Download or read book Free Software the Internet and Global Communities of Resistance written by Sara Schoonmaker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-19 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores software's pivotal role as the code that powers computers, mobile devices, the Internet, and social media. Creating conditions for the ongoing development and use of software, including the Internet as a communications infrastructure, is one of the most compelling issues of our time. Free software is based upon open source code, developed in peer communities as well as corporate settings, challenging the dominance of proprietary software firms and promoting the digital commons. Drawing upon key cases and interviews with free software proponents based in Europe, Brazil and the U.S., the book explores pathways toward creating the digital commons and examines contemporary political struggles over free software, privacy and civil liberties on the Internet that are vital for the commons' continued development.
Download or read book Incorporating the Digital Commons written by Benjamin J. Birkinbine and published by University of Westminster Press. This book was released on 2020-02-26 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of ‘the commons’ has been used as a framework to understand resources shared by a community rather than a private entity, and it has also inspired social movements working against the enclosure of public goods and resources. One such resource is free (libre) and open source software (FLOSS). FLOSS emerged as an alternative to proprietary software in the 1980s. However, both the products and production processes of FLOSS have become incorporated into capitalist production. For example, Red Hat, Inc. is a large publicly traded company whose business model relies entirely on free software, and IBM, Intel, Cisco, Samsung, Google are some of the largest contributors to Linux, the open-source operating system. This book explores the ways in which FLOSS has been incorporated into digital capitalism. Just as the commons have been used as a motivational frame for radical social movements, it has also served the interests of free-marketeers, corporate libertarians, and states to expand their reach by dragging the shared resources of social life onto digital platforms so they can be integrated into the global capitalist system. The book concludes by asserting the need for a critical political economic understanding of the commons that foregrounds (digital) labour, class struggle, and uneven power distribution within the digital commons as well as between FLOSS communities and their corporate sponsors.
Download or read book Apps written by Gerard Goggin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the rise of the smartphone, apps have become entrenched in billions of users' daily lives. Accessible across phones and tablets, watches and wearables, connected cars, sensors, and cities, they are an inescapable feature of our current culture. In this book, Gerard Goggin provides a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the development of apps as a digital media technology. Covering the technological, social, cultural, and policy dynamics of apps, Goggin ultimately considers what a post-app world might look like. He argues that apps represent a pivowtal moment in the development of digital media, acting as a hinge between the visions and realities of the “mobile,” “cyber,” and “online” societies envisaged since the late 1980s and the imaginaries and materialities of the digital societies that emerged from 2010. Apps offer frames, construct tools, and constitute “small worlds” for users to reorient themselves in digital media settings. This fascinating book will reframe the conversation about the software that underwrites our digital worlds. It is essential reading for students and scholars of media and communication, as well as for anyone interested in this ubiquitous technology.
Download or read book Advanced Introduction to Creative Industries written by John Hartley and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-29 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the world faces extreme economic, environmental and political crises, this bold and accessible Advanced Introduction argues for a future-facing approach to the creative economy and creative innovation. The book analyses contemporary and historical arts and culture whilst assessing historical shifts from national to global cultures; analogue to digital technologies; and individualist to systems thinking.
Download or read book Digital Interfacing written by Daniel Black and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-26 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes the interface – or rather to interface, a process rather than a discrete object or location – as a concept emblematic of our contemporary embodied relationship with technological artefacts. The fundamental question addressed by this book is: How can we understand what it means to perceive or act upon the world as a body–artefact assemblage? Black works to clarify the role of artefacts of all kinds in human perception and action, then considers the ways in which new digital technologies can expand and transform this capacity to change our mode of engagement with our environment. Throughout, the discussion is grounded in specific technologies – some already familiar and some still in development (e.g. new virtual reality and brain–machine interface technologies, natural user interfaces, etc.). In order to develop a detailed, generalizable theory of how we interface with technology, Black assembles an analytical toolkit from a number of different disciplines, including media theory, ethology, clinical psychology, cultural theory, philosophy, science and technology studies, cultural history, aesthetics and neuroscience.
