Target Audience and their Critical Conciousness
Media can be a tool for oppression and it also can be a tool for liberation if used correctly. One thing we gain from media is Critical consciousness which enables us to be more conscious and make changes in the world their living. the expectation of this debate is that the audience take action to better their society.
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Critical consciousness educates people towards the goal of social change. This theory was illustrated by Paulo Freire in his ground-breaking book Pedagogy of the oppressed. In this book he talked about the role of education and how it helps maintain control and domination in different societies. Freire applied a different way of teaching by giving people the tools to go out and improve their society. (Paulo Freire, 1968)
For the purpose of this event the audience we will range from 15 to 36 and will also include faculty, staff members and parents in the United Arab Emirates. Furthermore, this event will provide professors with some valuable information to base their research on or incorporate into their syllabus or they can integrate the debate into their lesson plans. They can also incorporate the media tools that help their literacy such as college databases that use peer reviewed research (e.g. CUD Data Base) other examples include new assistive technologies such as Free natural reader or dragon which are new software’s that read text for people who are dyslexic or illiterate. Electronic media can provide illiterate people who live in remote or oppressed environments with an opportunity to create social change and a big tool to create that change is having the ability to read and write.
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Young adults who are watching may gain some self-awareness on its effects, moreover this event can also shed some light of how the advancement of AI has provided them with the luxury to disregard their own literacy (e.g. spell check, Grammarly etc.) in addition, this would be a beneficial research topic for a student who is in the field of Mass communications and Media. Not only are we providing useful information for students and faculty we are also providing them with information about the lives young people are leading today and how they are gaining information and experiencing the world through modern technology. Once they understand the world that they are living in they will be able to exert more control over their lives by being critical thinkers.
Research suggests that the category of 18 to 28-year olds have been found to use social media the most in the UAE (Hanif, 2017). The youth of the UAE definitely have many benefits from this over-exposure to electronic media sources. 99.46% of the UAE’s younger generation are educated, which forms one of the reasons for the high rate of media use ("United Arab Emirates Literacy Rate Youth Male Percent Of Males Ages 15 24", 2015). According to a survey by Dr. Jad Melki (2010) comprising of 2,744 university and high school students in Lebanon, Jordan and UAE, the participants from UAE were found to use increased levels of media, especially for entertainment. 68% of UAE’s participants said they had three or more TV sets at home with 62% saying they spend three or more hours using these media specifically for entertainment purposes.
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But besides entertainment, 35% of participants 18 to 28 years old said they used new media, such as websites, internet videos, email, and mobile texting, as a source of news, several times a day. 31% said they use online social networking sites for news. Whereas 23% of the participants from UAE said they used traditional media such as newspapers and magazines for news, several times a day. When it came to usage of electronic media for work or school related purposes, 61% of UAE’s respondents claimed to use it several times a day. In the Canadian University Dubai itself, 69.7% of the students use social media platforms for more than five hours a day ("Nearly 70% of UAE students use social media for five hours or more daily", 2019). A quarter of the participants said that they use social media platforms to discuss socially unacceptable or taboo topics such as those related to sexual, political or religious topics. But in spite of this, the participation rate of youth in the UAE in online activism and political understanding seems to be generally low.
The most used social media platforms among 18 to 24-year olds include- Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, the latter two being the least common. According to Melki (2010), 70.1% of the participants use Twitter to post and share photos, videos and information. TikTok has garnered a cult following of the GenZ category, who are more active on this app as compared to Instagram and Facebook. 81% of the respondents said to have a Facebook account and 102 out of 2,744 claimed to use their Twitter account. Despite these high rates of media usage, the youth of UAE are still very smart users of social media. 73% of the participants of a survey, by YouGov for BPG Group, said that they clearly understand whether a post, from an online celebrity/influencer, is sponsored content or not. They are able to differentiate true and false information without falling into a herd-mentality (Nair, 2019).
