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- Volume 9, Issue 3, 2013
International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics - Volume 9, Issue 3, 2013
Volume 9, Issue 3, 2013
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Blending mass self-communication with advertising in Facebook and LinkedIn: Challenges for social media and user empowerment
Authors: Rob Heyman and Jo PiersonAbstractThe commodification process on Facebook and LinkedIn limits the potential of mass self-communication on these SNS. This is especially noticeable with regard to personal identifiable information (PII) used in advertising. This article is an analysis of Facebook and LinkedIn through desk research and website analysis of their advertising products. We illustrate how the commodification of personal identifiable information influences user empowerment, defined as mass self-communication. We have found that users are not able to control production, selection and distribution of PII, when this information is used in advertising. The commodification of PII is now portraying and distributing user-generated content and PII differently. Economically interesting content is shown more prominently, but commercial messages are also invading UGC to become economically valuable.
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Predicting, securing and shaping the future: Mechanisms of governance in online social environments
More LessAbstractIn online environments, the issues of governance, privacy and security are in a state of emergence, with consensus on institutional frameworks and practices not yet settled. The dynamic relations between governments, corporations and citizens are being renegotiated through the algorithmic formations of data mining and through contract law in the form of End User Licence Agreements. To analyse how the current practices and discourses associated with the socio-technical assemblages of online social worlds work within the broader political economy this article considers discourses associated with risk and security (Dean 2010), practices and discourses associated with algorithms (Gillespie forthcoming 2014) and the new shape of ‘predictive surveillance’ in the form of panspectralism (Palmås 2011). The emerging patterns of governance through contractual law and algorithms are enabling the discursive construction of a differently balanced set of relations between citizens, governments and corporations. The overlapping interests of these stakeholders are considered, and the strong alliances between corporations and the security arms of governments are identified.
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Technology design and power: Freedom and control in communication networks
Authors: Tamara Shepherd and Normand LandryAbstractThe design of technologies with particular sets of affordances for user action reflects and embeds particular sociopolitical values in the technological artefacts themselves. In relation to networked communication technologies like the Internet, design values of openness and decentralization accord with the hegemonic value of freedom as an inherently positive social and political concept. Yet freedom is also an elastic concept that contains the possibility for the freedom of powerful interests to exert controls – technological, state and legal – over the very networks designed to facilitate freedom. This article reviews how such controls are made manifest, with a particular focus on the role of technology design, in the areas of surveillance, censorship and intellectual property. It then concludes by addressing how such controls might be resisted using the affordances of open and decentralized networks. The interplay between freedom and control in communication networks is crucial for the construction of contemporary modes of citizenship, publics and participation.
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The geopolitical vs. the network political: Internet designers and governance
More LessAbstractWith the recognition that communication networks in general and the Internet in particular are not only infrastructural but socio-technical in nature comes the responsibility to think such networks through from the perspective of how they influence – and/or are – forms of power and governance. The notion of citizenship is one that appears relative to both social and technical systems, and thus at their conjuncture, because it is the concept through which the rights and responsibilities of individuals relative to governance are refracted. It was in fact the case that citizenship was a concern for those responsible for technical design of the Internet as that history both unfolded through and is recorded in the technical document series known as the Internet Requests for Comments, or RFCs. This paper analyzes the two types of citizenship of concern from the perspective of Internet design – geopolitical (oriented around the state) and network political (oriented around the network) – and interactions between the two as they were discussed within and affected the Internet design process. These network-inspired ideas about citizenship in turn contribute to the ongoing discussion about the evolution of new forms of citizenship in today’s environment, including in particular those that are global and/or technological in nature.
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Current perspectives and future challenges in feminism and media studies
Authors: Johanna Dorer and Brigitte HipflAbstractThis contribution gives an overview of the historical analysis, current assessment and future prospects of feminism. The challenges of future feminist media studies are presented in the context of the appeal by Nancy Fraser, who assumes that the fundamental claims of second-wave feminism are still of central relevance. These observations are based on the contributions that were compiled by Lisa McLaughlin and Cynthia Carter on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the international journal ‘Feminist Media Studies’.
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Reviews
Authors: Loreto Corredoira, Katharina Lobinger and Mara BalestriniAbstractInternational Internet Law, Joanna Kulesza (2012) Translated by Magdalena Arent and Wojciech Wołoszyk, Oxford, UK: Routledge, 196 pp., ISBN-13: 9780415674683 (hbk), £80.
The Mediatization of Culture and Society, Hjarvard, Stig (2013) London: Routledge, 173 pp., ISBN: 978-0415692366, Eur 75,
Beyond Smart Cities. How Cities Network, Learn and Innovate, Campbell Tim (2013) London: Routledge, 236 pp., ISBN: 978-1849714266, Eur 45.
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 19 (2023)
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Volume 18 (2022)
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Volume 17 (2021)
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Volume 16 (2020)
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Volume 15 (2019)
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Volume 14 (2018)
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Volume 13 (2017)
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Volume 12 (2016)
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Volume 11 (2015)
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Volume 10 (2014)
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Volume 9 (2013)
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Volume 8 (2012)
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Volume 7 (2011)
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Volume 6 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 5 (2009)
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Volume 4 (2008)
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Volume 3 (2007)
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Volume 2 (2006 - 2007)
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Volume 1 (2005)