Download or read book Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture written by Jacob Johanssen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-31 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture offers a comprehensive account of our contemporary media environment—digital culture and audiences in particular—by drawing on psychoanalysis and media studies frameworks. It provides an introduction to the psychoanalytic affect theories of Sigmund Freud and Didier Anzieu and applies them theoretically and methodologically in a number of case studies. Johanssen argues that digital media fundamentally shape our subjectivities on affective and unconscious levels, and he critically analyses phenomena such as television viewing, Twitter use, affective labour on social media, and data-mining. How does watching television involve the body? Why are we so drawn to reality television? Why do we share certain things on social media and not others? How are bodies represented on social media? How do big data and data mining influence our identities? Can algorithms help us make better decisions? These questions amongst others are addressed in the chapters of this wide-ranging book. Johanssen shows in a number of case studies how a psychoanalytic angle can bring new insights to audience studies and digital media research more generally. From audience research with viewers of the reality television show Embarrassing Bodies and how they unconsciously used it to work through feelings about their own bodies, to a critical engagement with Hardt and Negri's notion of affective labour and how individuals with bodily differences used social media for their own affective-digital labour, the book suggests that an understanding of affect based on Freud and Anzieu is helpful when thinking about media use. The monograph also discusses the perverse implications of algorithms, big data and data mining for subjectivities. In drawing on empirical data and examples throughout, Johanssen presents a compelling analysis of our contemporary media environment.
Download or read book Women and the Digitally Mediated Revolution in the Middle East written by C. L. Bernardi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-07 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book applies digital methods of analysis to the study of the impact of digital technologies on the social and political spheres of women in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. These countries have been early embracers of digital technologies in the Middle East, and are therefore useful cases to examine the region’s use of digital media. Bernardi discusses what can be called the silent revolutions of these women online. By combining Software Studies, Feminist Qur’anic Revisionism, Actor Network Theory and digital methods research and analysis, the book explores how ‘women’s issues’ in Egypt and Saudi Arabia arise, transform and manifest themselves in the digital sphere, both in English and in Arabic.
Download or read book Digital Icons written by Yasmin Ibrahim and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-04 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers critical perspectives on the digital ‘iconic’, exploring how the notion of the iconic is re-appropriated and re-made online, and the consequences for humanity and society. Examining cross-cultural case studies of iconic images in digital spaces, the author offers original and critical analyses, theories and perspectives on the notion of the ‘iconic’, and on its movement, re-appropriation and meaning making on digital platforms. A carefully curated selection of case studies illustrates topics such as phantom memory; martyrdom; denigration and pornographic recoding; digital games as simulacra; and memes as ‘artification’. Situating the notion of the iconic firmly within contemporary cultures, the author takes a thematic approach to investigate the iconic as an unstable and unfinished phenomenon online as it travels through platforms temporally and spatially. The book will be an important resource for academics and students in the areas of media and communications, digital culture, cultural studies, visual communication, visual culture, journalism studies and digital humanities.
Download or read book Digital Media Sharing and Everyday Life written by Jenny Kennedy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital Media, Sharing and Everyday Life provides nuanced accounts of the processes of sharing in digital culture and the complexities that arise in them. The book explores definitions of sharing, and the roles that our digital devices and the platforms we use play in these practices. Drawing upon practice theory to outline a theoretical framework of sharing practice, the book emphasizes the need for a coherent and consistent framework of sharing in digital culture and explains what this framework might look like. With insightful descriptions, the book draws out the relationship of sharing to privacy and control, the labored strategies and boundaries of reciprocation, and our relationships with the technologies which mediate sharing practices. The volume is an essential read for researchers, postgraduate and undergraduate students in Media and Communication, New Media, Sociology, Internet Studies, and Cultural Studies.
Download or read book The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture written by Bradley E. Wiggins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-02-25 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shared, posted, tweeted, commented upon, and discussed online as well as off-line, internet memes represent a new genre of online communication, and an understanding of their production, dissemination, and implications in the real world enables an improved ability to navigate digital culture. This book explores cases of cultural, economic, and political critique levied by the purposeful production and consumption of internet memes. Often images, animated GIFs, or videos are remixed in such a way to incorporate intertextual references, quite frequently to popular culture, alongside a joke or critique of some aspect of the human experience. Ideology, semiotics, and intertextuality coalesce in the book’s argument that internet memes represent a new form of meaning-making, and the rapidity by which they are produced and spread underscores their importance.
Download or read book Digital Gambling written by César Albarrán-Torres and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-28 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops the concept of "gamble-play media", describing how some gambling and gambling-like practices are increasingly mediated by digital technologies. Digital gambling brings gambling closer to the practices and features of videogames, as audio-visual simulations structure users’ experiences. By studying digital gambling from media studies, videogame and cultural studies approaches, this book offers a new critical perspective on the issues raised by computer-mediated gambling, while expanding our perspective on what media and gambling are. In particular, it critically analyses terrestrial, mobile and online slot machines, online poker and stock trading apps through a selection of case studies.
