The digital as an alternative space for social and political resistance : A study of Egyptian visual user-created content (UCC) / Nihal Alaa Gaber Elsayed Nour ; Supervised Randa Aboubakr

Thesis (M.A.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Arts - Department of English

The rapid worldwide advancement in the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) revolutionized social and cultural infrastructures on a global level. Though Egypt is a developing country struggling to keep pace with ICTs{u2019} expanding applications, its social and cultural infrastructures have been altered by this expansion, specifically by the internet. Not only has the relative accessibility to the internet in Egypt lend itself to government and corporate use, but it also gave people the chance to access an alternative space they can wield for social and political resistance. The digital context also has the potential for disrupting certain reductionist assumptions about the concepts of {u2018}popular culture{u2019}, {u2018}the people{u2019} and {u2018}class{u2019}. These inadequate assumptions, which conceptualize these terms in stable, rigid modes have been questioned and reevaluated throughout the last century but the introduction of the aspect of cyberculture poses further questions about them. This thesis seeks to investigate the cultural production of what is termed user-created content (UCC) on cyberspace. It undertakes to examine specific forms of this content, like Facebook memes and what users term 2comics3. These 2comics3 (redefined as cartoons in this thesis) are produced by amateurs who make use of computer software and other free and accessible repositories online to create visually and linguistically subversive content. Through an eclectic methodology that is derived from visual culture, cultural studies and media studies, this thesis seeks to explore the phenomenon of user-created content/cartoons in Egypt. It also closely examines a sample of these cartoons in terms of visual techniques utilized and evaluates the selection of these techniques

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