“Digital technologies clearly enable rapid, many-to-many communication that can be deployed tactically in moments of crisis; they provide individuals with avenues to participate in public life—a venue that is mostly closed to most citizens.”
Unlike the other courses I took that focused solely on the specifics of media and politics separately, this course approached both media and politics as one entity. The quote above encompasses the course’s aims to understand how the changing communication and information technologies have affected the public spheres, consolidated identity, redefine citizenship and provoke political disputes. It looks at the development of technologies, the social networks formed, the ways people communicated, the user and producer of media, the state, and the public.
I think this is an excellent pre-requisite course prior to taking other CMAP courses. This course is the very nexus of the certificate and covers multiple topics that I would not have thought of if I was not taking the class. I highly recommend that before any CMAP prospect students proceed to higher-level media and politics classes that they take Professor Zayani’s class first. As a senior taking the course to meet the requirements of the certificate, I think I would not have struggled as much to come up with a comprehensive thesis topic. Taking this introductory course allowed me to round up everything I have learned from the previous courses in perspective of my thesis.
The title of the course itself, Media, Culture and Politics in the Middle East, is explanatory of what to expect to learn from the class. The course examines the various ways that these three principles interact and shape the social, political, and cultural environment in the region. The changes in the technologies were simultaneously studied alongside the political developments in the Middle East. While there is a strong correlation between the three, the course looks into case studies that might have had causation such as the pervasive use of social media leading to the Arab Spring revolution. The readings are mostly about media theories, forms, and practices in the pre-digital and digital era, contemporary media issues, and news articles covering an event related to the week’s reading.
Even with a few weeks left to conclude the semester, I could say that the course helped me to broaden my understanding of media trends and key events in the Middle East. It allowed me to reflect on other author’s perspectives and connecting their arguments as dialogues in my mind. Part of the course assessment is a presentation on a reading and I was assigned the topic of digital activism in authoritarian regimes. I thought it was a significant and relevant topic because of the connection between digital activism and citizen journalism. Nowadays, people use their social media networks to share their narrative of an exposé by capturing pictures and videos and sharing them online. Questions on legitimacy, authenticity, and quality are raised by both digital activism and citizen journalism. While there are no direct answers to these difficult questions, I look forward to completing this course and acquiring more theoretical tools necessary to understand the complex relationship betweend media and state in the Middle East.