“New Morocco”… Sociologist Bennis delves into the features of a new virtual citizenship

Notes on the “Moroccan Virtual Society” presented by sociologist and university professor Said Bennis, noting that “the transition from Moroccanness as an identity vessel that embraces all elements of the Moroccan personality, including cultural, historical, civilizational, and human elements, to neo-Moroccanness has led to a new virtual citizenship with manifestations and manifestations that are different from those in community life.”

With this transition, citizenship has become “divided between positive, empowering values ​​that tend to consolidate practices of solidarity, coexistence, and harmony and contribute to building a parallel space for diverse and integrated discussion of Moroccan public affairs issues, and negative and negative values ​​whose goal is to create a hybrid and strange environment that results in a state of retention and value tension that could lead to undermining the pillars of coexistence and social cohesion, and could even be a threat to societal peace and the continuity of the components of coexistence.”

The researcher continues: “The negative values ​​emerging from the Moroccan virtual space are nothing more than digital slippages whose repercussions may dominate the future of rising generations, so that the Moroccan virtual society becomes a society teeming with identity oddities and blind values ​​and practices that strike at the heart of the concept of citizenship, and where digital rent becomes the highest levels of societal favor.”

This came in the latest publication of Said Bennis, which is expected to reach bookstores this year under the title “New Morocco: Notes on the Moroccan Virtual Society,” in which he approaches “the many questions raised by the societal transformations associated with the virtual boom and the development of means of communication about the inability of the basic structures of society to keep pace with the value matrix with which young people interact greatly, and even become active in it.”

The new source adds: “All these questions enable us to understand this situation resulting from the transition from a connected individual to a connected individual. The question of virtual citizenship in relation to the relevance of digital values ​​has led to the transition from real society to virtual society, from a Moroccan society to a neo-Maghrebi society.”

The researcher explains that this transition to a “neo-Moroccan” society took place “through the shift from the communicative cause to the communicative cause and from paradigms to algorithms, or in short, from the communication society to the communication society,” noting that the latter “demonstrated the dominance of the individual digital over the collective virtual and the technical digital.”

Among the questions raised by the book is: How can the value matrix produced by the virtual space affect the individual’s societal practices? The answer requires distinguishing between what is virtual, what is digital, and what is digital; “talking about influence is not talking about the virtual world that corresponds to the real world in general, nor is it a field for the digital world that refers to technical methods for managing public societal life, but rather it is primarily due to the digital nature that is considered the soft side of the digital and virtual, especially since within it the individual is able to influence and be influenced and then change his personal behaviors and practices, and create new values ​​that are in line with and mimic his virtual society.”

Therefore, the same source continues, “The general conclusion is that with the decline and even resignation of traditional socialization incubators, a spontaneous and personalized societal upbringing was born that took place via the bridge of the digital divide of social media, which resulted in a tsunami of undulating virtual values ​​that merge with, mimic, contradict, and oppose real values ​​at the same time, as if we were facing two parallel worlds and that the individual is two individuals and has two identities: a real identity and a virtual identity.”

Thus, “digital socialization can be linked to the value transformations that led to a new citizenship that, in the Moroccan case, enabled the transition from the concept of Moroccanness to the concept of neo-Maghrebiness, interspersed in parallel with negative values ​​and digital slippages that impose a new type of digital control in the horizon of environmentalizing the Moroccan virtual space.”

Another paradox of the virtual space is that it is a world “in which several margins are mixed, including breathing space, freedom, citizenship, solidarity, exchange, mobilization, addiction, compensation, violence, hatred, racism, isolationism, triviality, filth, value blindness…”, which requires “familiarity with the determinants of the virtual environment by distinguishing between the virtual, the digital, and the digital, and clarifying the practices of connected individuals, virtual groups, “virtual influencers,” the dominance of algorithms, and the decline of paradigms.”