There’s uproar among the youth in Turkmenistan today after the government decided to ban the popular social networking site, agent.mail.ru. Currently, it’s inaccessible via both TM Cell and MTS (about whom I’ve reported before). The website had eventually experienced a small surge in Turkmen users, especially young men and women who used it to get to know each other.

It’s an open secret that one of the main purposes of agent.mail.ru is dating. The site certainly facilitates meeting potential partners: just type in the city, gender, and age in the search engine, and within only a few seconds, voila! Lovely, smiling faces appear. You can even find young women in bikini shots or Odalisque poses — some as young as 16! Another big advantage is the availability of chat rooms, which are easy even for the less techno-savvy to use, and is cheaper in the long run than mobile phones.

Many young Turkmen users think the government’s decision is inexplicable. Unusually, the ban hasn’t been reported in the state media. And many doubt that the authorities’ concern is about political content (although I can’t speak for the level of encryption offered by agent.mail.ru, and whether chat rooms could be used for political purposes). However, it’s consistent with their decision in the spring to ban other new media and social networking websites, like Facebook and YouTube.

While the ban has been deplored by its users, it’s also been hailed by some older Turkmens (and non-users) as a welcome move. They have legitimate fears about the spread of child pornography and internet addiction. These are real problems, and exactly because the internet does not regulate itself, it’s reasonable that government must therefore do the regulation.  They also see something else — a threat to traditions.  Here’s what one elderly Turkmen told me:

“Thank God [this has been done], this way, the youth has been saved from worst to come. The people should not be allowed to do things which do not correspond to our culture and traditions.”

Those “things” include dating — which for many Turkmen means sex outside marriage.

So, it seems that the general Turkmen society is realizing the potential of the internet. The freedom it brings has a positive side by undermining the authority of our totalitarian regime, but potentially a negative side, too, by undermining the authority of our culture’s traditional morality.

We have to remember that ours is not a normal government. It uses these problems as an excuse for extreme censorship. Not only this, but I also get worried when I hear about “Turkmenness”, because it’s too frequently a pretext to damn every new thing as “alien”. You know, the Soviets talked about “harmful remnants of the past” to make room for their new ideology,  but today, protectionists damn everything new as the “work of the devil”. Such a sentiment only plays into the authorities’ hands.

We can have new, modern technology and still be Turkmens. Many of the Arab countries have managed to adopt new technologies while preserving their distinct cultures. Technology and tradition are not enemies!

The ban of agent.mail.ru is another blow against the slowly burgeoning Turkmenet, an online community that will prove critical to our political, economic, and cultural development in the future. However, I doubt it will really stop our society’s young. In fact, they’re already turning toward other social networking websites to connect. Such is the infectious-like nature of the internet, and I believe it wil be these new netizens who will eventually define real “Turkmenness”.