Pakistan’s Cultural Identity in the Era of Netflix: Perspectives of EMU’s Pakistani Students

This research is a qualitative, exploratory study that aims to understand the cultural identity of the Pakistani young adults in relation to Netflix. With a lack of youth centric local media available for Pakistani young adults, it is common for them to be exposed to adult oriented local and international content, both influencing, along with various political and social factors explored in the literature, the cultural identity that they develop. The sample population for this study consists of 15 Pakistani nationals studying at the Eastern Mediterranean University (EMU) who are undergraduates, users of Netflix, and aged between 18-25 years. I conducted semi-structured interviews and made use of the textual analysis methodology to analyze the information collected. There were three main research questions driving the study: how young Pakistani adults view the culture of Pakistan and subsequently their identity, how they navigate their way around the lack of youth centric content, and whether Netflix aids their identity formation, if at all, in a manner contrary to Pakistan’s cultural values. Findings show that the participants view their culture and cultural identity in terms of Islam but want to change the conservative air surrounding it, previously preferred third party websites and now Netflix to consume international content, and feel that Netflix has had no impact on their values, although it somewhat influences them in general. This study contributes to the dearth of literature regarding Pakistani identity and Netflix’s relationship with identity and benefits government and media personnel, academicians and students, media scholars, psychologists, sociologists, the Netflix team and more. Keywords: Pakistan, Cultural Identity, Netflix, Westernization