The Digital Double Bind: Change and Stasis in the Middle East
Mohamed Zayani and Joe F. Khalil
320 pages, Oxford University Press, 2024
The digital revolution holds immense promise for the Global South, particularly in the Middle East, where the stakes have never been higher. With over 50 percent of the population comprising young individuals navigating a rapidly evolving digital landscape, the interplay between digital platforms and cultural norms becomes a potent catalyst for social change. Our book addresses the profound impact of digital technologies on collective identity formation and societal structures, which is particularly evident in the realm of social networks.
In young people’s experiences on social networks, new modes of expression and engagement are emerging. While these experiences challenge traditional gender roles and amplify marginalized voices in public discourse, they also reveal the region’s struggle to reconcile aspirations for change with the realities of entrenched systems. These dynamics result in cycles of empowerment and conformity, of contention and acquiescence.
Underlying the disjunction between young people’s subjectivities and their sociality is a double bind whereby the same conditions that drive change inhibit it. While adopting and adapting digital technologies propels the state, market, and public into an immersive digital sphere, such endeavors also paradoxically impede the region’s momentum for deep change.
This excerpt from Chapter 14 illuminates the multifaceted implications of digital technologies for social change and offers insights into the digital lives of young people in the Middle East.—Mohamed Zayani and Joe F. Khalil
* * *
Increasingly, the lived experience of young people is shaped by what they experience online and what they do offline. Being nearly always connected, interpersonal relationships that characterize traditional social networks (primarily friends and family) are henceforth mediated through digital platforms and social-media applications.
Typically, people in the Middle East region spend 3.5 hours daily on social media, with the average person being active on roughly eight different social-media platforms and with nine out of ten youth using at least one social-media platform daily. Patterns of use and accessibility differ across socioculturally, economically, and politically diverse subregions and countries. On the whole, however, the region’s high rates of social-media adoption are in line with global trends and with patterns of usage in the OECD countries.
Saudi Arabia and Egypt dominate the social-media networks. Data from 2022 show that Egypt—the most populous country in the region—is a key national market for Facebook, with more than 44.70 million monthly mobile users (42.50% of the population), compared with more than 11.40 million (32% of the population) in Saudi Arabia, the region’s largest ICT market. On Instagram, though, usage data is comparable in the two countries, with 15.45 million users in Saudi Arabia and 16.00 million users in Egypt. The kingdom also has more than 29.30 million active YouTube users and dominates both Snapchat (with 20.30 million users) and Twitter (with 14.10 million users prior to the launch of Meta’s Twitter-like Threads) regionally. Globally, Saudi Arabia reigns as the sixth-largest market for Snapchat and the eighth-largest market for Twitter. Undoubtedly, young people continue to drive the growth on these social media, with millennials leading the development on Twitter and Facebook, Generation Z fueling growth on Snapchat and Instagram, and Generation Alpha dominating livestreaming apps such as TikTok, Likee, and Twitch.
A close examination of social-media adoption in the Middle East region points to sustained and diverse online interactions, personal and professional usage, and increased engagement. While it is difficult to account for the diversity of young people’s online interactions, it is possible to highlight common trends and identify defining characteristics based on widely adopted online activities and user habits, which tend to correlate with access to better infrastructure. In line with global trends, many young people in the Middle East engage in consuming and sharing videos (47%) and music (34%). However, when it comes to sharing personal content online, youth across the region differ in ways that reflect their sociocultural contexts, with 65% in Lebanon sharing personal photos or videos compared with 26% in Qatar. Similarly, young people in the region tend to acquire news primarily from online sources (61%) and to consume entertainment on digital venues, including those animated by social-media influencers (50%).
Importantly, young users are not merely passive consumers of content. They also use social networks to discover, negotiate, and perform their identities, from female cyber activists using social media to demand gender parity to Amazigh youth launching a health campaign in their indigenous language. Still other youth capitalize on social networks for self-advancement and professional pursuits. While many young people use social media to network, promote themselves, or identify job opportunities, the most venturesome use social media as marketing platforms. In particular, young innovators have been entrepreneurial in using social networks to advertise services, conduct business transactions, and organize product deliveries. Whether to produce and consume content, show solidarity, or develop business, young people have adopted social media as both modus vivendi and modus operandi.
An analysis of the growing prominence of digitality in young people’s lives needs to situate that development within the context of political dynamics and economic structures. From the onset of the digital turn, both state policies and market exigencies incentivized young people to develop digital skills. Where mandated by the state and integrated into educational programs, digital skills became a gateway for future-oriented employment, entrepreneurship, and investment opportunities. Once acquired, these skills helped youth navigate their way into an encompassing, unbounded, and consuming sphere where information, communication, and creation overlap and intersect. For savvy users adept at using communication technologies, operating online became second nature. These young people now communicate information, defend their ideological stances, voice their opinion on issues, and articulate their own understandings of everyday affairs by creating and posting content and by sharing, liking, and commenting on posts.
Together, information, communication, and creation amount to the development of individual voices, with more users adopting social networks as a platform for identification and for distinguishing themselves as individuals with independent voices. Yet, while imposing and pervasive, these voices tend to be fragmented and dispersed. These engagements also encompass disinformation, inauthentic behavior, and fraudulent transactions that replicate aberrations common in face-to-face interactions offline, accentuating the need for all users to develop digital literacies.
Living on social networks is reshaping social values and even challenging the kind of collectivist culture that has long characterized the Middle East. In practice, there is a form of cohabitation, delicate and tenuous as it may be, between a traditional sense of belonging to a community whose interests are prioritized over those of its members and a growing expression of individualism characterized by the pursuit of personal goals and interests that supersede those of the group. On one level, social networks encompass interactions and personal relationships as the foundation of collectivist societies. Such social formations are prominently based on shared identity markers, including kinship, nationality, language, interests, and religion. On another level, social networks constructed around social media often underscore the personal rather than the collective. Individuals are distinguished by their technical savvy, content creativity, and ability to attract followers.
