Globalisation and media in the Arab world

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject History - Asia, grade: 1,7, University of Erfurt, course: Globalisation and the Muslim World, language: English, abstract: The focus of this paper is the media system of the Arab world, its development, and the local and global factors that have had considerable influence during the last years. Different theories question the importance of communication and media for globalisation and vice versa, therefore the existence of a global communication network or global media and the participation of the Arab world in the global media evolution is observed. In the last fifty years print media, television, and internet have proven to be important agents of social change even if their development has always been accompanied by censorship arrangements in the different political systems of the region.

The Arab world has not been isolated from global changes in the media sector. Mass media, especially the Internet, and their importance for global economy are seen as motor of globalization but capital and technology are expanding faster than the development of trans-cultural communication is able to. This displacement in the action-reaction chain can be observed in the way global content and media are domesticised, transformed, controlled and rejected in the Arab countries and how important topics like cultural imperialism, indigenous values, international norms of journalism, and freedom of speech are discussed and negotiated in these societies.