Media and the Experience of Social Change: The Arab World

by Tim Markham

Overview

Drawing on both philosophy and an investigation of what people actually do with media, this book takes aim at the conventional wisdom and opens up new ways of thinking about media and the way we experience change.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786604224
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	07/28/2017
Pages:	246
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Tim Markham is Professor of Journalism and Media at Birkbeck, University of London. He is author of Media and Everyday Life: A Textbook (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016 in press) and The Politics of War Reporting: Authority, Authenticity and Morality (Manchester University Press, 2011), and co-author of Media Consumption and Public Engagement: Beyond the Presumption of Attention (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, revised ed. 2010).

Table of Contents

1. Introduction / 2. Professional Media Amid Change and Hysteresis / 3. Empirical Perspectives: Arab Journalists Debate the Upheavals / 4. Change and Hysteresis in Cairo / 5. Flux and Atrophy in Beirut / 6. Anti-politics, Populism and Social Media / 7. The Politics of Change: Media, Protest and Conflict / 8. Facebook Revolutions? Understanding the Work That Social Media Do / 9. Living in Interesting Times: The Work of Experience, Engagement and Identity / References

Editorial Reviews

The Arab uprisings, as well as the tumultuous political upheavals that have occurred since, suggest that we live not only in a world of crises but one that is undergoing profound transformations. Tim Markham’s distinctive book thoughtfully encourages us to approach and understand this same world as lived, communicated and experienced in the everyday. He has written no less than a phenomenology of the political at once timely, eloquent and insightful. Recommended.

Simon Cottle

At the time in which political life has become increasingly volatile and polarised there is so much at stake in the future of journalism and media. Political upheavals in the Middle East in particular are played out across a number of media platforms, highlighting frustrations and aspirations of millions of people demanding to be heard and calling for change. Tim Markham opens out this fiield and critically examines the conflicting, contradictory, micro impulses that stimulate and constrain media production and consumption in the region. In contrast to some of the celebratory accounts of the role of social media as the agent of change, this book anchors media in a much broader context of everyday capitalism.

Gholam Khiabany

Tim Markham explores how and why people navigate the world in relation to everyday experiences of modern media. Delving into the news reportage of the ‘Arab spring’ uprisings, he recasts familiar concepts - such as identity, cultural value, citizenship, engagement and trust - to secure an alternative basis for theory-building. This is a perceptive, challenging and at times provocative study, one certain to prompt fresh, counter-intuitive thinking about journalism’s responsibilities in public life.

Stuart Allan