Young people’s tensions between expressing individual voices and their collective belonging did not originate with the digital. The introduction of satellite television in the 1990s initially brought apprehensions that access to borderless media content could disintegrate the sense of communal belonging, that the proliferation of channels and de facto fragmentation of audiences could erode a sense of national and inter-Arab social cohesion. Instead, the proliferation of media fed a renewed sense of Arabness—of belonging to a broader linguistic, geographical, and cultural community—that transcended state borders. Similarly, in the digital era, individual subjectivities are defined less in contradistinction to the communal self than in relation to it.
Tensions between forms of sociality centered around collectivism and individualism, both alternative and mainstream, are expressed against changing notions of the private and the public. Digital social networks have contributed to new forms of socialization, including those related to internet privacy and public postings. These digital forms of socialization include dating applications such as Tinder or Grindr, which are used by an estimated 14% of the region’s population. With a younger generation of Arabs migrating their leisure time to social media and streaming platforms, these ongoing tensions manifest themselves even more intensely in the digital sphere. Whether socially enforced or religiously dictated, the separation between private and public spheres has been challenged by introducing relatively open digital spaces. In the process, young people have redefined the parameters of privacy by selectively including or excluding particular communities and individuals online.
Across the Middle East, new forms of socialization benefit from platform affordances where young people, particularly women, would share avatars instead of pictures of themselves, limit the visibility of their accounts, exclude certain friends and family members from “official” accounts, or create mirror accounts and develop aliases. Young people are conscious of their level of privacy, particularly as social-media accounts become accepted and normalized and their profiles and images become more readily consumable.
The use of personal devices has enhanced young people’s ability to foreground their identities and assert their individuality. Spending so many hours engaging through social networks amounts to being connected to and spending time with others. Yet the substance of these activities points to the rise of new collectivities transcending existing barriers. While young people tend to be removed from (and often distrustful of) the sphere of formal politics, they develop communities around issues of “everyday politics,” which center on the topics that affect them on a personal level and the challenges they encounter in their daily lives, including subjects as diverse as unemployment, the environment, migration, and dance parties. Being at the receiving end of state policies and government choices that affect their lives, young people are constantly negotiating their evolving identities and roles within their societies. The tensions that animate the multiple levels of sociality between collectivism and individualism are particularly evident in how youth negotiate their voice and presence on social networks.
A case in point is Ayza Aggawez (I Want to Get Married), a television series based on a book that was inspired by a blog and subsequently inspired a Netflix series. Both the content, including the storyline and the characters, and its multimodal narrative production reveal much about the tension between collectivism and individualism. In 2006, when many Egyptian blogs were focused on political issues surrounding Mubarak’s succession, Ghada Abdel Aal, a young woman from Al Mahalla, a large industrial city in Egypt, started a blog recounting her personal experiences and the challenges many of her female friends encounter as they navigate the community’s sociocultural norms for finding a suitor. She chronicled her encounters and reflected on her experience using witty, critical, and poignant journal- style blog entries that became instantly popular among a generation of young Egyptians dealing with the same issues. Whereas in many societies the choice of a spouse is a personal decision, in Egypt’s largely conservative communities courting happens in public under the scrutiny of the family and the neighborhood community. In the blog, Abdel Aal questioned the immediate and extended community’s probing involvement in a personal matter.
The blog resonated with young women precisely because it exposed deep-rooted tensions between individual choices and collective values in a changing society in which females are increasingly educated and independent. While Abdel Aal’s blog may be read as an articulation of incongruencies between the values of traditional and westernized societies, or between middle- and upper-class communities, at its core, it is also about young people developing competencies and affordances to turn information and communication into critical reflection and artful creation whereby imaginatively crafted messages acquire a broad circulation and a strong resonance.
Becoming a “blogthrough” that attracted wide attention helped Ayza Aggawez cross over from digital media spaces to traditional media. Dar al Shuruq, one of the region’s prominent publishers, printed a book version of the blog, which was subsequently translated to other languages. In 2010, MBC, the region’s most popular entertainment channel, turned the book into a sitcom, which broadened its appeal further. Capitalizing on the success of Ayza Aggawez while giving it a new spin, Netflix produced a sequel to the series, Finding Ola (2022), which featured the lead character as a forty-year-old newly divorced mother navigating even more difficult social pressures in a world where dating apps coexist with arranged marriages and where social influencers compete with community elders as role models. The various iterations of Ayza Aggawez and Abdel Aal’s own journey highlight a creative tension between markers of collectivism and individualism that reflect societal changes and how individuals navigate them in the digital era. They also demonstrate young women’s ability to harness digital platforms to communicate their subjectivities and advocate for alternative cultural politics.
Living on social networks imbues life with a sense of urgency, epitomized in the virality and instantaneous nature of messages, which amounts to a practical antidote to feelings of powerlessness as individuals build solidarities within and across boundaries. There is an unprecedented immediacy with which individuals and groups can reach local, regional, and global users. Young people’s ability to forge a life outside traditionally established cultural norms and social structures is often considered a threat to the fabric of these collectivist societies. Gender roles and sexual identities have become arenas in which old, patriarchal norms and the very “habitus” and practices that limit sexuality are challenged. Similarly, other collectivities have found strength in digital platforms where women’s voices are consolidated in religiously defined digital spaces. Such largely gender-based collectivities are built around everyday politics and transcend traditional boundaries that often limit women’s participation in public life.