Arab Media & Society

This ethnographic audience study investigates the complex intersections between the dynamics of social change in the village of Kafr Masoud, close to the city of Tanta in the Egyptian Delta, and the transformations in the media arena in the same village, with the intent of assessing the numerous implications of these intersecting transformations on Egyptian rural women’s lived realities, including their familial and social relations, and, most importantly, their media reception and consumption experiences. In doing so, the study explores the complex paradoxes that these transformations have introduced in these women’s lives and the new challenges they have created on multiple levels, including: challenges to governmental ideologies, traditional religious authority, male domination, and parental control.

In analyzing the dynamics of the shifting social landscape and the shifting media landscape in the village of Kafr Masoud and their multiple implications for women’s complex media consumption experiences, the study takes into consideration these women’s construction of their own gendered identities, as an active media audience, based on a wide array of variables, including age, marital status, education, socio-economic level, and employment.

It is worth noting that this is a follow-up study to an earlier ethnographic audience research which was conducted in the same village ten years ago, between 1989 and 1999, which analyzed Egyptian rural women’s exposure to televised governmental public awareness campaigns dealing with family planning and literacy, and how and why their interpretations diverged from, or overlapped with, the original intended meaning of these televised messages. Taking into account the impact of the gradual ongoing process of social change on women’s media reception experiences, I decided to return to the village of Kafr Masoud in 2009 to conduct a follow-up study ten years later to find out what has changed in the village, in terms of the intersecting factors of social change, on the one hand, and new communication patterns, on the other hand, and how these factors are continuously and effectively shaping the women of Kafr Masoud’s media experiences as an active, interactive and dynamic audience.

The Importance of this Study:

This study attempts to answer a number of important questions, such as: Why and how has the village of Kafr Masoud changed over the last ten years? What kind of implications have these changes had on women’s lived realities in the village? What kinds of new media have been introduced into the village in recent years? How has the introduction of these new media affected women as media consumers and as communicators? What kinds of implications, challenges, and paradoxes have resulted from the introduction of these new media?

The fact that the study was conducted on Egyptian rural women has special significance, since it allows the investigation of the impact of different values, traditions, and beliefs and the complex processes of media reception and social change in a culturally specific, non-western context, and among a non-western audience, which has been largely invisible in previous audience research that has mostly been conducted in western contexts by western scholars and focused mainly on western audiences (Bausinger, 1984; Gray, 1992; Lull, 1990; Morley, 1986; Press, 1989). Although there is a growing trend in recent years to extend media research dealing with women to non-western contexts, most of these studies mainly focused on women’s representation in the media, women as communicators, or the effects of the media on women, rather than on women as an active and interactive media audience. The few studies that tackled the theme of women’s interpretation of mediated messages (Bissell, 2004; Press & Cole, 1995; Weaver, 2004), or how girls and women make meaning out of cultural experiences (Acosta-Alzuru & Kreshel, 2002), are still largely conducted in western contexts and on western audiences.

Moreover, the theme of social change and its interaction with the processes of media reception and consumption is still largely overlooked in many of these non-western studies. The few studies which tackled this theme dealt with how the process of social change has been portrayed in the media (Yunjuan & Xiaoming, 2007), rather than how it interacts and overlaps with women’s own lived realities and their media reception and consumption experiences. Only a few of these studies were conducted by women researchers on women audiences and tackled the issue of ‘gendered identities transformation and media reception, within the context of social change’ (Sakamoto, 1999, p.173), and even fewer of them tackled this theme using an ethnographic methodology (Kim, 2006), which highlights the fact that ‘Ethnographic studies of television in everyday life are still relatively rare, and mostly conducted in a western context’ (Kim, 2006, p. 129). The value of using ethnography in media studies lies in the fact that ‘the very diversity of modes of reception, reception contexts, uses of media content, and the performative and creative relationships that audiences develop suggest that media ethnography is a highly complex, multifaceted endeavor’ (Murphy and Kraidy, 2003, p. 5).

Therefore, this study contributes to audience research and feminist media theory through focusing on an underrepresented audience, angle, and methodological orientation. This is particularly important in light of Dow & Condit’s (2005) remark that ‘The growth of feminist scholarship that pays specific attention to race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and globalism is a heartening sign, although there is a need for much more of it, as well as a need for it to spread across methodological and content categories’ (p. 467).