Television & New Media

This special issue of Television & New Media brings together current research on media technologies, society, and culture in the Middle East from diverse methodological and analytical perspectives. The topics addressed cover a wide spectrum: circulation of Arab music videos and public discourse; Lebanese bloggers and mediated public spheres; transnational television audiences and ontological security; social media, TV talk shows, and political change in Egypt; youth-generated Arab media and cultural politics; and the Arab Spring as an ephemeral communicative space. Together, the articles provide a panorama of how today’s multimodal media geographies and engaged actors reinscribe public cultures and politics in the Middle East.

This article explores music video as a catalyst of public discourse in the digital age through an analysis of heated online controversies fueled by Wa‘d ‘Arqoub (WA), a video featuring a romantic relationship against the backdrop of the plight of Iraq under U.S. occupation. It puts forth the argument that music videos stimulate public discourse because of their capacity to (1) promote ideas and make them visible, (2) conjure up several meanings and interpretations, and (3) circulate through “hypermedia space,” a communicative space created by networked broadcast, mobile, and online platforms. The analysis of the circulation of contentious public discourse around WA leads to the conclusion that music videos are best understood as instruments of visibility in a symbolic economy that suffers from attention scarcity.

This article examines whether the ways Lebanese bloggers blur the boundaries between the national and transnational, the formal and informal, and entertainment and politics can be described as counter-publics. We focus on the ten most popular individual blogs in Lebanon during the time period April 2009–2010, noting bloggers’ mutual connectivity and links to online media in Lebanon. We then analyze themes common to these blogs, focusing specifically on how Lebanese bloggers question the norms and push the boundaries of what can be said mediated public sphere. While there are differences between the bloggers not least due to whether they are writing in Arabic or English—almost all explicitly criticize the current sectarian system, human rights violations, as well as existing religious, gender and environmental norms. Whether they see themselves as cosmopolitan or locally based activists, a significant minority uses humor and political satire as key elements in their blogs.

This article examines the role of transnational television in supporting transnational subjects’ ontological security in a world of information, risk, interconnected spaces but fragmented social relations. The discussion draws from Silverstone’s and Giddens’s work on ontological security and modernity. It revisits Silverstone’s analysis of television as a core system for managing modern subjects’ insecurities and relocates this thesis in a transnational context. Enabling symbolic as well as physical co-presence, the space around television becomes a contradictory, yet important, frame for managing everyday anxieties shared by many migrants and diasporic subjects. This is particularly the case for people torn by anxieties associated with separation, political instability in their region of origin, and the precariousness of migrant life. With reference to empirical research with Arab audiences across Europe, the article shows that television sustains its central role, even when new media make significant advances.

At least two pivotal moments in Egypt’s 2011 uprising took place on talk shows on the country’s private satellite television channels. In seeking to understand how these shows evolved, under authoritarian rule, to the point where they could host such moments, this article explores the impact of online media on their evolution. Taking account of studies into online–offline media interaction in democratic and nondemocratic settings, the research traces processes behind the rise of oppositional talk on Egyptian television during three consecutive periods. It finds that these had as much to do with particularities of national politics and economics as with transnational digital networks. Indeed, it was the restrictions on mainstream media that pushed political communication online, which validates Kraidy’s theory of hypermedia space, where multiple points of access to digital media are seen to facilitate contestation of the status quo. Yet, unequal offline power relations continue to shape these access points.

This article examines the contemporary configuration of youth cultural politics through self-expressive artifacts, probing in the process the changing mediascape in the Arab world. The article discusses the relationship between youth and media focusing on the way young people develop and circulate their own messages outside corporate, religious, and state institutions. Youth-generated media is introduced as a framework for analyzing these alternative forms of communication. The article focuses on the case of Lebanese blogger Fink Ployd whose blog, BloggingBeirut.com, exemplifies the characteristics of youth-generated media. Blurring old and new media, BloggingBeirut.com, was a platform for youth cultural politics surrounding the July 06 War.

The uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, immediately labeled “the Arab Spring,” are best described as processes rather than outcomes. Despite being a common area of media focus due to decades-long geopolitics, the Arab Spring, as a mediatized meta-event, has led to the reemergence of the region as a discursive territory. The communicative spaces that opened up during and in the aftermath of the uprisings allowed for a multiplicity of topics to reenter public discourse across local, national, and transnational scales. In the process, seasoned debates such as religious sectarianism and democratic institutionalization gained magnitude. More specific debates such as Turkey’s role as a model/antimodel added new discursive aspects to the multitopic ensemble. The purpose of this article is to reflect on the communicative and scalar dimensions in the mediation of the Arab Spring by way of taking the debates on Turkey as a case in point.