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- Volume 15, Issue 2, 2022
Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research - Volume 15, Issue 2, 2022
Volume 15, Issue 2, 2022
- Articles
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Digital youth in Qatar: Negotiating culture and national identity through social media networks
The expanding digital media environment in Qatar is arguably affecting the construction of young people’s identities and the various expressions of who they are. The multiplicity of online digital spaces allows the youth nowadays to easily commute between multiple platforms and consume a multitude of media content in a manner not possible at any point before them. Through the implementation of ten focus group discussions among a sample of Qatari youths between 19 and 35 years of age, as well as 27 semi-structured in-depth interviews with social media activists, media experts, academics and policymakers in Qatar, this article attempts to analyse the complex media consumption environment that the Qatari youth engage with as well as the impact of that consumption on the formation of their identity. It looks at the extent to which their choices of various media genres on social media platforms allow them to negotiate and develop their own hybridized cultural identity. This study also considers how the Qatari youth capitalize on online spaces to reconstruct and represent their own personas and consolidate their thoughts and perceptions about the world around them. The findings show great affinity to social media networks. Online spaces such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp appear as key sources of news, information gathering, communication and entertainment. The study also reveals a significant impact of the content of social media networks along with opinion leaders like role models and influencers in prompting the consumption behaviour, opinion-making and personal choices in terms of fashion and style among the Qatari youth.
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Social media networks as platforms for culture and identity interplay among Qatari youth
The popularity of social networking platforms has increased dramatically in recent years, impacting how people communicate, exchange ideas and exert influence on others. These platforms have provided new opportunities for people to connect and engage with each other, ultimately reshaping their sense of belonging and constructing their identity. The current study focuses on how Qatari youth use social media networks as a tool for identity interaction. By examining the motives for, perceptions about and impacts of social media usage, this study provides insights into how the Qatari youth use these platforms. The research employed a quantitative method, collecting data via an online survey administered through Google Forms. A total of 532 Qatari youth responded to the study. This study’s findings illustrate that most youth use social networks frequently, with half stating that they are always connected. In addition, over 40 per cent report subscribing to one to five groups on social networks. The primary motivation for joining these groups is to engage in discussion about social and political issues as well as to stay up-to-date on the news about their community. According to this study, the most popular social media platform among Qatari youth is Instagram, followed by WhatsApp and Twitter. People use these platforms for different reasons, but many find them to be helpful in staying connected with friends and family, sharing news and experiences and staying up-to-date on current events. Moreover, nearly half of the youth who took part in this study claimed that social media had contributed to creating role models in society. This indicates that social media may play a significant role in shaping young people’s identity and their sense of belonging. A significant number of respondents reported that social media role models influenced their personal choices such as dress, perfumes, language and fashion. This suggests that social media play an unmissable part in shaping individuals’ personal preferences and their cultural identities.
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Underrepresented and marginalized: Television news framing of ordinary Arab citizens before the Arab uprisings of 2011
By Alyaa AnterThis study applied news framing theory with mixed quantitative and qualitative methods to analyse news items (N = 1348) about ordinary Arabs on Al Jazeera Arabic, Al Arabiya and Nile News TV shortly before the Arab Spring. Results show that ordinary Arab citizen representation was low. Overall, there were significant differences in networks’ framing of ordinary people. Importance, negativity and conflict values dominated the news featuring ordinary citizens. Arab news networks did not provide adequate time for citizens to voice opinions, and limited representation occurred via vox pop, footage and indirect reference. Networks employed negative sentimental framing (protest and rejection, economic problems, victimization, health problems and mistrust in governments) and mainly portrayed citizens of countries undergoing crises and wars. Arab television news should prioritize sharing the opinions, concerns and successes of ordinary Arab people and engage in constructive journalism rather than concentrating on problem frames without offering solutions.
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Hybrid ethnicities, fashionable bodies and unruly transgressors: Fetishizing Arab ‘first ladies’ in western media1
More LessUntil the Arab uprisings occurred, many Arab first ladies and queens feted by US media received exceptionally favourable coverage that celebrated their physical appearance and western sense of fashion. Grounded in the context of neo-liberal politics which considers them objects of cultural identification, this article studies western media’s representations of Suzanne Mubarak, Queen Rania of Jordan and Asma al-Assad who are framed as virtuous house wives, western by ethnicity, birth place or education, and sophisticated upper-middle class ladies with panic-trigger for both Arab elites and western observers: Egypt’s veiled Naglaa Mahmoud and the architype of a working-class seductress with lust for power, Tunisia’s Leila Trabelsi. Using qualitative textual and visual analysis of narratives and images from media coverage, reports and fashion magazines, the article presents a comparative content analysis of their representations through a set of three dichotomies: the first one pays careful attention to the intersection of neo-liberal politics and the deployment of ethnic hybridity as an ideological apparatus that sets up a binary between Arab and Caucasian or half-White women who emerge as the new ‘saviour’ of Muslim women; the second is a close pairing between the sexualization of the westernized and fashionable first lady and the de-sexualization of her veiled ‘backwards’ counterpart sister; the third entails a juxtaposition of the good and desired seductress with the promiscuous and bad one. Findings show how media discourses of modernity impose neo-liberal and neo-Orientalist demarcations to define Arab Muslim women’s agency, femininity, bodies and status according to western standards.
