Hungry for content: How the COVID-19 pandemic changed media usage in the Middle East and North Africa

Abstract

While the uprisings during the Arab Spring had a significant influence on the adoption of technology and its insertion into peoples' daily lives, the COVID-19 pandemic has been paramount to the new disruptions in the media landscape, provoking accelerated changes as well as novel relations between social actors on mediatised platforms. Whereas the first paradigm shift with media usage can be found in the adoption of the internet and user-generated content on media platforms, the second paradigm shift observed at the time of the pandemic is an acceleration of media consumption, as well as interwoven relations between work and play on mediatised platforms, creating both solidarity and distance between the users of digital content. The pandemic marks a new technological milestone in audiences’ media usage and habits, one that has thus far been both positive - through the interconnectedness and agency - and negative - because of a lack of access for some - for cultural diversity and intercultural relations. The adoption of mobile internet skyrocketed in the region, and some countries, particularly Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have ranked among the countries with the highest penetration rates globally for platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.