scholarly journals Digital media infrastructures: pipes, platforms, and politics

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Christophe Plantin ◽  
Aswin Punathambekar

Over the past decade, a growing body of scholarship in media studies and other cognate disciplines has focused our attention on the social, material, cultural, and political dimensions of the infrastructures that undergird and sustain media and communication networks and cultures across the world. This infrastructural turn assumes greater significance in relation to digital media and in particular, the influence that digital platforms have come to wield. Having ‘disrupted’ many sectors of social, political, and economic life, many of the most widely used digital platforms now seem to operate as infrastructures themselves. This special issue explores how an infrastructural perspective reframes the study of digital platforms and allows us to pose questions of scale, labor, industry logics, policy and regulation, state power, cultural practices, and citizenship in relation to the routine, everyday uses of digital platforms. In this opening article, we offer a critical overview of media infrastructure studies and situate the study of digital infrastructures and platforms within broader scholarly and public debates on the history and political economy of media infrastructures. We also draw on the study of media industries and production cultures to make the case for an inter-medial and inter-sectoral approach to understanding the entanglements of digital platforms and infrastructures.

Author(s):  
Stina Bengtsson

This article aims at understanding to understand the distinctive mechanisms of digital media use, seen in relation to cultural practices at large. The empirical material is a survey study of university students at the Business Administration, Media and Communication Studies, Political Science and Philosophy departments at Södertörn University, Sweden. The empirical analysis deals with the students’ digital media use and preferences, and how these are related to their broader cultural practices and preferences. Specific attention is paid to the webpages the students mention in the survey, and how these are distributed among the groups. By showing detailed information on these areas, the mechanisms of difference of digital media use are revealed.


2020 ◽  
pp. 25-32
Author(s):  
V. A. Sofronov ◽  
S. M. Maksimova

Today’s society cannot be imagined without information technologies that have opened up new market opportunities. The emergence of new digital media with modern advantages in the field of information technologies, their adoption and implementation in the social and economic life of society forms a new system of the global international economy, i.e. digital.


2021 ◽  

In a crucial sense, all machines are time machines. The essays in Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time develop the central concept of hardwired temporalities to consider how technical networks hardwire and rewire patterns of time. Digital media introduce new temporal patterns in their features of instant communication, synchronous collaboration, intricate time management, and continually improved speed. They construct temporal infrastructures that affect the rhythms of lived experience and shape social relations and practices of cooperation. Interdisciplinary in method and international in scope, the volume draws together insights from media and communication studies, cultural studies, and science and technology studies while staging an important encounter between two distinct approaches to the temporal patterning of media infrastructures, a North American strain emphasizing the social and cultural experiences of lived time and a European tradition, prominent especially in Germany, focusing on technological time and time-critical processes.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanne Boersma

This article scrutinizes how ‘immigrant’ characters of perpetual arrival are enacted in the social scientific work of immigrant integration monitoring. Immigrant integration research produces narratives in which characters—classified in highly specific, contingent ways as ‘immigrants’—are portrayed as arriving and never as having arrived. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork at social scientific institutions and networks in four Western European countries, this article analyzes three practices that enact the characters of arrival narratives: negotiating, naturalizing, and forgetting. First, it shows how negotiating constitutes objects of research while at the same time a process of hybridization is observed among negotiating scientific and governmental actors. Second, a naturalization process is analyzed in which slippery categories become fixed and self-evident. Third, the practice of forgetting involves the fading away of contingent and historical circumstances of the research and specifically a dispensation of ‘native’ or ‘autochthonous’ populations. Consequently, the article states how some people are considered rightful occupants of ‘society’ and others are enacted to travel an infinite road toward an occupied societal space. Moreover, it shows how enactments of arriving ‘immigrant’ characters have performative effects in racially differentiating national populations and hence in narrating society. This article is part of the Global Perspectives, Media and Communication special issue on “Media, Migration, and Nationalism,” guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata.


Humaniora ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Abitassha Az Zahra ◽  
Eko Priyo Purnomo ◽  
Aulia Nur Kasiwi

The research aimed to explain the pattern of social communication on the issue of rejection of the PLTU Batang development policy. It used data on Twitter accounts involved in the rejection of the PLTU Batang development policy. In analyzing existing data, qualitative methods and social analysis networks were used. To see social networks in the rejection of the PLTU Batang development policy, the research used the NodeXL application to find out the patterns of social communication networks in #TolakPLTUBatang. From the results, it can be seen that in the dissemination of social networking information, the @praditya_wibby account is the most central account in the social network and has a strong influence on the social network. The @praditya_wibby account has a role in moving the community through Twitter to make a critical social movement. This means that in the current digital era, democracy enters a new form through the movement of public opinion delivery through social media. Besides, by encouraging the role of online news, the distribution of information becomes faster to form new perceptions of an issue. This is evident from the correlation network where the @praditya_wibby account has correlations with several compass online media accounts, tirto.id, okezonenews, vice, antaranews, BBCIndonesia, and CNN Indonesia.


