The Middle East: Social Media Revolution in Public and Private Communication

 

Ehsan Shahghasemi 

University of Tehran, shahghasemi@ut.ac.ir

Michael H. Prosser

University of Virginia, michaelhprosser@hotmail.com

ABSTRACT

Interculturally, social media’s impact has been twofold. Social media have provided unprecedented opportunities for members of different cultures to get to know each other directly and hence they have helped people to demystify their intercultural beliefs. At the same time social media have made poisonous hate speech and xenophobic comments communicated to other cultures which is followed by backfire from hated people. This causes a chain of increasing hate speech which eventually finds its way into practice.

The changes in the media landscape as they are related to intercultural communication are what Shutter (2014: p. 478) calls a new field of inquiry, labelled as “intercultural new media studies,” which consists of two fields: (1) new media and intercultural communication theory and (2) culture and new media. The study of social communities is extremely multidisciplinary, requiring expertise from communication, computer science, sociology, behavioral sciences, mathematics, and statistics

Those who have a relevant position in a social media platform organization have access to the most personal information one can conceive. They know what an individual looks like, how he or she lives, whom he or she loves or hates, where he or she goes, what he or she thinks. Doing research on social media gives us better accuracy, particularly in the case of sensitive issues of intercultural communication in the Middle East. In this article, we evaluate different aspects of social media in the Middle East, though with a critical view, the concept of “Middle East” is itself problematic. Middle East is middle east to another construct which is the West.

Fruitful study of social media in the Middle East necessarily includes considerations there of ethnicity and race, religion, identity and language, the economy, and history and wars in the region and elsewhere. 

Key words: Fundamentalism; Hate Speech; Historicity; Intercultural New Media Studies; Middle East; Social Media

Introduction

The so-called Web2 technologies have brought about a revolution in public and private communication. These technological changes could be predicted as the Internet was developing fast during the 1990s. There were many preliminary social networking tools like Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) which could be traced back to the early 1970s, but, it was the cultural, sociological, economic and political impact of these new technologies which proved to be unprecedented for politicians, businesses, academics, and others. Social media are powerful, but their power is not manifested in the conventional ways one could have predicted 20 years ago. Estimations show that by the year 2014, the number of people who were members of at least one social networking service had passed 2 billion and this number was increasing (Kemp, 2015). 

Social media have left a profound political impact. Things that now happen –particularly in the previously non-democratic societies- could hardly been imagined only two decades ago. As social media give individuals the power of online participation based on –with some reservations- equal opportunities, marginalized and isolated groups are no longer oppressed in silence and they can reach out to the wider society and even bring their plight before the global audience. Many of such instances include the massacre of Rohingya people in Myanmar, relocating, harassing and killing of Sampang Shia people in Indonesia and enslaving Izadi women and children in Iraq that raised global awareness and distaste and pushed the governments to simply “do something.” Social media also have provided a platform for election campaigns and polling surveys which can give the authorities better feedforward and help them make Read More . . .