Debates for the Digital Age

Debates for the Digital Age
Author: Danielle Sarver Coombs
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2015-11-23
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN:

By evaluating the Internet's impact on key cultural issues of the day, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the seismic technological and cultural shifts the Internet has created in contemporary society. Books about Internet culture usually focus on the people, places, sites, and memes that constitute the "cutting-edge" at the time the book is written. That approach, alas, renders such volumes quickly obsolete. This provocative work, on the other hand, focuses on overarching themes that will remain relevant for the long term. The insights it shares will highlight the tremendous impact of the Internet on modern civilization—and individual lives—well after specific players and sites have fallen out of favor. Content is presented in two volumes. The first emphasizes the positive impact of Internet culture—for example, 24-hour access to information, music, books, merchandise, employment opportunities, and even romance. The second discusses the Internet's darker consequences, such as a demand for instant news that often pushes journalists to prioritize being first over being right, online scams, and invasions of privacy that can affect anyone who banks, shops, pays bills, or posts online. Readers of the set will clearly understand how the Internet has revolutionized communications and redefined human interaction, coming away with a unique appreciation of the realities of today's digital world—for better and for worse.

Digital Political Communication Strategies

Digital Political Communication Strategies
Author: Berta García-Orosa
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2021-11-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3030815684

This book, with a foreword by Manuel Castells, explores the core strategies of digital political communication. It reviews the field’s evolution over the past 25 years and examines the coexistence of old and new actors (lobbyists, citizens, parliaments, political parties, media outlets, digital platforms, among others), as well as hybrid communication tactics. Topics covered include frames, fake news, filter bubbles, echo chambers, artificial intelligence, the significance of emotions, and engagement with citizens. As we find ourselves in the fourth wave of digital communication, and in the wake of a pandemic which has shaken the foundations of political communication, an evaluation of these topics is essential to the reinvention of democracy. The book is geared towards students and researchers who wish to delve into the latest trends in digital communication, political communication actors and journalists. It further aims to prepare citizens to effectively deal with messaging that blurs the line between truth and falsehood with increasingly powerful strategies supported by artificial intelligence.

Hybrid Media Activism

Hybrid Media Activism
Author: Emiliano Treré
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2018-12-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1315438151

This book is an extensive investigation of the complexities, ambiguities and shortcomings of contemporary digital activism. The author deconstructs the reductionism of the literature on social movements and communication, proposing a new conceptual vocabulary based on practices, ecologies, imaginaries and algorithms to account for the communicative complexity of protest movements. Drawing on extensive fieldwork on social movements, collectives and political parties in Spain, Italy and Mexico, this book disentangles the hybrid nature of contemporary activism. It shows how activists operate merging the physical and the digital, the human and the non-human, the old and the new, the internal and the external, the corporate and the alternative. The author illustrates the ambivalent character of contemporary digital activism, demonstrating that media imaginaries can be either used to conceal authoritarianism, or to reimagine democracy. The book looks at both side of algorithmic power, shedding light on strategies of repression and propaganda, and scrutinizing manifestations of algorithms as appropriation and resistance. The author analyses the way in which digital activism is not an immediate solution to intricate political problems, and argues that it can only be effective when a set of favourable social, political, and cultural conditions align. Assessing whether digital activism can generate and sustain long-term processes of social and political change, this book will be of interest to students and scholars researching radical politics, social movements, digital activism, political participation and current affairs more generally.

Sociophobia

Sociophobia
Author: César Rendueles
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2017-04-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231544375

The great ideological cliché of our time, César Rendueles argues in Sociophobia, is the idea that communication technologies can support positive social dynamics and improve economic and political conditions. We would like to believe that the Internet has given us the tools to overcome modernity's practical dilemmas and bring us into closer relation, but recent events show how technology has in fact driven us farther apart. Named one of the ten best books of the year by Babelia El País, Sociophobia looks at the root causes of neoliberal utopia's modern collapse. It begins by questioning the cyber-fetishist dogma that lulls us into thinking our passive relationship with technology plays a positive role in resolving longstanding differences. Rendueles claims that the World Wide Web has produced a diminished rather than augmented social reality. In other words, it has lowered our expectations with respect to political interventions and personal relations. In an effort to correct this trend, Rendueles embarks on an ambitious reassessment of our antagonistic political traditions to prove that post-capitalism is not only a feasible, intimate, and friendly system to strive for but also essential for moving past consumerism and political malaise.

