Beyond Al-Jazeera

Abstract

BEYOND AL-JAZEERA Noha Mellor, Muhammad Ayish, Nabil Dajani, and Khalil Rinnawi, Arab Media: Globalisation and Emerging Media Industries, Cambridge, Polity, 2010, 206pp; £16.99 paperback Arab Media: Globalisation and Emerging Media Industries raises prescient questions on the subject ?? how to look at the rise and expansion of various media in the Arab world alongside some long held maxims about the role of those same media outlets. Mellor et al are keen to historicize and contextualize the proliferation of media, quantifying usage and critiquing content. What comes across quite swiftly in the book is the potency of the existing argumentative framework against which new ways of understanding the production of media meaning must be measured. Tank Sabry, in his book Cultural Encounters in the Arab World writes that, Due to the external threats from Imperialism and Zionism, it was, and still is, much more fashionable for Arab intellectuals to contextualise their work on 'culture' and 'identity' within frames of nationalistic, pan-Arab and pan-Islamist discourses (p48). Thus, the assumed and comfortable endpoint for the consumption of media, the strengthening of community discourses alongside local nationalist variations of Islamic and pan-Arab fraternity, is understood by the authors of Arab Media as an obstacle to complex socio-cultural research that would instead seek to understand media production and consumption across a wide spectrum of variants: literacy levels, income, gender, sexual orientation, ideologies of modernization, and so on. Arab Media deals with the above limitations by setting itself the challenge of reading the growth and changes in Arab media 'as a direct result of the acceleration of the globalization process' (p8). The book attempts and to some extent succeeds in overcoming the limitations posed by the 'Arab intellectuals' that Sabry speaks of and to tackle openly the ideological and theoretical impasses that face the scholar of Arab media. This makes it a very useful introduction for those new to the field as it historicizes Arab media studies whilst revealing the ways in which it has developed. Arab Media certainly casts the net wide and seeks to engage with a variety of media outlets - publishing and print; the press; radio; television; cinema and the internet. The section on the humble radio is crucial to the context of wide coverage in the Arab world across class and economic divides. With many books hailing the satellite channel Al-Jazeera as enabling a more open view of the intricacies of Arab regimes and allowing the Arab world to participate in cosmopolitanism and global debates, it is significant that the authors of Arab Media have chosen to look at more rudimentary and older forms of media that serve to highlight the long history and discursive power of the dissemination of public discourse, opinion and ideology. The addition of cinema is also very welcome as it introduces an element of creative media working at the level of representation and allows for a much broader look at how a variety of media forms negotiate socio-political circumstances alongside each other. An unavoidable overarching theme of the book relates to how media is viewed and utilized by individual Arab states and how media is, in turn, conceptualized as either a welcome modernizing force propelled by local needs and articulated through indigenous routes or vilified as a force of involuntary modernization imposed by a Western hegemony (the details of which, the authors argue, are often vague). In this context, the hierarchy of media outlets is constantly renegotiated, depending on cultural and political priorities within Arab culture. So, for example, burgeoning on-line access is used to, on the one hand, celebrate the business-oriented free market qualities that the Arab world wants to be seen to be participating in. On the other hand, the internet is criticized for accelerating the erosion of nationalist solidarity and encouraging an unbridled individualism. …