Author(s):  
Simon Keegan-Phipps ◽  
Lucy Wright

This chapter considers the role of social media (broadly conceived) in the learning experiences of folk musicians in the Anglophone West. The chapter draws on the findings of the Digital Folk project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), and begins by summarizing and problematizing the nature of learning as a concept in the folk music context. It briefly explicates the instructive, appropriative, and locative impacts of digital media for folk music learning before exploring in detail two case studies of folk-oriented social media: (1) the phenomenon of abc notation as a transmissive media and (2) the Mudcat Café website as an example of the folk-oriented discussion forum. These case studies are shown to exemplify and illuminate the constructs of traditional transmission and vernacularism as significant influences on the social shaping and deployment of folk-related media technologies. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the need to understand the musical learning process as a culturally performative act and to recognize online learning mechanisms as sites for the (re)negotiation of musical, cultural, local, and personal identities.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (05) ◽  
pp. 1340021 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTIAN BARROT ◽  
JAN KUHLMANN ◽  
ANDREA POPA

Adoption processes are often heavily influenced by interpersonal communication. Marketing managers are increasingly trying to use these relationships to foster the market penetration of their products. In an empirical study of the US market for an innovative medical device, we survey the social network of (mostly chief) anesthetists from 151 hospitals. We confirm the influences from personal communication on individual adoption decisions through hazard regressions. We then use a multi-agent modeling framework trying to identify what seeding strategies would have been optimal to achieve a fast market penetration, i.e. which and how many anesthetists should be selected to initiate personal communication processes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 102 (6) ◽  
pp. 14-19
Author(s):  
Antero Garcia ◽  
T. Philip Nichols

Antero Garcia and T. Philip Nichols explore how classrooms and schools must reframe their conceptions of technology from a focus on tools that serve specific purposes to a focus on platforms and their ecologies. In doing so, they argue, educational stakeholders should attend to three different dimensions of how technology is integrated in schools: the social uses of digital technologies, the design decisions that were made about these products, and the material resources that help make them operate. This approach requires educators to ask complicated questions about what technology does in schools and how to teach with and about it.


2021 ◽  
pp. 205015792098482
Author(s):  
Linus Andersson ◽  
Ebba Sundin

This article addresses the phenomenon of mobile bystanders who use their smartphones to film or take photographs at accident scenes, instead of offering their help to people in need or to assist medical units. This phenomenon has been extensively discussed in Swedish news media in recent years since it has been described as a growing problem for first responders, such as paramedics, police, and firefighters. This article aims to identify theoretical perspectives that are relevant for analyzing mobile media practices and discuss the ethical implications of these perspectives. Our purpose is twofold: we want to develop a theoretical framework for critically approaching mobile media practices, and we want to contribute to discussions concerning well-being in a time marked by mediatization and digitalization. In this pursuit, we combine theory from social psychology about how people behave at traumatic scenes with discussions about witnessing in and through media, as developed in media and communication studies. Both perspectives offer various implications for normative inquiry, and in our discussion, we argue that mobile bystanders must be considered simultaneously as transgressors of social norms and as emphatic witnesses behaving in accordance with the digital media age. The article ends with a discussion regarding the implications for further research.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 310
Author(s):  
Alicia Izharuddin

What accounts for the endurance of forced marriage (kahwin paksa) narratives in Malaysian public culture? How does one explain the ways popular fascination with forced marriage relate to assumptions about heteronormative institutions and practices? In a society where most who enter into marriages do so based on individual choice, the enduring popularity of forced marriage as a melodramatic trope in fictional love stories suggests an ambivalence about modernity and egalitarianism. This ambivalence is further excavated by illuminating the intertextual engagement by readers, publishers and booksellers of Malay romantic fiction with a mediated discourse on intimacy and cultural practices. This article finds that forced marriage in the intimate publics of Malay romance is delivered as a kind of melodramatic mode, a storytelling strategy to solve practical problems of experience. Intertextual narratives of pain and struggle cast light on ‘redha’ (submission to God’s will) and ‘sabar’ (patience), emotional virtues that are mobilised during personal hardship and the challenge of maintaining successful marital relations. I argue that ‘redha’ and ‘sabar’ serve as important linchpins for the reproduction of heteronormative institutions and wifely obedience (taat). This article also demonstrates the ways texts are interwoven in the narratives about gender roles, intimacy, and marital success (or lack thereof) and how they relate to the modes of romantic melodrama.


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