Black Sun

Black Sun
Author: Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2003-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780814731550

The Unpredictable Constitution brings together a distinguished group of U.S. Supreme Court Justices and U.S. Court of Appeals Judges, who are some of our most prominent legal scholars, to discuss an array of topics on civil liberties. In thoughtful and incisive essays, the authors draw on decades of experience to examine such wide-ranging issues as how legal error should be handled, the death penalty, reasonable doubt, racism in American and South African courts, women and the constitution, and government benefits. Contributors: Richard S. Arnold, Martha Craig Daughtry, Harry T. Edwards, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Betty B. Fletcher, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Lord Irvine of Lairg, Jon O. Newman, Sandra Day O'Connor, Richard A. Posner, Stephen Reinhardt, and Patricia M. Wald.

Critical Perspectives on Social Media and Protest

Critical Perspectives on Social Media and Protest
Author: Lina Dencik
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1783483377

Commercial social media platforms have become integral to contemporary forms of protests. They are intensely used by advocacy groups, non-governmental organisations, social movements and other political actors who increasingly integrate social media platforms into broader practices of organizing and campaigning. But, aside from the many advantages of extensive mobilization opportunities at low cost, what are the implications of social media corporations being involved in these grassroots movements? This book takes a much-needed critical approach to the relationship between social media and protest. Highlighting key issues and concerns in contemporary forms of social media activism, including questions of censorship, surveillance, individualism, and temporality, the book combines contributions from some of the most active scholars in the field today. Advancing both conceptual and empirical work on social media and protest, and with a range of different angles, the book provides a fresh and challenging outlook on a very topical debate.

Networks, Movements and Technopolitics in Latin America

Networks, Movements and Technopolitics in Latin America
Author: Francisco Sierra Caballero
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2017-11-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319655604

This edited collection presents original and compelling research about contemporary experiences of Latin American movements and politics in several countries. The book proposes a theoretical framework that conceptualises different mediation processes that emerge between cyberdemocracy and the emancipation practices of new social movements. Additionally, this volume presents some Latin American practices and experiences that are autonomously and by using self-management–creating other identities and social spaces on the margins of and against the neoliberal system through the use of digital technology. This book will be of great interest to scholars of media and social movements studies as well as of contemporary politics.

Visualising far-right environments

Visualising far-right environments
Author: Bernhard Forchtner
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2023-10-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1526165376

This volume presents ground-breaking analyses of how the far right represents natural environments and environmentalism around the globe. Images are not simply pervasive in our increasingly visual culture – they are a means of proposing worlds to viewers. Accordingly, the book approaches the visual not as something ‘extra’ or ‘illustrative’ but as a key means of producing identities and ‘doing politics’. Putting visuality centre stage and covering political parties and non-party actors in Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Europe and the United States, contributors demonstrate the various ways in which the far right articulates natural environments and the rampant environmental crises of the twenty-first century, providing essential insights into such multifaceted politics.

Digital Political Participation, Social Networks and Big Data

Digital Political Participation, Social Networks and Big Data
Author: José Manuel Robles-Morales
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 151
Release: 2019-09-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030277577

This book explores the changes in political communication in light of the development of a public opinion mediated by web 2.0 technologies. One of the most important changes in political communication is related to the process of disintermediation, i.e. the process by which digital technologies allow citizens to compete in the public space with those agents who, traditionally, co-opted public opinion. However, while disintermediation has undeniably generated a number of advances, having linked citizens to the public debate, the authors highlight some aspects where disintermediation is moving away from a rational and inclusive public space. They argue that these aspects, related to the immediacy, polarization and incivility of the communication, obscure the possibilities for democratization of digital political communication.

Technopolitcs

Technopolitcs
Author: Constantino Pereira Martins (Ed.)
Publisher: Editora Dialética
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2024-09-24
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 6527037384

Technopolitics is a follow-up book that intends to depart and expand the concept of Cyberpolitics to all the dimensions and effects of technology in our lives but placing politics at the center of debate and thought. Most investigations in the fields of Humanities have highlighted the impact of digitization and social virtualization and mapped the transition from the Industrial Revolution, and mass disciplinary society, to the digital revolution, telework and social atomism. The fusion of disruptive technologies is changing the fundamentals of our world almost roaming on its own towards a near future with unprecedented and unpredictable outcomes. This new technological reason implies a rupture and a paradigm shift in the radical transition from an instrumental reason (auxiliary) to an autonomous reason (essential). This means the impossibility of further sustaining the illusion of technological neutrality. Science, culture and technology appear to be merging and in combat simultaneously. And all fields of knowledge are alert to a main idea: how deep is technology shaping our societies and politics? Regardless of the outcome, an age of instability is also an age of challenges. In our era of uncertainty, and while our civilization moves forward toward a hyper-technological future, we should not forget to discuss and reflect on the values and ethics we would like to survive the ruin of time and to pass on to the next generations.