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New Media, Social Change, and the Communication Revolution in an Egyptian Village

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Media Evolution on the Eve of the Arab Spring

Abstract

The political revolution that caused an upheaval in the political domain in modern Egypt was preceded and accompanied by an equally powerful communication revolution that transformed the patterns of communication in both urban and rural Egypt. This study investigates the complex intersections between the dynamics of social change in a rural Egyptian village and the multiple transformations in the media arena in the same village, with the intent of assessing the numerous implications of these intersecting factors on Egyptian rural women’s lived realities, including their familial and social relations, and the multiple resistances, challenges, and paradoxes that confronted them. It is a follow-up study to earlier research, which was conducted in the village of Kafr Masoud, close to the city of Tanta in the Egyptian Delta between 1989 and 1999. The previous study focused on Egyptian rural women’s exposure to televised public awareness programs dealing with family planning and literacy. It was an ethnographic audience study investigating why and how Egyptian rural women in this particular village interpreted the messages in these televised family planning and literacy campaigns differently, based on their varying demographic and psychographic characteristics, as well as why and how their interpretations diverged from, or overlapped with, the original, intended meaning of the messages.

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Notes

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Authors

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Leila Hudson Adel Iskandar Mimi Kirk

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© 2014 Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University

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Khamis, S. (2014). New Media, Social Change, and the Communication Revolution in an Egyptian Village. In: Hudson, L., Iskandar, A., Kirk, M. (eds) Media Evolution on the Eve of the Arab Spring. Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137403155_3

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