ABSTRACT
The modern Arabic-speaking Middle East is incomprehensible without taking into account the central importance of mass media. Existing literature on media in the Arab Middle East tends to clump (with some important exceptions) at either end of a historical spectrum: analyses of the adoption of the printing press in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and scholarship on “new” (primarily digital) media as they have unfolded over the past two decades. Much work on contemporary “new media” suffers from an implicit technological determinism. Historical literature is generally more sound, but not necessarily well focused on media as a phenomenon that deserves analysis in its own right. I argue that “new media,” stripped of its technological determinism, is a useful concept. A history of new media over the past hundred and fifty years or so will make media an object of study on par with “economy” or “society,” or “culture.” One would not want to fall into the trap of assuming the existence of such an object as a given. There is, however, a great deal to be gained from understanding the media system historically as it emerges and takes on the status of a socially constructed reality in the Arabic-speaking world.
