A New Footing for the Study of Digital Media in the Arab World

Media and communications studies and adjacent fields have for some time now devoted considerable attention and critical energy to the question of the social and political implications of digital technologies. The Digital Double Bind: Change and Stasis in the Middle East grounds these questions by placing what the authors describe as the “digital turn” in the region on firm theoretical, historical, and empirical footing. It centers the conflicting tendencies that have informed the digital landscape in the Arab Middle East, highlighting the tensions between state projects and political aspirations, cultural imaginaries and lived economic conditions, and national and transnational formations. This critical strategy allows the book’s analysis to move beyond those modes of inquiry that set out to determine, for example, whether social media is or is not a “tool” that facilitates protest movements or disinformation, and instead reframes the matter of political contestation within the broader history of digital technologies in the region. There has long been the need to question formulations in which nebulous conceptualizations of “the digital” are equated with “change,” and conceptually excised from a “Middle East” presumably uniquely ill-equipped to metabolize its potentialities. The book’s method of examining often-forgotten histories and specific case studies leads it to the empirical basis for a theoretical contribution that situates technological change within a concrete historical process that has long shaped the region. In doing so, The Digital Double Bind (DDB) makes an important interdisciplinary contribution, setting the stage for more rigorous approaches to the role of digitality in the contemporary moment in the region.

DDB is the outcome of a collaboration whose nature is palpable when understood in light of earlier contributions of its coauthors, who individually and together have produced scholarship that has been crucial to the study of media in the region. Some of these topics notably include the political economy of media and television (Khalil 2013, 2015), Pan-Arab broadcasting and journalism (Zayani and Sahraoui 2007), digital activism (Zayani 2015), and more recently and jointly the regional emergence of streaming media and apps in the digital economy (Khalil and Zayani 2023). In what follows, I first explicate how the book’s main argument plays out across (and informs the structure of) its five parts and fourteen chapters. I then unpack the significance of its primary contribution for the multiple fields that it draws on and speaks to, and how it might inform future work in the field.

At the heart of DDB’s critical project is a diagnosis of the social basis of the dialectical historical movement that has underpinned the digital turn in the Arab Middle East. Zayani and Khalil borrow the titular concept of the “double bind” from the work of Gregory Bateson, that names the logic of a communicative situation in which responding to one message entails necessarily failing to respond to another, which over time results not in the resolution of the contradictions that produce it but in affected actors’ acceptance of the condition as a given. The authors clarify that the double bind is not reducible to a paradox: “the double bind is not a simple contradiction or mere opposition between two conflictual realities, nor is it even a paradox. Whereas a paradox is characterized by the incomprehensibility of a contradictory state, a double bind designates an insoluble complexity” (p. 5). They argue that the tensions of the double bind are at the heart of the digital condition in the Middle East. The book sets out to show how understanding the digital turn in the region as a double bind is essential to grasping related technological changes as an unfolding historical process, and not as singular event or break that flows primarily from technological form itself. By placing technological change within history in this frame, they argue that it then becomes possible to understand how and why “change” is not the same as “progress,” nor is the region merely a static place outside of history buffeted by technical forces from outside it.

The book’s structure is designed to unpack the historical present of this digital condition. It is divided into five parts (“Conjunctures and Disjunctures”; “Aspirations and Hindrances”; “Expression and Suppression”; “Imitation and Innovation”; “Connectivity and Collectivity”) and an afterword. Apart from the first part, which outlines the book’s primary argument, these parts are each constituted by three concise chapters on more specific issues or topics—for example, “Imitation and Innovation” is divided into chapters titled “In Pursuit of the Knowledge Economy,” “Cultural and Creative Industries,” and “Emerging Digital Economies.” This thematic organization is consistent with the book’s critical project and departs from a more linear or chronological sensibility, particularly the kind that imposes on media history the periodization and historical breaks of wars or the arrival of new experiences of consumer electronics or distribution method. This approach is what lets DDB trace how historical continuities and discontinuities inform the present. Its discussion of the regional history of the software industry exemplifies the strengths of this approach; it places this history within the broader entanglements of computerization and information technology since the 1970s with factors such as state goals of creating a knowledge economy, private interests in global systems, and early attempts to create the technical basis for personal computing and internet experiences that would be compatible with Arabic. It then brings the story up to the present, situating contemporary industry trends around AI within the different national and regional trajectories this has taken. Thus, the book is able to situate the UAE’s 2017 creation of a Ministry of Artificial Intelligence within a longer history of that country’s approach to fostering foreign investment in domestic tech industries, infrastructural development policy, special economic zones, and its involvement in regional and global politics. On this front, it can be understood as building on long-standing debates in critical approaches to development, and information and communications technologies for development (ICT4D) in particular.

