The Social Construction of the Arab Online Media Audience: Paradoxical Issues in the Digital Era

Abstract

The online media services are substantially changing the landscape of audience consumption. Indeed, there is a need to know why some of the Arab audience members use online media, and how they interact with it. The core of this article tackles some contradictory issues resulting from using online media among a sample of the Arab audience. Issues of fragmentation, diversity of content, the virtual public sphere, or convergence are inherent to the current study. A conceptual framework has been developed, based on the “uses and gratifications” theory, under which two major hypotheses have been put to the test: there is a causal relationship of co-dependency between the audience of online media and the mainstream media content; and there is a reciprocal relationship between the richness and quality of online media content and its primacy and relevance among the online media audience.

Keywords

• Social reality
• pluralism
• public sphere
• networking