Introduction
The digital era has connected all living humans together. Nowadays, a person in Antarctica is able to follow up with the American presidential elections effortlessly and cheaply from where he or she is. He immediately can access the internet and start sharing his view on each candidate’s campaign, which candidate he supports, and which he opposes. The impact this Antarctica resident could have, with millions of other non-Americans who also shared their views on the topic, is unmeasurable. Foreign opinions could influence the American voters and sway their opinions towards the more internationally favored candidate even if that candidate might not be the most appropriate one for their country. Foreign News headlines and social media posts can, to some extent, affect decision making in any part of the world. Similarly, The Middle East was and is faced with similar conditions. Events and decisions of the Arab states are a major interest of the western news that constantly criticize them and prompts Arabs to adapt to a more westernized, open-minded lifestyle as means of development and achieving political and social progress. In fact, some Arabs have welcomed the western calls and have taken radical decisions to better appeal to the western communities even if those decisions oppose the Arabian and Islamic norms. They have made fundamental institutional changes to pass new laws, if done 50 years ago, would be considered a cultural crisis. Losing the cultural diversity would result in a unified limited view of the world, as all people would, then, behave in a similar manner which would expose the human mind to a biased version of the life that would restrict an individual’s freedom of choice and uniqueness. This urgent situation raises concerns over what are the most effective measures and actions that the modern young Egyptians can undertake to limit western political and social intervention and to save their cultural identity from disappearance and criticism, while actively participating in the modernization and development of the human race.
Through providing detailed analysis of data obtained from primary methods of research in the forms of surveys, face to face and zoom interviews, focus groups, and careful observations, this research provides an abstract guideline to help better understand the nature of the Egyptian culture and how it interacts and coexists with other cultures without imposing negative influences on each other, and how such knowledge could be used to create boundaries between the Egyptian and western cultures to maintain the splendid individuality of the Egyptian identity.
The importance of this research is reflected in its broad level of application, for the methods evaluated in the paper could be used as framework for other cultures with similar contexts, as it gives an overview of what methods and decisions an ethnic groups could apply, respectively, to save their cultures from loss due to acculturation- a process in which an individual adapts to characteristics of a culture other than his native one (Word Reference) - pressured by the western hemisphere. Additionally, The paper takes into great account the significant role of the digitalized modes of communication, for they are perceived as weapons employed by the west to not physically colonize lands, but rather to colonize the minds and culture of its people (Mavrinac, 2019) and (Chulu, 2015). However, with the current accelerating rate of global change, more research would be required to further investigate the topic in future times, and to verify if the currently proposed methods would still be viable within the span of the next three decades.