Mohamed Zayani

In the Middle East, digital technologies have ushered in a new era of connectivity and global integration, promoting political, economic, and social opportunities. However, adopting these technologies presents a digital double bind for states, markets, and publics. States leverage digital technologies to drive economic growth and modernize their infrastructure, yet simultaneously seek to control and restrict their uses to preserve power and uphold societal norms. Markets embrace the innovation and dynamism brought by digital technologies while clinging to entrenched economic structures that curb the professed entrepreneurial spirit of the digital age. Middle Eastern publics harness the empowering potential of digital platforms to invigorate cultural politics and foster social movements, all while contending with the same tools being employed for surveillance, censorship, and repercussions. Occasioned by the release of the open-access edition of Mohamed Zayani and Joe F. Khalil’s The Digital Double Bind (2024), this article deepens the understanding of these dynamics, highlighting the need for a nuanced approach to digital transformation in the Global South and inviting further scholarly reflection and policy engagement.

Although the digital Middle East has received wide attention, there has been little engagement with the cultural roots of ongoing transformations. This article offers a critical analysis of the region’s technological journey over the past century, revealing how the pursuit of the digital aligns with a historical quest for modernity and aspirations for socioeconomic development. By examining the cultural origins and trajectory of the region’s engagement with technology, the article illuminates how the present is inextricably linked to the past through multiple temporalities. It contends that a mnemonic connection with modernization, as a culturally embedded concept, is essential for comprehending the unfolding digital turn and engaging with the region’s adoption of various technologies, including the digital. This article contributes to the expanding body of literature on the intersection of technology and society in the Middle East. It underscores the need for a nuanced understanding of the region’s intricate relationship with modernization and digitalization.

Emerging digital entertainment media in the Global South are anchored in nation-state configurations, benefit from supranational affordances, and aspire to global operations. Drawing on Sassen’s “third spaces,” the article focuses on the case of Shahid, a Middle East-based video streaming platform and a hybrid media venture that operates at the intersection of the local and the global. The article suggests digital media entertainment territoriality is such that content services simultaneously inhabit geographic nation-state borders and transversally closed bordered spaces, and point to potential reconfigurations of power dynamics with such ventures functioning as spaces for negotiating cultural politics in the region.

In 2014, Al Jazeera Network launched AJ+, a digital initiative intended to put it at the forefront of a changing journalistic field. Targeting an expanding mobile-centric generation of avid social media users and tech-savvy youth, Al Jazeera’s innovative media lab for digital storytelling engages audiences on a wide range of popular and emerging social media platforms. This qualitative and quantitative research study explores what AJ + reveals about the ability of established media organizations to adapt to changes in technology and adjust to the evolving ways news is produced and consumed. While shedding light on the opportunities and challenges ICT-driven innovation in journalism have brought to legacy media players in the digital era, the case of AJ+ also helps unravel intricate dynamics at the intersection of changing digital journalistic practices, retooled forms of political communication, and reconfigured geopolitical realities.

In 2018, Saudi Arabia and Netflix were forced to confront the limits of freedom of speech online. The kingdom requested that the streaming giant remove a critical episode of the satirical show Patriot Act with Hassan Minhaj from its local service, and the latter complied at the risk of reputational damage. Focusing on the controversy surrounding this case, this article explores how both state and business adopt and adapt to changes in technology and how each reasserts its sphere of influence in the digital era. We argue that state and business are developing a symbiotic relationship in the context of de-territorialized digital capitalism. Such a relationship allows both entities to engage in mutual interdependence that accommodates the interests of the other while avoiding harmful consequences and deleterious effects. In practice, the state exercises targeted censorship while businesses abide by controlled compliance. The account and analysis presented regarding the logic of symbiotic relationship draws attention to the various ways in which global media players in the digital era have navigated territoriality and the extent of state–business mutual accommodation.

Saudi Arabia is a crucially important media player in the Middle East, commanding modern, sophisticated and far-reaching media systems. Driving the Saudi media hegemony is what may be loosely termed ‘a security imperative’ which is tightly connected to internal dynamics, geopolitical considerations and regional rivalries. Empowered with its oil wealth, Saudi Arabia pursued a dual media strategy, operating state-controlled and circumscribed domestic media systems which insulate the population from undesired external influences and uphold the religious sensibility of the kingdom while developing decentralized, open and modern transnational media systems abroad capable of safeguarding the kingdom's interests and promoting its foreign policy. Instrumental as it may be in the kingdom's comprehensive security approach, though, the media have proven to be an inordinately complex asset. Although remarkable in many respects, the liberalization of Saudi media engendered a number of conflictual dynamics which are potentially consequential.

This paper explores the potential of cultural anthropology to reinvigorate the study of Arab media and to help deepen our understanding of the complexity of media practices in the changing Middle East region. Drawing on critical theory and recent ethnographic work, the paper is an attempt to refocus the study of Arab media within cultural anthropology. It argues that the study of the evolving Arab mediascape calls not so much for consolidating the field within the purview of the discipline of media and communication, but for a cross‐disciplinary, theoretically informed and empirically grounded study of localized practices that is amenable to articulating overlapping dynamics of correspondences and disjunctions set in motion by mass‐mediated everyday life processes.

"The Challenges and Limits of Universalist Concepts: Problematizing Public Opinion and a Mediated Arab Public Sphere" published on 01 Jan 2008 by Brill.