Critical to the vision of a new United Arab Emirates is an educated, skilled workforce that fuels the intelligent growth needed in a knowledge-based economy. As the country begins developing a vision of that economy, the mediated transparent environment fundamental to this process will carry with it new visions of (and possibilities for) living life. If peaceful change is to be achieved, a transitional generation faces the conundrum of adapting the best that modernity can offer while retaining the best of tradition. As have others, this study suggests two things: that (1) media literacy, growing in part from education is correlated with urbanization and a changing infrastructure and that (2) media in all its forms is inseparable from the outcome of this drive to modernization.
