology with its attendant online community as opposed to terrorism as a course of action." I know this because I conceived the research in question and I brought Weimann in on it precisely because his expertise is in the study of communications, not "terrorism."
You may find a copy of Ramsay's essay here...
Posted on 25 May 2008 @ 14:21