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Over the past decade or so, the digital landscape in the Middle East has changed dramatically. Technological adoption, advanced IT infrastructures, communication changes and enhanced connectivity have slowly but surely impacted the region. While much has been written about the role digital media played since the 2011 Arab uprisings, less attention has been paid to the larger digital transformations the MENA region has been experiencing and the implications of these technology-enabled transformations. This chapter focuses on the broader nature of these information and communication changes. It offers critical reflection on how the evolving communication environment and fast changing digital technologies are affecting the region and transforming practices, paying particular attention to the cultural, economic, and political implications of these ongoing changes. The chapter pays particular attention to both the opportunities and challenges the adoption of digital technologies holds for a Middle East that is aspiring to transition toward a knowledge-based economy. It shed light on significant developments and evolving dynamics that characterize the digital Middle East, but also reveals disjunctions and maps out discordances that are inherent to this emerging digital culture.

This chapter details the case studies that were conducted as part of a five-year research project, which conducted the world’s first real-time cross-cultural exchange via the networking of large public screens located in Melbourne and Seoul. The project linked large screens located in Seoul and Melbourne for three media events: SMS_Origins and <Value>, HELLO, and Dance Battle. The chapter details methodological innovations of the research, which involved the reformulation of the way in which the scholar was embedded in the research and transformed according to the interactive research process. It also elucidates critical insights into the process of cultural exchange, the impact of media technologies on public space, and the transformation of the public sphere in the global era. The empirical research generates fresh insights into public interactions with large screens, providing a prototype for future cross-cultural events and offering new theoretical perspectives on the use of public space.

This chapter argues that speculative fictions are a mechanism for struggling with speculative capital. Speculative fictions envision unrealized future scenarios, and share a similar strategy to speculative capital, the very forces whose fictions have become our realities. Through a reading of Gary Shteyngart’s contemporary dystopian novel, Super Sad True Love Story, and Deleuze and Guattari on writing and language, the chapter diagnoses how literature could still serve a critical function in light of the digital reorganization of life. Shteyngart models a data-centered world, whereby humans are products of their data for monetization, and interaction between beings has become mediated by a transactional reality. In the process, Shteyngart’s critique not only unravels the distinction between appearance and reality by demonstrating how language is a form of matter, but also his writing allows for concepts to become existence. This is one of speculative fictions major contributions for thinking ahumanly.

This chapter explores the overdetermined word ‘save’ – tracing its shifts from notions of salvation and paradise through to its contemporary meaning of ‘store’. This shift is not without anxiety, and this chapter argues that there is a movement from paradise to limbo which encapsulates our relationship to technology. The ability of programming such as UNICODE to convert alphabetic languages to their purest forms of presence and absence through binary makes the familiar unfamiliar; the heimlich unheimlich. The Gothic effects of this ‘shift from the tactile to the digital’ (Baudrillard, in Landow 1997) is evidenced by the hauntings and monsters depicted in two episodes of series four of the BBC TV series Doctor Who, ‘Silence in the Library’ and ‘Forest of the Dead’ (2008). The clash of the traditional and the technological embodied by the library and its terrifying inhabitants perfectly illustrates the horror of being ‘saved’.

This chapter looks at how artists and activists are utilising still and moving images combined with simple digital technologies to investigate political conflicts. Often working with low-tech solutions they explore, document and present complex issues through images that challenge our existing views and provoke new ways of thinking. They present views from above, afar and beyond, developing visual investigations that present slices into unknown worlds and undocumented practices. The images do not solve problems, but open new questions, expanding new possibilities for image activism and political engagement.

This chapter considers the impact of technology on society in recent years. A new environment of information, social media and digital interfaces has inaugurated new political connections that have transformed the landscape. Rather than ruminate over the ways that Trump uses Twitter and other technologies to communicate in sometimes bizarre and dangerous ways, this chapter discusses how the spectacle itself has gone digital and how this has produced a kind of hyper-techno-consumer. There is an uneasy resemblance between the narcissism that this technology is capable of producing and the personality of Trump himself.

Chapter 5, “Validating Segregated Observers”, explores the intricate ways that the Israeli occupation shapes empirical observations. Through a critique of feminist standpoint theory and Donna Haraway’s work on situated knowledge, it shows how the most well meaning maps can be drastically different depending on who makes them. After 1967 Israeli settlers have increasingly moved to the West Bank, establishing diffuse but numerous settlements that dominate the landscape, engendering forms of segregation that are both rigid and complex. As a result, Palestinians see different parts of the landscape, and under tougher restrictions, than do Israelis, and vice versa. For example, cartographers in Palestinian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are able to collect map data only within Palestinian areas, and must view the Israeli settlements from without. This produces a dichotomy between, and enforces a drastically unequal separation of, Palestinians and Israelis. It also buttresses imbalances of power in international technoscience, influencing even the most apparently objective, empirical knowledge. Chapter 5 explores the (by no means straightforward) implications of this segregation in detail, while also introducing the notion of refractivity, or material and spatial reflexivity. Throughout, it seeks to understand how cartographers in organizations who use the same tools to map the same landscapes can produce different results.

Disruptive Power traces the development of the modern state and drawing on disruption theory, explores how the introduction of digital technology presents a crisis to state power. The state began as a mechanism for centralizing and exercising power and over time became hierarchical, bureaucratic, and, in democratic states, accountable to the rule of law. In a networked world, however, groups like Anonymous wield power by being decentralized, collaborative, and resilient. These two models of power are fundamentally at odds and the resulting disruptive power threatens the institutions that have preserved the balance of power since the end of World War II.

The last chapter analyses four more identities that the Çemberlitaş Hamamı has taken on in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: that of a tourist attraction promoted by a long lineage of Orientalist painters, travel writers and, lately, guidebooks; that of an emblem for an Ottoman past that many Turkish citizens now rediscover in the wake of a postmodern nostalgia for an Ottoman past that is imagined to be both simpler and more authentic—also known as Ottomania; that of a modern workplace; and that of a digital entity with an online presence.

N. Katherine Hayles’ essay is concerned with the transposition of the paradigmatic onto the syntagmatic in Only Revolutions. Pointing to the proliferation of different kinds of data in the text, Hayles claims that it manifests a ‘deterritorialized spatial dynamic’, involving ‘a profound shift from narrative as a temporal trajectory to an element of a topographic plane upon which a wide variety of interactions and permutations are staged.’ Hayles highlights how the text’s distinctive topography is only made possible by the use of sophisticated computer software; thus although technology is literally absent from the narrative of Only Revolutions, it permeates the text in her view: ‘nowhere present within the narrative diegesis, digital technologies are everywhere apparent when we consider the writing-down system as a whole.’