Book Review: Zayani, Mohammed, and Joe F. Khalil. 2024. The Digital Double Bind: Change and Stasis in the Middle East. New York: Oxford University Press
| Author(s) |
Jon W. Anderson |
| Contact |
Jon W. Anderson, Catholic University of America, 620 Michigan Av., Washington, DC 20064, USA. E-mail: jwa@acm.org |
| Issue |
CyberOrient, Vol. 18, Iss. 2, 2024, pp. 75-81 |
| Published |
December 20, 2024 |
| Type |
Book Review |
| Abstract |
Summarizing the past twenty-plus years of internet media studies on the Middle East, this study pulls together thinking and findings about digital citizenship, frames, and sites of contention, “new” voices and “virtual” lives online, e-commerce and “knowledge” economies, “connected” culture and digital identities in the region. Its overall methodology is to assess how large, generic models apply to regional experience. The authors, who work and teach there, press beyond older diffusion-of-innovations paradigms to remap stasis and change bracketed by interplays of informational freedom and state management of communication as digital double binds, finding liberalizations on the margins more of personal and artistic expression than of political mobilization. |
| Keywords |
internet, Middle East, media, politics of communication
|
