I attended a conference titled “Islam and the Media” organized by the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I got great comments on my paper and met interesting and fascinating people from both academia and the media business like Charles Hirschkind and Zarqa Nawaz, just to mention my very favorite.

The latter, Zarqa Nawaz, is an energetic woman and a born comedian. She created the Canadian series “Little Mosque on the Prairie”This is the official webpage: http://www.cbc.ca/littlemosque/
And here one of my favorite episodes: Ban the Burka
and is involved in other film projects taking on the whole conundrum of Islam, “the West” and the rest.

Interestingly, however, the notion of the liberal, moderate, modern (feminist) Muslim, kept popping up during the conference, in presentations of both social scientist and Muslim media professionals/activists.

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What do people do in chat rooms and internet forums? What a question: discussing, learning, chatting, reading, socializing, looking up information op just “hanging out”, surfing around and many other things, the negative side like flaming, hate mails etc. not included. These (inter)actions are all reason enough for researchers to look at phenomena in computer-mediated environments.However, what really strikes me more and more is how people act and perform identities or, put simply, how they “are” and “inhabit” the web.

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