Assignment1

The Arab media has undergone an enormous change in the last decade. Ayish started his theoretical chapter by dividing the analytical approaches to media into three paradigms:

· The modernization paradigm

· The dependency paradigm


· The globalization paradigm.
The main thesis of the book is that television development in the Arab world in the 1990s was a function of the interchange between local and global forces in political, cultural, economic, and technological sectors.
Ayish formulates a "media interplay model" that hypothesizes that the local variables will depend upon the global variables.
He divides the development of Arab television into three main periods:

· The first period is the formative phase (1954-1975).
· The second phase is that of national expansion (1976-1990).
· The third phase is the regional and global expansion (since 1990).
He comes up with two possible progressions for the Arab world television:
· The convergence process that manifested itself in the establishment of web casting services for multiple broadcasters
· The mergers (Arab regimes will have to adjust to deal with these developments by, for instance, merging "multiple satellite television services into single super channels" to rationalize resources and be competitive)
The book gives us many typologies:
· One based on patterns of political communication with 3 types: traditional government-controlled television, reformist government-controlled television, and liberal commercial television.
· A second typology based on the globalist pattern, the localist pattern, and the glocalist pattern.
· A third typology based on technological policy patterns: the pragmatist policy pattern and the formalist one.