TRANSFORMATION OF PAKISTAN’S MEDIA LANDSCAPE UNDER THE CONDITIONS OF THE DIGITAL DIVIDE: EXPERT ASSESSMENTS OF THE EFFECT OF SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCE

Abstract

The article examines the transformation of Pakistan’s media landscape under the influence of social media through the lens of J. van Dijk’s concept of the digital divide. The scientific novelty of the study lies in shifting the focus from user statistics and literature synthesis, which have dominated existing research, to the perceptions of media experts, and in identifying a research-level digital divide as an additional manifestation of digital inequality. The aim is to determine how leading Pakistani specialists in mass communication assess the effect of social media on the national media environment and what place digital inequality occupies in these assessments. The empirical basis comprises in-depth expert interviews with seven faculty members of mass communication departments at Pakistani universities, selected through purposive sampling and analysed through thematic analysis in MAXQDA, together with current statistics on the country’s digital environment. The findings show that the transformation is real and manifests itself in a platform shift in media consumption, the erosion of editorial control and the spread of citizen journalism, and changing news-consumption practices. At the same time, the experts unanimously record the reproduction of the digital divide not only at the level of access (urban–rural and gender imbalances) but also at the level of knowledge production: a lack of resources, limited access to current research, a language barrier, and methodological lag. It is concluded that in a developing country the digital divide is a multilevel phenomenon affecting the media research community itself.