The Digital Double Bind

Change and Stasis in the Middle East

Mohamed Zayani and Joe F. Khalil

Book Description

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

Reviews and Endorsements

Anthony Giddens

Life Fellow of King's College, Cambridge

"Essential reading not only for those specializing in the Middle East, but for anyone concerned with the impact of the digital revolution more generally. Never before in history has cutting-edge technology gone straight to all sectors of the world and en masse to the less-privileged as well as the affluent. The consequences in a sub-continent in which tradition and engrained structures of power remain strong are complex indeed, but brilliantly traced out by the authors."

Karin Wilkins

Author of Prisms of Prejudice

"Zayani and Khalil offer a welcome and significant contribution to our critiques of discourses that simplify and essentialize 'digital' and 'Middle East.' This volume deftly moves beyond binaries, creatively proposing a double bind framework that invokes fluid movements of people and technologies. It is a critical reminder that communication needs to be understood in historical and social contexts, as well as global political and economic structures."

Vincent Mosco

Author of The Smart City in a Digital World

"In this skillfully written and thought-provoking book, Zayani and Khalil take readers to a Middle East few Westerners know. Complex, conflicted, and creative, the region, as this important work describes, is accelerating into the information age with big plans and even bigger uncertainties."

Nick Couldry

London School of Economics and Political Science

"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!"