Digital habitus and the sociotechnical transformation of everyday life in the United Arab Emirates: a hybrid framework of governmentality, surveillance capitalism, and Gulf state modernity

Introduction: Rapid digitalization in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has reshaped everyday life, yet existing scholarship has not fully captured how digital practices are embedded within broader sociotechnical and political-economic transformations. In particular, there is a need for a framework that integrates cultural dispositions with structures of power, governance, and market logics. Objective: This paper develops a conceptual framework to explain how digital practices are produced, structured, and experienced in the UAE, with a focus on the transformation of everyday life. Methods: derived from Pierre Bourdieu's theory of habitus. It synthesizes insights from governmentality (associated with Michel Foucault), surveillance capitalism (as articulated by Shoshana Zuboff), and scholarship on Gulf state modernity to construct an integrated analytical framework. Results: The paper proposes a hybrid framework that conceptualizes digital habitus as shaped by the interaction of state governance, corporate digital infrastructures, and culturally specific forms of modernity. It highlights how everyday digital practices in the UAE are simultaneously enabled and constrained by systems of surveillance, data extraction, and state-led modernization, producing distinct patterns of behavior, identity formation, and social interaction. Conclusion: By integrating cultural, political, and economic dimensions, the proposed framework advances understanding of sociotechnical transformation in the UAE and offers a foundation for future empirical research on digital life in non-Western contexts.