Epilogue

Changes in the global digital landscape over the past decade or so have transformed many aspects of society, including how people communicate, socialize, and organize. These transformations have also reconfigured how companies conduct their businesses and altered how states think about security and interact with their citizens. Glancing into the future, there is good reason to believe that nascent technologies such as augmented reality will continue to change how people connect, blurring the lines between our online and offline worlds. Recent breakthroughs in the field of artificial intelligence will also have a profound impact on many aspects of our lives, ranging from the mundane—chat bots as convenient, always available customer support—to the disruptive—replacing medical doctors with automated diagnosis tools....

Working for Free

While freedom dividends from spreading the Internet specifically and information technologies more generally across the Arab Middle East have proven problematic, hopes for economic dividends endure throughout the spectrum from national policy-makers to developers and users in nearly all countries in the region. Enthusiasms for investment in Internet and IT generally have rested on broad supply-side orientations at macro levels that do not link with the actual sociology of IT development, deployment and use at more micro levels, where returns to working on and through the Internet have been elusive. This chapter focuses on Internet developers as the missing link and identifies factors from piracy to strategies for pursuing returns by selling the firm rather than the product and forms of rent-seeking that add problems of getting paid to practices in which IT workers elsewhere have been found to share value orientations of entrepreneurial IT firms, while value is extracted upward and marginal returns on primary production fall at the micro level and fail to register as productivity at the macro level.

Domesticating Foreign Intellectual Property Laws in the Digital Age

This chapter examines some of the challenges faced by GCC nations as they attempt to modernize their economies in the digital era and in the face of substantial technological transformations. In order to fit within repositioned international markets geared towards knowledge economies, GCC states need to abide by the many rules and regulations in the area of intellectual property protection that have been developed and dictated by the World Trade Organization and the agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Interestingly, even as Gulf governments introduce externally imposed legal systems, they attempt to “domesticate” foreign intellectual property laws to gain a competitive advantage by investing in the production of locally-produced content and promoting niche areas of intellectual property, including the protection of traditional knowledge rights. This is an area generally neglected by industrialized nations that tend to promote the concept of “innovation” rather than promoting and protecting collective knowledge. GCC states are attempting to use intellectual property laws to their own advantage with an emphasis on digital archiving and protection of traditional knowledge, heritage, and folklore. By promoting and protecting locally-produced content, GCC states can aspire to the globalized international economic framework as envisioned by the WTO.

Women’s Digital Activism

One of the many transformations that is taking place across the Middle East and North Africa region is women's engagement with new communications technologies and their increasing involvement in public life. Despite the initial enthusiasms of the uprisings of 2011, the region is now in considerable turmoil and digital developments are only slowly rolling out across the region. Using Mouffe's notion of the “political” as what is put into public contention in a society, the chapter explores how women in various countries across the Middle East are using and appropriating these new communication tools, especially social media, finding their voices and setting new social agendas for action, many of which revolve around issues of the body and female presence in public space.

The Changing Nature of Socialization among Arab Youth

This article examines online relationship activities among Arab youth, paying particular attention to micro-practices of engagement and the ways on which socio-cultural contexts shape social interactions online. Youth resort to a range of strategies to develop friendship and interact with evolving technologies. In negotiating and managing their relationships, they take into account not only their identities, cultures, and values but also the images they want to project to the users and online groups they interact with. Drawing on narrative analysis and personal stories of informants, this chapter discusses the dynamic relationship between online and offline interactions in relation to socialization. It explores how everyday practices inform the reconfiguration of the culture of connectivity in social media times. The chapter points to the multimodality of social lives and suggests that offline and online interactions are deeply intertwined.

