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The Middle East's digital turn has renewed hopes of socio-economic development and political change across the region, but it is also marked by stark contradictions and historical tensions. In this book, Mohamed Zayani and Joe F. Khalil contend that the region is caught in a digital double bind in which the same conditions that drive the state, market, and public immersion in the digital also inhibit change and perpetuate stasis.
The Digital Double Bind offers a path-breaking analysis of how the Middle East negotiates its relation to the digital and provides a roadmap for a critical engagement with technology and change in the Global South.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- CONJUNCTURES AND DISJUNCTIONS
- 1. The Digital Middle East
- 2. Reckoning with Change
- ASPIRATIONS AND HINDRANCES
- 3. The Digital as Infrastructure
- 4. Technologies of Center and Periphery
- 5. The Digital as Digitality
- EXPRESSION AND SUPPRESSION
- 6. The Enticement of Digital Citizenship
- 7. Collective Voices and Digital Contention
- 8. Digital Adaptations and Disruptive Power
- IMITATION AND INNOVATION
- 9. In Pursuit of the Knowledge Economy
- 10. Cultural and Creative Industries
- 11. Emerging Digital Economies
- CONNECTIVITY AND COLLECTIVITY
- 12. Virtual Lives and Digital Spaces
- 13. The Demographics of a Connected Culture
- 14. Collectivity, Identity and Multivocality
- Afterword
- Notes
- References
- Index
About the author
Mohamed Zayani is Professor of Critical Theory at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar.
Joe F. Khalil is Associate Professor of Global Media at Northwestern University in Qatar.
Summary
The digital has emerged as a driving force of change that is reshaping everyday life and affecting nearly every sphere of vital activity. Yet, its impact has been far from uniform. The multifaceted implications of these ongoing shifts differ markedly across the world, demanding a nuanced understanding of specific manifestations and local experiences of the digital.
In The Digital Double Bind, Mohamed Zayani and Joe F. Khalil explore how the Middle East's digital turn intersects with complex political, economic, and socio-cultural dynamics. Drawing on local research and rich case studies, they show how the same forces that brought promises of change through digital transformation have also engendered tensions and contradictions. The authors contend that the ensuing disjunctures have ensnared the region in a double bind, which represents the salient feature of an unfolding digital turn. The same conditions that drive the state, market, and public immersion in the digital also inhibit the region's drive to change.
The Digital Double Bind reconsiders the question of technology and change, moving beyond binary formulations and familiar trajectories of the network society. It offers a path-breaking analysis of change and stasis in the Middle East and provides a roadmap for a critical engagement with digitality in the Global South.
Additional text
Zayani and Khalil's comprehensive and conceptually ambitious review of media in the Middle East makes an important and much-needed contribution to debates on technology and regionalization generally. This is a landmark study in the de-westernization of media research. We have needed a book like this for a long time!