DDB parses the commonalities and differences within and between nations and regions in a topical and comparative frame, eschewing the common conceptual structure in which the specificity of a country or region is examined separately from another. Avoiding the pitfalls of methodological nationalism in this reflexive manner makes it so the book traces the place of states in the digital landscape more precisely, as media and telecommunication policy, and development strategies, are most often regulated and coordinated at a national level. For example, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria may have all invested in dataveillance and cyberwarfare capabilities after 2011, but they did so under very different geopolitical and economic conditions. The book’s analytical structure allows it to investigate the multifaceted and crucial questions raised by this development in a manner that attends to these national and regional histories and specificities but does so in a manner that enables a synthetic and transversal consideration of questions of citizenship, the politics of platforms, and political culture. This analytical move is replicated at the regional and sub/intra-regional level, highlighting how North Africa, the Levant, and the Gulf have been historically conditioned in ways that do not reduce to essentialized cultural difference. One key dimension of DDB’s method is to identify overarching subregional tendencies and why they emerge at the moments that they do, and then examine how those tendencies are conditioned by subregional and national particularities that exemplify or defy them. This analytical lens balances attention between micro and macro political economic scales, following the unevenness within cities and countries as well as across social strata. It also offers a balanced consideration of these three regions that attends to continued rising importance of the Gulf countries to the regional and global digital landscape.

Core to DDB’s argument is that the digital double bind affects states, industries, and society, and that it is therefore crucial to understand the historical tensions that the double bind embodies in terms of its social and cultural dimensions. All of the book’s chapters include a consideration of how technology has been shaped by powerful actors as well as lived, with the chapters in the third, fourth, and fifth parts directing close attention to the latter. The emphasis on a historical frame for the digital double bind clarifies how power comes to operate in both a productive and a repressive manner—fostering avenues of disruptive expression and digital selves that are also readily trackable and monetizable.

DDB synthesizes a diversity of primary sources—demographic, data about patterns of usage, and economic indicators—from international organizations such as the International Telecommunication Union, state agencies, and market surveys. It situates the snapshots captured in this data to tell a complex story about how the social, economic, and technological are bound up with each other—offering a critical perspective on the gendered implications of the digital double bind, particularly for women and young people. One of the payoffs of DDB is in how it illuminates how the social experience of the digital—so often equated with a placeless, transnational quality—has been shaped by national factors and characteristics that are immanent to historical formations that are not reducible to technological affordances or essentializable cultural tradition. This makes it so the book’s consideration of the place of digital technology in regional protest movements and contentious politics since 2010 is relieved of causal and functionalist explanation. This analysis in turn supports a critical perspective on the Pan-Arab and transregional dynamics within the region. It also makes it so its discussion of moral panics surrounding phenomena such as dating apps and women dancing on TikTok videos can offer a nuanced consideration of how the tension between public and private spheres has been rearticulated within digital spaces and youth culture.

DDB also makes a significant contribution to the literature on the place of digital distribution in the political economy of media by widening the analytical frame to consider state and industries within the frame of the place of technology in everyday life. Its discussion adds to interdisciplinary debates about digital media distribution, streaming media, and platform labor and platform culture. Drawing on their own primary research on these topics, the authors situate the emergence of regional entities such as Shahid, Anghami, and Careem at the nexus of the history of media industry transformation since the rise of satellite broadcasting, the relationship of state development to the financial sector and start-up culture, and the uneven nature of mobile data access.

The potential contribution of DDB is one of raising the bar for how the implications of digital technologies in the region are understood. Like other works that synthesize ongoing debates in the literature and posit an original argument about what links them, it prepares new ground for further critical inquiry. DDB’s contribution should be placed alongside work on digital technology that centers the experiences and conditions in what is sometimes called the Global South or Majority World, not unlike Irani (2019). It puts the study of digitality in the Arab world on firmer footing by putting how the two have been intertwined back into a historical frame. DDB’s argument opens onto ongoing debates around digital capitalism, and potentially to future work on the relationship of tech to extractive economies. This work offers a vantage point synthesized from an analysis spanning multiple countries while also pointing to concrete local conditions. This means that it lends support to future ethnographic research that might deepen and thicken the analysis of the questions that it raises, and to work that might more fully engage the matter of trans-regional and diasporic interconnections with places such as South Asia. For readers of Global Perspectives, the book’s argument about the digital turn has implications for several areas of interdisciplinary inquiry. The book’s discussion of the place of digital technology in the political economy of the region extends beyond media industries into other economic sectors and into those domains affected by state practices, e-government, and surveillance and citizenship. DDB also presents a perspective pertinent to ongoing debates in subfields in media studies such as platform studies, production studies and distribution studies, digital activism, and ongoing debates in the study of comparative media systems and critical policy studies. For work centered on the region, the book’s synthesis further opens the door to infrastructure studies and the history of computing and software studies, and given its reflexive discussion of the data sources it draws on, it points the way to future work in critical data studies.

In sum, The Digital Double Bind establishes a historical perspective on the study of digital media in the Arab Middle East that aims to reground critical inquiry into the social dynamic of the contemporary moment, creating a touchpoint for future work that might take its insights into new directions.