A study on the Role of the Media and Its Effects on the Identity of Muslims (Part 6)
The Impact of Media on Youth Identity
Media, with its overwhelming and rapid influence, possesses the ability and potential to bring diverse societies from the farthest reaches of the world into a unified and coherent thought process, set guidelines for them, and affect their decisions. Given this possibility, Western hegemonic governments, with strategic foresight, exploit this growing technology as an effective tool to reshape thoughts for their personal and national interests, ultimately alienating nations from their ideals, hidden behind the facade of soft warfare.
Their self-serving achievements and personal gains are founded on the influence they exert over media. The true leaders of the media landscape advance their agendas by penetrating individuals’ personal data and implementing their objectives. Through this means, they alter societal values and gradually distance people from their cultural identity, replacing it with Western culture and beliefs.
Media plays a crucial role in shaping the identity of young people. It serves as a vehicle for transmitting cultural elements and altering beliefs and social norms, thus transforming the lifestyle of a society. This lifestyle shift within families leads to value changes, ultimately affecting child-rearing approaches and altering youth identity.
What is Identity?
According to the “Oxford Dictionary,” identity is defined as “the qualities, feelings, and beliefs that distinguish individuals from one another.”
Postmodernist theorist David Poster has attempted to scrutinize the effects of new technologies and media on society and culture through the lens of contemporary theories. In his work titled “The Second Media Age,” he states, “What is significant in the technical innovations of the second media age—the age of the internet, email, and satellites—is the broad transformation of culture, cultural identity, and the new method of identity formation.”
Graham Fuller, former National Intelligence Council deputy chair at the CIA, asserts, “Islam and Islamic movements in our time provide a key source of identity for people seeking to strengthen social solidarity in the face of cultural invasions.” In line with this perspective, the Jewish National Security Affairs Institute in Washington recently announced at a conference: “We must strip Muslims of their religious identity.”
In fact, the strategy of the Western world and Western media is to confront young people’s national and cultural identity with new challenges and crises. Here, the discussion about the role of media in creating identity crises gains significance.
The Mission of Islamic Media in Identity Formation and Preservation
The mission of Islamic media is to institutionalize Islamic culture within society and offer healthy identity models to youth. Islamic media should protect their independent and collective identity against foreign media efforts to homogenize cultural identity and weaken the Islamic identity of Muslim societies.
To the extent that media understand their responsibility in preserving identity and providing identity models to youth, they can counter the negative effects of invasive media that target our cultural identity with crisis-creating strategies.
Islamic media must inform young people about the risks posed by foreign media and their intentions. They should review their historical background, investigate their current position in the world and region, highlight the negative impacts of satellite channels, the internet, and other transnational media, and empower youth to discover their authentic cultural, historical, political, and social identity.
Conclusion
A significant part of youth identity is formed within society and among peers. When family institutions, educational centers, and social environments fulfill their role in shaping individuals’ true identity, the results are social self-confidence, independence, self-discovery, free-thinking, autonomy, pride, growth, development, and the attainment of individual and social excellence. However, if society neglects its role in fostering a healthy collective identity, the outcomes will be dependency, lack of identity, passive imitation, despair, depression, lack of growth, a sense of inferiority toward foreigners, underdevelopment, consumerism, and countless other social problems.
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