Postmodern Media and Questions of Culture, Identity and Fragmentation: Morocco as a Case Study

Abstract

The present paper tackles the impact and repercussions of postmodern media on Moroccan culture, security, and identity. It sets out to delineate major manifestations and aspects of postmodern media by focusing on Social Networking Sites content and Moroccans‟ frequent exposure to this content along with highlighting the implications of their unprecedented omnipresence in the fabric of our everyday life and the dangers New Media may have on our culture, security, and identity. This paper contends that one way of understanding postmodernism is by considering its coincidence with the age of media and one specific feature of this age is the implosion and booming of the digital image. Thus, the focus will be put on how images, as the backbone of the present visual media, pave the way for the articulation and enhancement of a number of postmodern tenets and how these latter can challenge and probably change Moroccan identity and question Moroccans‟ security.  It is assumed that Moroccans‟ interaction with postmodern media results in a fragmentary, disjointed, discontinuous and decentered sense of self. Furthermore, the alienating trends characterizing postmodern media content broadcast especially on SNSs are supposed to have many cultural implications on the process of identity construction. To verify these hypotheses, I opted for administering a questionnaire to elicit information from respondents to validate the hypotheses on a focus on Facebook. The respondents were geographically distributed on four cities each representing a region of the country namely Rabat, Nador, Oujda and Tangier.

 Keywords:  Postmodern Media, Culture, Identity, Security, Fragmentation