White dialect Versus White Identity New Media and the crisis of Arab cultural identity: A qualitative study

Abstract

This paper embodies a qualitative research to identify features of the Arab cultural crisis and mechanisms of preserving its particularities within the new media from universities professors affiliated with universities in the Arab region. The results of in-depth semi-structured interviews revealed that Arab new media users seem to feel a deep gap between the export of technology and consumer societies; this negatively affects their psyche and may push them to reconsider their original identity, creating what might be called a "white identity" as a kind of hybrid character, transcending the forms of local and regional values, but deriving from them features of a new, globalized, and unifying culture. To overcome the risk of losing authentic Arab identity features, interviewees advocate judicious use of cyberspace: Openness while maintaining the compass of authenticity; participants in this research paper call the intellectual elite to play a significant role in raising awareness and consolidating Arab cultural identity features through new media.