This ain't Kansas!

He's a geek based in Amman and makes the point in his blog that his first name is Ahmad, not Ahmed. Equally important, if not more so, are his views on the media and the web. He reports here on a symposium at which he spoke recently and my main takeaway is the following quotation, which is not without interesting implications:

"The digital media revolution in the Arab world may not be on the web, but will definitely be mobile."

It was after reading this that I found that Michael Rosenblum had picked up on a statistic which I also noted a few days ago:

While the average American watches 4.2 hours of television a day, The University of Ohio reports that 80 percent of American families did not purchase or read even one book last year.

Which got me thinking that maybe America is more like the Arab world than one might suspect, given that neither book publishing nor reading are major aspects of the cultural landscape out here in the Sandlands.

Rosenblum typically found in the statistic (which indeed is deplorable as far as literacy in the USA is concerned) encouraging...

"The answer, I think, is that thinking people, intelligent people have to become video literate, seize control of the ‘means of production’ (i.e., get yourself a camera and FCP) and begin creating content that is both intelligent and thoughtful, but in video instead of text."

Given growing number of video-enabled mobile phones in the Middle East, that could make sense for Ahmad, I think. It does for me.