Digitality and Debordered Spaces in the Era of Streaming: A Global South Perspective

Abstract

Emerging digital entertainment media in the Global South are anchored in nation-state configurations, benefit from supranational affordances, and aspire to global operations. Drawing on Sassen’s “third spaces,” the article focuses on the case of Shahid, a Middle East-based video streaming platform and a hybrid media venture that operates at the intersection of the local and the global. The article suggests digital media entertainment territoriality is such that content services simultaneously inhabit geographic nation-state borders and transversally closed bordered spaces, and point to potential reconfigurations of power dynamics with such ventures functioning as spaces for negotiating cultural politics in the region.