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Ethnic minority media as counter-hegemonic and agents of participation for minority communities
More LessThis article interrogates the extent to which ethnic minority media acts as tools for preserving minority cultures and identities and as counter-hegemonic to mainstream media’s representations of migrants in South Africa. It also discusses how diasporic ethnic media function as agents of participation for diasporic communities that are struggling to find a ‘home’ away from home. Mainstream media in South Africa, particularly tabloids, tend to represent the diasporic communities as petty criminals, prostitutes, robbers and accuse them of stealing the locals’ jobs. Most of these communities comprised by people of Asian descent – Pakistan, India – and the majority from African countries like Zimbabwe, Malawi, Ethiopic, Nigeria, Somalia and Mozambique. Migrants are often labelled as ‘aliens’, and the entrepreneurship associated with these minority migrants is rarely reported by South Africa’s mainstream media. The article deploys the digital public sphere theory and the four models of alternative journalism. Using textual analysis of purposively selected stories and programmes of an online radio station, Radio Mthwakazi, this article concludes that ethnic minority media in South Africa challenges the hegemonic tendencies of mainstream media and, in the process, constructs multi-ethnic subaltern public spheres and acts as agents of participation.
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The painful pursuit of weight-loss pleasure in The Biggest Winner 4
By Rim LetaiefThe current article provides the first attempt to use Lévi-Strauss’s theory of binary opposition in the study of a reality TV programme, which is the Arab version of the American reality format The Biggest Loser. The major aim of this article is to reveal the stigmatization of obesity and the promotion of the thin body type in MBC’s The Biggest Winner 4. To reach this aim, a qualitative content analysis is applied to the journeys and fourteen episodes of the programme, whereby the utterances and behaviours of the different participants are coded in search of themes related to fatness and thinness using NVivo 12. The analysis comes to unveil the existence of two levels of dual reconstruction. The first superficial opposition exists between fatness and thinness, and the second binary opposition is established between pain and pleasure, which involve the opposing feelings associated with the first binary opposites of fatness and thinness. The two levels of binary opposition evidence that the narrative of the programme is predicated on building a contradiction between the pain of fatness and the pleasure of thinness to add drama to the reality show and distance Arab viewers from overweight bodies. The major finding of the study is that The Biggest Winner, despite being localized and given an Arab flavour, still echoes the same anti-fat rhetoric of the original American format and serves to promote the American cultural ideal of thinness in the Arab world.
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Strategies and tactics of polemical exchanges: The play of minorization/de-minorization in public hearings
More LessBroadly debated in various public arenas, the ‘reasonable accommodation’ controversy has emerged on the advocacy agenda in Quebec (Canada), raising heated disagreements about religious minorities’ rights and practices, and passionate discussions about policies governing the management of religious diversity. While borrowed from the legal domain, the concept of reasonable accommodation moved beyond its origin and became the subject of various inquiries in communication studies and sociology, raising questions such as the media’s role in transforming the debate into a social crisis, the sexist representation of women and the racializing implications of the debate. However, the literature omitted the inherent dialogical nature of the debate and consequently missed identifying the communicative tactics employed by protagonists of the debate. The analytical and conceptual tools offered by conversation and argumentation analysis have not been used to clarify the discursive mechanisms of this controversy. This article fills this gap and examines the verbal and non-verbal interactions occurring during an important yet understudied instance of public debate: the public hearings that took place in Quebec, Canada, between May 2010 and January 2011, within the framework of public consultations on Bill 94. The article contributes to an understanding of the communicative strategies that influence public debates and their tactics: polarization and the processes of minorization and de-minorization. Findings show that polarization could be schematized according to two axes: one opposing partisans of an open secularism and partisans of a ‘republican’ secularism and one confronting justification based on gender equality, and justifications based on the principle of state neutrality. The findings also reveal that public hearings are not only an arena in which those possessing institutional power define who counts as minoritarian and who does not, they are also arenas in which those that are seen to be the ‘others’, can challenge the established structures of power and formulate alternative narratives of heir realities.
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- Book Review
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Global Media Ethics and the Digital Revolution, Noureddine Miladi (ed.) (2022)
More LessReview of: Global Media Ethics and the Digital Revolution, Noureddine Miladi (ed.) (2022)
Abingdon, Oxford and New York: Routledge (Taylor and Francis Group), 278 pp.,
ISBN 971-1-03206-214-3, h/bk, £120
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