Virtual Worlds, Digital Dreams

Video games are inherently transnational by virtue of their industrial, textual and player practices. Until recently, the focus of research on the social and cultural aspects of video games has been on the traditional centers of the video game industry consumption, while the international flows of digital gaming remained largely underexplored. This chapter analyzes the cultural dynamics and technological processes influencing both video game development and the gaming culture in the Middle East. It conceptualizes Middle Eastern video games as imaginary spaces that entangle diverse and contradictory processes: global cultural flows, media policies of nation states, visions and engagements of private entrepreneurs, and migration and appropriation of Western game genres and rule systems. By mapping out dominant trends, the chapter offers the opportunity to think about processes and flows influencing the video game industry in the Middle East during the first fifteen years of its existence

Citizenship and Cyber Politics in Iran

All developments in relation to the Internet and cyberspace in Iran have occurred in a highly politicized post-revolutionary environment. Yet the central issue is not the obvious and crude divide between a ‘traditional’ and ‘religious’ state and ‘modern’ technology, since that very state has adopted new information technologies. There are two more subtle lines of tension running through Internet development and digital activism in Iran. The first is the centralizing state’s desire to control expression in a ‘new technology’ environment that is highly conducive to widespread and popular participation. The second is the centralizing state’s desire to orchestrate and manage the slow development of the private sector and the inhibitions placed on entrepreneurial ICT activity in a field that has made net millionaires in other parts of the world. This chapter examines the relationship between the internet and politics in Iran. It engages with the possible lessons of digital activism, examines various organizational and media strategies, and factors in broader internal and external issues that help or hinder the growth or success of rebellion against regressive and repressive state and policies, and then moves on to explore the expansion of the Internet in the country in its wider social context.

Digital Rights Activism after the Arab Spring

This chapter examines the efforts of advanced-industrialized Western democratic states to promote internet freedom through the backing of several international policy summits and associated funding efforts for promoting freedom of expression, for global internet users, especially in closed repressive political systems. However, the recent leaking of key classified documents identifying unlawful global surveillance practices by both authoritarian and democratic states, has further galvanized global attention towards the credibility and meaning of “internet freedom promotion.” In order to better understand what the promotion of Internet freedom entails and to unpack the complex international political economy of this global arena of policy entrepreneurship, this chapter critically examines the key stakeholders that have define and consolidate the norms and frameworks surrounding the shared global digital commons that have been used by protest movements and democracy promoters during all of the recent waves of transnational political mobilizations, including the Green Revolution, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street. The chapter argue that future investigations should discard reductive frames of analysis like ‘cyber-optimism” and “cyber-dystopianism,” and instead pay more critical attention on the key tech-savvy “communities of practice” that have emerged with a pragmatic focus on overseeing and infusing democratic norms into esoteric telecommunications policy.

From Souk to Cyber Souk

Cultural values provide a way of understanding consumers’ acceptance or rejection of the way business is conducted, given their culturally-attuned preferences, choices and tastes. Culture has also been shown to affect almost all aspects of business, including transactions between seller and buyer, from how the seller attracts the customer’s attention to the way they negotiate a deal to the moment the transaction is completed. The notion that globalization results in a “universal taste” is no longer an effective promotional element for enticing international customers. Instead, marketers need to customize their products, services and systems to suit the customer’s specific needs. This chapter is to explore two questions: In what ways does culture impact e-commerce and what are the culturally-rooted challenges of conducting e-commerce in the MENA region? The chapter concludes with a set of propositions based on the argument that culture does influence the adoption of e-commerce for MENA consumers.

Mediated Experience in the Egyptian Revolution

Reconciling large scale political and social change with everyday lived experience has always been a fundamental problem for understanding social and political change. This chapter offers a conceptual framework that recognizes the intricacy of interaction between mediation and revolutionary social change by looking at the lived experience of Egyptians during the Egyptian revolution. The experience of collective events is mediated through information and communication technologies; these mediated experiences are both collective, in that people are connected by media uses and practices and by common activities and spaces, and yet they are also deeply personal and individualized, in that specific sets of technologies, interpersonal relationships and embodied practices that comprise one person’s unfolding experience are different from another’s. The chapter argues that these two dimensions could be theorized using the concepts of network and assemblage. On a broader scale, we can understand the relationship between mediated experiences of events and agent-driven uses of media technologies by turning to processual analysis of the sort called field theory, which allows us to see the revolution as a series of struggles over the symbolic meaning of revolutionary activities, in which media practices play a crucial part.