Arab youth, education, and satellite broadcasting

Abstract

This chapter explores the complex intersections between Arab youth, satellite broadcasting and informal education in the Arab region, with particular focus on the extent to which youth favourite television programmes act as sources of cultural and moral education. Informal education is a lifelong process within which the individual acquires attitudes, values, skills and knowledge from his/her closest surroundings including family, work, leisure, and the mass media (Guseva and Kravale, 2006). In this chapter, informal education refers to the learning and acquisition of knowledge, information, values, behaviour and lifestyles associated with young people’s interaction with and experience of satellite television. Contrary to arguments in the Arab public discourse1 that youth’s exposure to satellite television, and especially entertainment programmes, is ‘corrupting’ and at best ‘bad education’, this chapter argues that satellite broadcasting is an important source of informal education for youth. It provides them with opportunities to learn and enhance their knowledge about many issues whether political, social, economic, or cultural, and thus, contributes to their intellectual enrichment, personal development and self-esteem. The Arab public discourse, which is dominated by the elder generation, is filled with warnings that youth consumption of television is passive in nature, and that young people are merely absorbing materials they are offered (Amin, 2000; Abaza, 2001; Al-Fawi, 2001; Jum‘a and Al-Shawāf, 2005). Concerns revolve around issues which might affect the formation of their identity in a negative way – in particular relating to what is seen as economic affluence, moral permissiveness, corruption, and a reduced sense of Arab cultural identity. However, this chapter argues that youth responses to television involve interpreting what they see, not just absorbing the contents offered. In this, I agree with Giddens (1993) that “TV watching, even of trivial programmes, is not an inherently low-level intellectual activity; that young people ‘read’ programmes by relating them to other systems of meaning in their everyday lives” (p. 451). The chapter reveals that youths acknowledge the influence satellite television has on their lifestyle, values, and behaviour, and consider it is necessary for their education and personal development. This is seen either as a positive force (wanting to emulate) or negative (rejection of what is portrayed on screen). Either way, the data collected show a conscious rather than passive viewing, which leads to the conclusion that youth are an active audience, critically assessing the programmes on offer. They also contend that programmes provide them with access to information and experiences that can contribute to their learning and therefore help build their value-system and lifestyle in general, even more than do the school or the home. In the developing world youth is a stage of life that has only recently begun to receive focused attention, mainly because of high demographic rates in this sector of the population, and consequently the latter’s political importance (Lloyd, 2005: 1). The use and meaning of the terms ‘young people’ and ‘youth’ vary around the world, depending on political, economic and socio-cultural context. Also, sociologists and psychologists have different opinions in determining the characteristics of this stage and its length. Yet, it is generally agreed to be the stage where the most significant changes in youths’ interests, social behaviour and tendency to freedom and individuality occur (Al-Askary, 2001). In this chapter, individuals aged between 16 and 27 years old have been interviewed to probe youth engagement with media in Arab society. The study of the role of the media in youth education is not devoid of problems. The complexity of the process involved in media consumption makes it more difficult to methodologically measure the effect of media on youth education. Neither large-scale surveys nor detailed experiments replicate or reflect that actual experience of viewing and reading (Street, 2001: 93). It is also very difficult to separate the influence of media from all other social, psychological and educational factors involved in the formation of personality. It is my view that inadequacies inherent in audience studies analysis are due to the fact that media stimuli routinely interact with other social stimuli. Disentangling these multiple influences is extremely difficult and as a result clear evidence of direct media influence is difficult to obtain (Croteau and Hoynes, 2000: 242), still less to quantify. By employing qualitative techniques, this chapter is moving away from inherently inadequate approaches which measure and quantify media effects in an attempt to disentangle different media influences, towards an ethnography of discourse, of attitudes, and opinions as well as perceptions of youth audiences. Popular media texts such as entertainment programming (reality TV shows, soap operas, movies, music, etc.) were initially approached by researchers throughout the 1980s and early 1990s (cf. Ang, 1991; Hobson, 1982; Morley, 1980) as sites in which ideological discourses around class, gender, race and power were produced, organized and negotiated (Tincknell and Raghuram, 2002: 200). In doing so, the agency involved in the sense-making processes that audiences bring to their understanding of textual meaning was emphasized. Thus, audiences were seen as active agents, not passive subjects, in their consumption and enjoyment of popular texts, and the process of understanding was one of negotiation rather than imposition (ibid.). To explore selective aspects of the above issues, research was undertaken between 2005 and 2008 amongst a cross-section of Arab youth in Jordan, Egypt, United Arab Emirates and Palestine. The main method of data collection was focus group interviews. Twelve focus group interviews (totalling 86 participants in mixed and non-mixed gender groups and numbering on average seven participants in each) were conducted with young Arabs in the focal countries. This is both an ample and still a manageable size for qualitative research. While representativeness is not an objective in qualitative research, when making a generalization about Arab youth it is important to aim for a fair representation of variation within the Arab population. Therefore, care was taken to choose equal numbers from both sexes, as well as informants from a mixture of socio-economic groups, such as the seven young people from the poorer Cairene neighbourhood of Manshiet Nasser.2 Participants were randomly selected by using the snowballing technique. The chapter offers some analyses of the discourses underlying the aspirations of Arab youth and their views on media and education.