Download or read book Gay Men Identity and Social Media written by Elija Cassidy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-09 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how the social and technical integration of mainstream social media into gay men’s digital cultures since the mid 2000s has played out in the lives of young gay men, looking at how these convergences have influenced more recent iterations of gay men’s digital culture. Focusing on platforms such as Gaydar, Facebook, Grindr and Instagram, Cassidy highlights the ways that identity and privacy management issues experienced in this context have helped to generate a culture of participatory reluctance within gay men’s digital environments.
Download or read book Everyday Resistance written by Bruno Frère and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-10-04 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies those who, in various domains of life, are resisting the increasingly harsh day-to-day pressures of “late capitalism,” centering mainly on French examples. Far from the global euphoria of the sixties and seventies, everyday people are trying to loosen the grip of injustice in very concrete ways: people experiencing homelessness try to occupy and live in empty buildings; collectives of small farmers and consumers avoid long (and costly) commercial supply chains to defend their common interests; students and teachers organize to prevent the expulsion of undocumented migrants; and activists in the free software movement fight for the “common ownership” of software and of the Internet. Through civil disobedience in the midst of daily life, people are trying to resist, work against, and change laws that protect the interests of firms and corporations considered socially or ecologically unfair.
Download or read book Re Inventing the Internet written by Andrew Feenberg and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-03-24 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although it has been in existence for over three decades, the Internet remains a contested technology. Its governance and role in civic life, education, and entertainment are all still openly disputed and debated. The issues include censorship and network control, privacy and surveillance, the political impact of activist blogging, peer to peer file sharing, the effects of video games on children, and many others. Media conglomerates, governments and users all contribute to shaping the forms and functions of the Internet as the limits and potentialities of the technologies are tested and extended. What is most surprising about the Internet is the proliferation of controversies and conflicts in which the creativity of ordinary users plays a central role. The title, (Re)Inventing the Internet, refers to this extraordinary flowering of agency in a society that tends to reduce its members to passive spectators. This collection presents a series of critical case studies that examine specific sites of change and contestation. These cover a range of phenomena including computer gaming cultures, online education, surveillance, and the mutual shaping of digital technologies and civic life.
Download or read book Digital Dilemmas written by M.I. Franklin and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital Dilemmas is a groundbreaking ethnographic, mixed method approach to understanding dynamics of power and resistance as they are played out around the future of the internet. M. I. Franklin looks at the way that publics, governments, and multilateral institutions are being redefined and reinvented in digital settings that are ubiquitous and yet controlled by a relative few. Franklin does this through three original and wide-ranging case studies that get at the way that computer-mediated power relations play out "on the ground" through a mixture of overlapping online and offline activity, at personal, community, and transnational levels. Case studies include online activities around homelessness and street papers in the U.S. and around the world, digital and human rights activism carried out though the United Nations, and the ongoing battle between proprietary and free and open source software proponents. The result is a thought-provoking and seminal work on the way that the new paradigms of power and resistance forged online reshape localized and traditional power structures offline.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Communities of Practice in Information and Knowledge Management written by Coakes, Elayne and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2005-10-31 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This encyclopedia will give readers insight on how other organizations have tackled the necessary means of sharing knowledge across communities and functions" -- Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Sociology in the Age of the Internet written by Allison Cavanagh and published by McGraw-Hill Education (UK). This book was released on 2007-04-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years there has been a large and diverse body of writing from scholars in the social sciences who have been studying changes brought about by new communication technologies in general and the Internet in particular. The question of how people behave, interact and organize themselves in relation to this form of communication has been given added prominence by developments within new social theory, especially in relation to the novelty of contemporary social formations and the importance of mass communications to this changed order. For the student new to the study of technology and society, there are a bewildering array of claims and counter claims, representing a spectrum of theoretical, methodological and critical sensibilities in relation to the Internet. In this new book Allison Cavanagh evaluates the work in this area by: Investigating the novelty of the Internet and setting the Internet in the context of communication histories Evaluating the extent and rate of change through a synthesis of the available empirical literature Providing a key to understanding the changes identified through an evaluation of the utility of new social theory Sociology in the Age of the Internet is essential reading for academics and students with an interest in the relationship between the internet and society.
