Georgetown Professor Explains How the Digital Era is Affecting Middle Eastern Societies in New Book “The Digital Double Bind”

Georgetown University in Qatar Professor Mohamed Zayani has published a new book titled The Digital Double Bind: Change and Stasis in the Middle East. The book, which is coauthored with Northwestern University in Qatar Associate Professor Joe F. Khalil and published by Oxford University Press, is a landmark study of how the Middle East is acclimating to the promises and uncertainties of today’s fast-paced digital transformations. 

The Digital Double Bind reconsiders the question of technology, development, and social change in the digital era. Moving beyond familiar accounts of the uniform trajectory of the network society, the book provides a roadmap for a critical engagement with the peculiarities of digitality in the Global South. "The digital is profoundly affecting the pace and direction of development and social change, but each region experiences this transformation differently" noted Dr. Zayani. He added: "We wanted to understand how the digital is playing out in the Middle East and how the region is responding to momentous changes in information and communication technologies as they endeavor to reorient themselves towards the knowledge economy."  

“The Digital Double Bind offers a welcome and significant contribution to our critiques of discourses that simplify ‘the digital’ and essentialize ‘the Middle East’,” noted Dr. Karin Wilkins, Dean of the School of Communication at the University of Miami and scholar of communication and development. “It is a critical reminder that communication needs to be understood in historical and social contexts, as well as global political and economic structures.”

Commenting on the broader significance of the book, Dr. Anthony Giddens, sociologist and Life Fellow of King’s College, noted: “this is an essential reading not only for those specializing in the Middle East, but for anyone concerned with the impact of the digital revolution more generally.”

The book is part of the Oxford Series in Digital Politics. Mohamed Zayani is the author of the award-winning book Networked Publics and Digital Contention, also published by Oxford University Press. Joe Khalil is the co-editor of the newly released Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East. Currently, the two are working on a grant-supported collaborative book project on how digitality is reconfiguring territoriality. For more on The Digital Double Bind, see www.digitaldoublebind.com.