Abstract
The uprisings that swept the MENA region in 2011, known as the ‘Arab Spring’ challenged long held assumptions regarding the region’s authoritarian resilience, and its structural and cultural immunity to democratization. Advocates of the modernization theory found in the unexpected developments a fulfillment of their intellectual prophesies. Comparative studies on Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and the role of civil society, education and economic development in democratization reinforced the Western centric conception of the linearity and universality of political transitions. Several studies celebrated the role social media and what political sociologist, Larry Diamond called ‘liberation technology’ played in the Jazmine Revolution in Tunisia and the diffusion of protests throughout the region (Diamond, 2012). Long before the ‘Arab Spring’, the prospect for democratic opening has been highly linked to the emergence of radio, television, phones and new media in general (Becker, 2001; Spinelli, 1996). Studies showed a strong correlation between Internet diffusion and penetration and democracy (Best and Wade, 2009). Howard (2010) posits that in Muslim majority countries information infrastructure plays an important role in democratization.
In this context, Mohamed Zayani and Joe Khalil present a timely and much needed nuanced analysis of the intertwined complex relations between society, identity, political dynamics and the digital in the Middle East and Global South at large, in their fascinating book, The Digital Double Bind: Change and Stasis in the Middle East. The book explores the continuity, change, images and realities of the Middle East’s digital turn culminating in the ‘digital double bind’ denoting the tensions between conditions, simultaneously catalyze the interaction between the digital and state institutions, the market and the citizens and promote change while sustaining inertia and stasis. The authors’ critical and pathbreaking analysis of the role of technology and socio-political development in the Middle East challenges the oversimplified and binary conceptualization of change in the region. The book explores the trajectories of the digital turn in the Middle East as a complex process encompassing ongoing negotiations, varieties of configurations among socio economic and political actors infused with historical and cultural legacies that are rooted in people’s every day experiences leading to divergent directions of opportunities and barriers.
While pre-Arab Spring literature focused on the ways authoritarian regimes in the region maintain power over traditional media and contention politics such as the focus on Al-Jazeera’s role as ‘ the Arab World’s new Habermasian public sphere’ contesting both authoritarian Arab regimes and American Hegemony (Lynch, 2006), The Digital Double Bind challenges the assumptions of digital determinism that characterizes post-Arab Spring studies by embedding the digital in everyday socio-political practices. The book’s compelling narrative, rich empirical cases and la Longue Durée historical analysis approach makes it a very informative and insightful contribution. As noted by the authors; to understand development, we must reckon with the ‘digital double bind’ that presents ‘a situation where the choice of a particular technological path promotes change while at the same time undermining its ultimate objectives regardless of which choice is made’ (Khalil and Zayani, 2024).
The Digital Double Bind: Change and Stasis in the Middle East is divided into five parts. The first part titled Conjunctures and Disjunctures is the theoretical section, grounding the author’s digital double bind in the original theory of ‘double bind’ put forward by British anthropologist Gregory Batson. Unlike, the notion of paradox, a double bind ‘designates an insoluble complexity’. It is manifested in everyday life’s practices and situations that ‘we learn to navigate, accept, overcome, or simply ignore’ and in how power dynamics are reproduced and co-produced in ordinary people’s everyday encounters. Part 2, Aspirations and Hindrances: Technological Foundations and Trajectories, and part 3, Expression and Suppression: The Entangled Web of Politics employ historical analysis to look at the complexities of the intertwined, multi-actors’ interactions between norms, incentives, economic structures, international players and their implications on our understanding of the region’s experience with ICTs. The authors disentangle the divergence in infrastructure, planning and development of ‘Old’ media and ‘New’ Media while acknowledging and exploring the overlaps and interactions with diverse demographic and sectorial realities that produce long-term tensions in everyday practices.
Chapters 6, 7 and 8 provide a rich analysis based on empirical cases exploring the use of YouTube, Facebook, blogs and digital tools in general to voice contestation and challenge power structures by marginalized youth, minorities and diaspora communities. Perhaps the most insightful contribution of this part lies in the exploration of the everyday manifestation of citizenship in the Middle East and how marginalized peoples employ the digital space as tools of contention and disruption of hegemonic narratives. This is not a one directional relational process but rather ongoing negotiations. Between the states’ continuous effort to adapt to the challenges brought by the technologies and the mass’s continuous endeavor to reconfigure power dynamics and the digital tools, lays our understanding of collective action and political decision-making in the Middle East. Part 4, focuses on the ways different states are interacting with the digital space, and the demands and hopes of their youth. Special attention is given to the digital cultural industries highlighting how digital media is reconfiguring the interplay between political economy, culture and technologies.
The fifth part is one of the most interesting sections of the book. The chapters explore the interactions between the digital and the socio-cultural in relation to grassroots movements, challenging traditional norms, gender roles, notions of religious interpretations and citizenship. I particularly find the illustration of how women redefine gender roles while balancing cultural expectations interesting. Ultimately, the Middle East encounter with the digital offers new possibilities and obstacles for communities, especially marginalized groups like children, youth, and women. Digital spaces provide both opportunities for expressing individuality and clash with social expectations as people navigate independence and interconnectedness in their everyday experiences. One of the most relatable and powerful examples is the TV series Ayza Aggawaz (I Want to Get Married) which I watched on TV years ago. It is insightful to learn that the TV series is an adaptation of a book inspired by a blog. The series did not only resonate with Egyptian women but also with other women across the region facing similar social pressures and expectations which makes it a valuable case study.
Despite its density and length, the book is a fascinating and valuable contribution to cultural studies. It enriches our understanding of how the Middle East experiences the digital turn through the cultural studies lens of the everyday. Like all great works, it is not without its shortcomings. For instance, the book is a rebuke of digital determinism and dichotomous analyses of the digital Middle East. Ironically, it falls into the determinism trap by implicitly idealizing Silicon Valley’s model without considering the flaws imbedded in the model itself and its implications on inequality, the environment, privacy and labor exploitation. Given the book’s stated commitment to a nuanced analysis, it would have benefited from critically examining the model itself and its ethical and socio-cultural implications that are problematized even in the American context instead of focusing exclusively on the existing eco-systems’ inability to reproduce the model in the Middle East. Overlooking such dynamics, suggests an implicit techno-idealization. By framing it as an aspirational model and focusing on the barriers that emerge from attempts of its adaptation in the Middle East, the opportunity to critique Silicon Valley as a model on its own right and link it to the power dynamics at play in the digital double bind. Moreover, this framing suggests that despite rejecting determinism the book leaves the reader with the impression that the Middle East is infinitely trapped in a perpetual double bind.
Nonetheless, the Digital Double Bind: Change and Stasis in the Middle East is a theoretically and empirically significant and powerful contribution to cultural studies, interdisciplinary scholarship and researchers due to the depth of the analysis and understanding of the Middle East and its everyday experiences with the digital. This fascinating and well-researched book is an essential and powerful reading for anyone interested in a deeper understanding of the nuances of the digital, cultural and political developments in the Middle East and the Global South.
