KUWAIT CITY, March 4: The Arab youth is no different from youth anywhere else in the world when it comes to engaging in the electronic media, according to Dr Adel Iskandar, a Canadian scholar on Middle East media who is in Kuwait as part of a 10-nation tour of Arab countries. Dr Iskandar was delivering a lecture on ‘Youth Media in the Arab World’ Tuesday to students and guests at the American University of Kuwait on the second day of a 3-day speaking engagement under the auspices of the Canadian Embassy in Kuwait. Youth media, according to Dr Iskandar who also delivered a talk on ‘Intercultural communication between the West and the Arab world’ Monday at the Aware Center in Surra, is, in his words “a broad brush stroke definition — an overarching term he says, that covers a huge territory; and that one can look at some aspect of blogging as a subset in the area of youth media production.

Dr Iskandar, who grew up in Kuwait and studied at the Kuwait English School where he finished his high school studies before moving to Canada to pursue higher studies, discussed a number of issues and problems concerning Arab youth media. He discussed approaches by which the youth can benefit from the use of media in a manner that would make them look credible to the rest in society. Youth media, he said, is an area of tremendous political import, often used to preserve certain aspects of cultural and religious information from potential infringement from outside.

However, youths are oftentimes considered infants thought incapable of comprehending the nuances within society or in deciphering different political mindsets and tend to embrace what amounts to cultural indecency that often earns them rebuke from elders. He recounted his own experiences during his young days when he kind of rebelled against prescribed norms by indulging almost exclusively in western music particularly heavy metal which he said many in the Arab world shun and consider as demonic, satanic and anti-religious; with some Arab countries outlawing heavy metal music groups. He also mentioned that a colleague has done extensive research and did a dissertation on the subject in a book focusing on heavy metal as an expression of contemporary Islam.

Though the concept has been perceived as immensely threatening and has somehow infiltrated Arab youth society and Arab pop culture, what happened is that it has metamorphosed into something completely different. He said that though most local youth media production contents may be imported, they still retain some recognizable aspects of local culture.

Debate
The debate, he said, over media production and cultural imperialism that has raged across the region and beyond has prompted the entire International Communication and Information Order to debate the extent to which protection litigation and policies can prevent infiltration. He also said that the idea that the West somehow is encroaching in a very threatening manner onto the Arab culture, has been effectively countered by adopting the western format through repackaging, re-articulating and re-presenting it in a manner that conforms and resonates with local sensibilities. He said it is unfairly inaccurate to describe that media production is centralized in the Arab world. There is tremendous trend towards complete dispersal of production sites, and those with access to it will have the opportunity to come up with their own media production; in effect changing the model most have been accustomed to, whereby users of media content are considered strictly users. Presently, he said, almost everyone is in a position to produce content and engage in independent production on any particular subject like documentaries, etc.

According to him, youth media can be credited with starting a trend that has been embraced by almost every segment in society and has evolved into a tool not only for sharing information but in other important uses as well. He also said that the use of electronic media technology has led to youth becoming increasingly engaged in journalistic practice that has spawned what is now known as citizen journalism which major news organizations with dwindling budgets are able to tap into for news sources. Youth media in the Arab world, he said, is seeing more receptiveness at a disproportionate level than media produced through traditional sources.

According to him, majority of bloggers use the media to chronicle or describe their own personal experiences though there are some containing critical opinion about others, and others with vulgar and profane language, which he said violates the unwritten rule on what is decent and permissible and what is not. With this violation and vulgarization of the textual form, youth media is often dismissed as having little to no message to relate at all which has become a major problem, Dr Iskandar said. The youth media has produced terminology and linguistic characteristic that has existed in every possible communication dimension and some terminologies, he said, has found its way into the popular public sphere.

By Boie Conrad Dublin
Arab Times Staff