scholarly journals Migration and Mobility in a Digital Age: (Re)Mapping Connectivity and Belonging

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 547-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Ponzanesi

This article charts new directions in digital media and migration studies from a gendered, postcolonial, and multidisciplinary perspective. In particular, the focus is on the ways in which the experience of displacement is resignified and transformed by new digital affordances from different vantage points, engaging with recent developments in datafication, visualization, biometric technologies, platformization, securitization, and extended reality (XR) as part of a drastically changed global mediascape. This article explores the role of new media technologies in rethinking the dynamics of migration and globalization by focusing in particular on the role of migrant users as “connected” and active participants, as well as “screened” and subject to biometric datafication, visualization, and surveillance. Elaborating on concepts such as “migration” and “mobility,” the article analyzes some of the paradoxes offered by our globalized world of intermittent connectivity and troubled belonging, seen as relational definitions that are always fluid, negotiable, and porous.

Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....


Author(s):  
Matylda Szewczyk

The article presents a reflection on the experience of prenatal ultrasound and on the nature of cultural beings, it creates. It exploits chosen ethnographic and cultural descriptions of prenatal ultrasounds in different cultures, as well as documentary and artistic reflections on medical imagery and new media technologies. It discusses different ways of defining the role of ultrasound in prenatal care and the cultural contexts build around it. Although the prenatal ultrasounds often function in the space of enormous tensions (although they are also supposed to give pleasure), it seems they will accompany us further in the future. It is worthwhile to find some new ways of describing them and to invent new cultural practices to deal with them.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jumoke Giwa

<p>This research project undertakes a critical analysis of the use of new media technologies by community activists engaging in local and global communities. Increasingly, community organizations are using digital media to augment their various activities and conduct campaigns. I will consider this development with regard to WorldPulse.com, a global organization whose aim is to foster and facilitate civic engagement. More specifically, the website attempts to function and serve as a global public sphere and vehicle for the expression and discussion of political, social and cultural issues relevant to women. The analysis conducted in this thesis focuses on the website’s digital action campaigns on gender-based violence, girl child education, and women’s access to technology between 2012 and 2014, and its ‘Voices of Our Future’ citizen journalism training program.  This project employs digital ethnographic methods using content and discourse analysis, participant observation, online web survey, semi-structured email interviews and a researcher’s journal to examine the potential of worldpulse.com to serve as a global public sphere for women. The research makes use of critical studies theories and data triangulation methodologies in order to identify and evaluate if, and to what extent, the site facilitates public sphere activity and activism. I have developed an inductive typology to assess levels and kinds of civic engagement that is enabled and augmented by the interconnection of online and offline advocacy. This thesis aims to contribute to the body of scholarly literature researching and evaluating the extent to which new media technologies enable and facilitate public sphere engagement.</p>


2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 569-587 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanya Horeck

Although it often goes unremarked, digital screens are a key point of commonality across the many different transnational renditions of the story of violence against girls and women found in contemporary TV crime drama. The Fall (United Kingdom, 2013–) and Top of the Lake (United Kingdom/Australia/New Zealand/United States, 2013–) are two striking examples of TV crime dramas that frame their self-conscious interrogation of rape culture through digital media. Considering the mutual imbrication of feminist politics and the deployment of new media technologies on these shows, this essay considers how the digital interface functions as a way of mediating viewer response to violence against women. Resisting a reading of digital technologies as either inherently oppressive or inherently liberatory, the essay explores how these TV series navigate the tension between the simultaneous violence of new media and its investigative/feminist/affective potential.


Author(s):  
James Rendell

The 2020 Covid-19 global pandemic has greatly impacted societies around the world, where governmental strategies to curb and control the outbreak have resulted in citizens being unable to attend public businesses and spaces. For musicians who rely on touring as a dominant part of their income, the pandemic has had a hugely negative effect on their finances since they can no longer play face-to-face shows. However, a number of artists have turned to digital media to remedy this, performing online to audiences via Web 2.0 platforms. To better understand this cultural phenomenon, the article introduces the concept of portal shows that employ a converge between traditional live gigs, screen media and new media technologies. Analysing the textual, affective, performative and economic dynamics of portal shows, the article examines three differing case studies: Code Orange’s album release show on Twitch.TV, Beach Slang’s acoustic performance on StageIt and Delta Sleep’s in-store show on Instagram. In doing so, the article argues portal shows offer novel and nuanced ways artists and audiences can engage with one another through spatial convergence afforded by video streaming technologies and digital interfaces. Such live events also offer just-in-time fan engagement but does so within a digital transcultural remit, aiding the support of virtual scenes. As a result, the article expands on what is considered pandemic media and subsequent audience affective registers and enriches the study of the music industry’s engagement with digital media and wider convergence cultures more generally.


