International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

The history of communication as an academic field of study in the Arab world goes back to 1939 when the Higher Journalism Institute (HJI) was established within the College of Arts at Cairo University (Cairo University 2004). By the early 1970s, Egypt and Iraq (Baghdad University) were the only countries in the Arab region to have full-fledged academic communication programs. In the early 1980s, however, mass communication programs mushroomed in many Arab universities, and as the third millennium dawned on the Arab world, almost all institutions of higher education offered some form of academic program in media studies.From a historical perspective, communication studies in the Arab world have evolved in three distinctive post-World War II contexts: the modernization paradigm context, the dependency paradigm context, and the globalization paradigm context (→ Dependency Theories; Globalization of the Media; Modernization). In the three contexts, communication has developed in line with western-oriented perspectives about politics, culture, and social change. Daniel Lerner's classic about the “passing of traditional Society” (Lerner 1954) seemed to have focused research on a presumed media role in socio-economic modernization (→ Lerner, Daniel). To a large extent, academic programs share some common features: they cater largely to undergraduate students, focus more on professional ... log in or subscribe to read full text