On New Media and Creativity in Lebanon

People in Lebanon are obsessed with their country. Technological networks have become sites where utopian models of Lebanon are continually being shaped. However, when interacting with these networks, the active citizen is often passive in receiving content. Many people in Lebanon are generally very receptive to mass media and the huge amount of often contradictory information it provides. Consequently, personal identities are blurred. One trap many fall into is fragmentation of their identities. Some are ready to defend a new but fake identity, although its real owner may have thrown it away and the new owner found it somewhere in the information-sphere. Real values can be found within one's "deeper" (cultural, national and familial) identity, not only in one's economic value. The economy can change rapidly in a lifetime, unlike one's "deeper" and real identity. Subjects discussed over a morning coffee with neighbors were once static but have now become varied, variable and scrambled, depending on the media perceived on the screen.

Turning points in Lebanese social behavior include the introduction of the satellite dish, Short Message Service (SMS) and the mobile phone. A 60-year-old woman who once sat on her balcony, observing and even supervising activities taking place in the street below, noticing the tiny changes and micro-events happening here and there, now has a new favorite spot at home: on the sofa in front of the TV set with its wide choice of satellite channels. The (literal) Lebanese term for this is "sitting in front of the 'Dish.'" The large variety of channels has provided this person with a new way to spend her spare time. This citizen needs to find ways to fill the emptiness of what is left of her life: what remains after a spouse's death, children's marriages, children's trips abroad for work or study; what remains after the role of telling stories and leading discussions in the family is eclipsed and defeated by new technologies. This citizen, like many others, is convinced that academic study in Lebanon is good, but not good enough. Work in Lebanon is also fine, although it is not always available or safe due to uneven security and the fluctuating economic climate. Thus, young people leave Lebanon for good in order to seek stability, security and a better future for their children. They seek a second nationality; a sort of social security document enabling easy evacuation from the country should another war start. Then, in their absence, the parents of these young people start to enjoy the multitude of channels . . . hundreds, even thousands of channels!

Once they become channel-zappers they are no longer desperate Lebanese. They have a reason to live again. They wake up in the morning and start zapping. The remote control becomes their favorite tool. Even if they do not know how to fully use its features, they are at least able to locate the channel and volume buttons. Once they become advanced zappers, they discover that they can zap whenever they feel bored. Zapping thus becomes a means to escape boredom, control the media and react against the passivity associated with TV. These viewers keep zapping and only stop for brief moments to watch fragments they find interesting. They enjoy these "peak points" that connect them to life. Each peak point is a link followed by the search for another peak point. There is a red alert, however, whenever the next link is hard to find. This creates some mutuality between the viewer and the broadcasting company providing the content. Because the viewer uses the moving images to construct a new, coherent, although edited, meaning, the broadcasting company has to provide interesting quality content, and the viewer has to hunt for it. Hence, hunting is added to zapping.

The ever-changing screen illustrates how broadcasting companies now promote their programs to these active viewers, who continue to avoid bad content and search for good material. In addition to rerunning a program up to five times a day (in order to satisfy viewers who might live in...