2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Mutsvairo ◽  
Helge Rønning

The purpose of this issue of Media Culture and Society is to discuss the possible role of social media in the struggle for democracy, against authoritarianism, and over hidden power structures. The articles included in this volume are meant to offer empirical interventions to beliefs, some of them unproven, on whether the emergence of new media technologies has driven Africa towards democratic change. Papers in this Special Issue cover a wide variety of African countries delving deep into comparative studies of participatory citizens’ media on the continent. This introduction is an attempt to offer an explanation on African democratisation and authoritarianism before conceptualising the role of social media in political processes with the backing of current case study dispatches in Africa, demonstrating the dilemmas of digital disparities in promoting or denting democratisation in Africa.


2011 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 617-633 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Gilmore

Over the past decade Brazil has become well known for its open embrace of new media technologies. In tandem, an increasing number of Brazilian candidates have begun to use web and social media sites as an integral part of their overall campaign efforts. The present study is the first effort at large-scale modeling of these relationships in an emerging Latin American democracy. To explore the relationship between using digital media in a candidate’s political campaign strategy and voter support, I built an original dataset of the 2010 elections for the lower house of the Brazilian Congress. I investigate factors such as a candidate’s use of web and social networking sites in conjunction with other traditional influences such as candidate gender, age, incumbency, party affiliation, coalition membership and campaign spending. I demonstrate that having a robust web presence and using social media, holding other factors constant, can be a significant contribution to the popularity of a candidate on election day in an open-list proportional representation electoral system such as that in Brazil. Additionally, I demonstrate how this digital media campaign tactic might be specifically beneficial to traditionally disadvantaged candidates in bridging the gap of their under-representation in Brazilian politics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 592 (7) ◽  
pp. 29-36
Author(s):  
Grażyna Penkowska

The aim of the article is to popularize and attempt to reflect on the phenomenon of visuality in various areas of life in the age of new media. The first part of the text introduces the meaning of the term 'visualization' and shows various dimensions of visuality, which is an attempt to validate the assumption about the leading role of image in the modern world. The next part presents the main characteristics of visuality. Visuality is a mean of communication, description of events and expressing emotions. Visual objects affect both the cognitive and emotional sphere, which is the reason behind the constant increase of importance of the message with their participation. The last part of the article contains analysis of the positive and negative aspects of visuality. The dual nature of modern visual messages is associated with the specifics of digital media. The ease of creating and sending images in the era of new media leads to overload of the space with visual objects.


2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 111-117
Author(s):  
Gennady Petrovich Bakulev

Digital technologies and the Internet in particular are causing deep changes in film industry. The development of the VoD service is enhancing the tendency for digitalization and disintermediation. Consequently, there is a considerable cost reduction in the value chain. In the long term future there can be a radical revision of the existing system of distribution “windows”. To understand the principles of the on-line distribution the author tries to estimate the impact of new media technologies on film distribution and the strategy of its main participants


Author(s):  
MsC Sonja Kokotović ◽  
PhD Miodrag Koprivica

Today, digital media technologies enable faster reaching the necessary information and placement information that are important to the user, quickly and easily using new communication channels available to everyone around the world. Internet mainly compared with the "information buffet" from which users take as much information as he is when he needs to. This information can be used for information, education, entertainment, advertising, sales, and other aspects of the business. As we live in the age of new media, which enabled the creation and exchange a wide variety of content, including the content of traditional media such as those produced by JMU broadcasting a large number of Internet users, researchers influence of the media warn of increase dependence on the media, especially new and the need to create the institutional basis for the introduction of media education in the regular education program. Gradual influence of new media people indirectly determine the meaning of life, because it is believed that two-thirds of our waking time with the media or with media and other activity. This work will define terms such as Internet, communications, new media, media literacy, social media, media content, but ... I will analyze the expectations and challenges that we accelerated technical and technological developments made in terms of the Internet and other forms of electronic promotions.


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