Social-media-weaponised populism and community development

2020 ◽  
pp. 89-108
Author(s):  
Jacques Boulet
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Community Development ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Development Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Community Life ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Economic Background ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter assesses the resurfacing of populism and its much-discussed and documented adoption and enactment by leaders and citizens. More specifically, it discusses reasons for this (re-)emergence and its effects on people's daily lives and their participation in community life against the wider political-economic background, two areas central to much community development theory and practice. The first question posed is: what is going on with and around people — especially their modalities of 'being' and 'relating' — rendering them more 'prone' to being influenced by populisms and become populisms' 'accomplices'? Second, what role does social media play in this imposition/complicity dialectic? Indeed, social media powerfully invades and interpenetrates all levels and processes of the political economy, of people's everyday experiences and their subjective-affective lives, and they infest the mediating institutions operating 'between' the virtual global and the imperceptible here and now. Finally, a third question is posed: what is the effect of such socially mediated populism on communities and on efforts to (re)develop and maintain them? The chapter concludes with some ideas about ways to resist the (combined) assault of populism and social media and restart the project of democracy.

The Political Economy of Attention

2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Morten Axel Pedersen ◽  
Kristoffer Albris ◽  
Nick Seaver
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Online Publication ◽  
The Political ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Moral Concern ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Political Economic

Attention has become an issue of intense political, economic, and moral concern over recent years: from the commodification of attention by digital platforms to the alleged loss of the attentional capacities of screen-addicted children (and their parents). While attention has rarely been an explicit focus of anthropological inquiry, it has still played an important if mostly tacit part in many anthropological debates and subfields. Focusing on anthropological scholarship on digital worlds and ritual forms, we review resources for colleagues interested in this burgeoning topic of research and identify potential avenues for an incipient anthropology of attention, which studies how attentional technologies and techniques mold human minds and bodies in more or less intentional ways. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 50 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to Studying Digital Feminist Activism

2019 ◽  
pp. 24-41
Author(s):  
Kaitlynn Mendes ◽  
Jessica Ringrose ◽  
Jessalynn Keller
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
The Political ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Feminist Activism ◽  
Approaches To Studying ◽  
Critical Technology ◽  
Key Terms

In this chapter, we outline our conceptual framework, addressing key theories that underpin our analysis, including, affect and related concepts, including affective solidarity, networked affect, and affective publics. We also introduce key terms from critical technology studies, including platform vernacular and other concepts relevant to the political economy of social media. After providing further information on the six case studies described in the Introduction, including their reason for selection and methods used, the chapter details our unique methodological approach, which draws insights from a range of interdisciplinary tools, including feminist ethnographic methods, thematic textual analysis, semi-structured interviews, surveys, and online observations.

scholarly journals The threat of surveillance capitalism

Teknokultura ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-276
Author(s):  
Chris H. Gray
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
21St Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Important Addition ◽  
The Early 21St Century

Using Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the essay explores this latest form of capitalism and Zuboff’s claims about its organization. Her arguments are compared and contrasted with David Eggers novel, and the movie that came out of it, called The Circle, as well as other perspectives on capitalism (Marx, Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger) and the current dominance of social media companies (especially Alphabet/Google, Facebook, and Amazon) from Evgeny Morozov, Natasa Dow Schüll, Zeynep Tufekci, Steve Mann and Tim Wu. Zuboff’s description and critique of Surveillance Capitalism is a convincing and important addition to our understanding of the political economy of the early 21st Century and the role of giant monopolistic social media companies in shaping it.

Community development in the UK: whatever happened to class? A historical analysis

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Craig
Keyword(s):  
Community Development ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Development Theory ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Unequal Distribution ◽  
The World ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Distribution Of Income

Prior to the 1950s, differing strands of what might be seen as community development can be perceived in work by extension officers in colonial settings, as an extension of trades union activism, or ‘community-building’ with a social focus, usually in social housing areas. Yet, despite a common emphasis on poverty and disadvantage, attempts to locate community development within a class-based understanding of, for example, the unequal distribution of income, wealth and power within most societies have been limited. This chapter will trace ways in which the issue of class has or has not been addressed within community development theory and practice, drawing on key texts and experiences from across the world. It will seek to identify the extent to which the mainstream practice of community development, as it has developed, has been able to locate itself solidly within and build alliances with more explicitly class-based forms of political struggle.

Competing concepts of class: implications and applications for community development

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorraine C. Minnite ◽  
Frances Fox Piven
Keyword(s):  
Community Development ◽  
Public Debt ◽  
Public Spending ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Effective Resistance ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Development Theory ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
New Phase ◽  
Tax Cuts

This chapter reviews some of the trends associated with the new phase of capitalism called ‘neoliberalism’, particularly widening inequality and its correlates in the growing political influence of the wealthiest strata. The consequences for community development include tax cuts, cuts in public spending, and mounting private and public debt. Finally, the authors consider the prospects for effective resistance within the context of community development theory and practice.

Rethinking PGIS: Participatory or (post)political GIS?

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven M. Radil ◽  
Matthew B. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Community Development ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Progressive Change ◽  
Participatory Gis ◽  
Political Outcomes ◽  
Political Intervention ◽  
Political Economic

Participatory GIS (PGIS) emerged from the contentious GIS debates of the 1990s as a means of political intervention in issues of social and environmental justice. PGIS has since matured into a distinct subfield in which GIS is used to enhance the political engagement of historically marginalized people and to shape political outcomes through mapping. However, this has proven to be difficult work. We suggest that this is because PGIS, particularly in its community development incarnations, though well-intentioned in endeavoring to enhance the voices of the excluded, is inherently limited because it primarily aims to enhance the inclusion and participation of the historically marginalized by working within established frameworks of institutionalized governance in particular places. This, we suggest, has left this mode of PGIS ill-equipped to truly challenge the political-economic structures responsible for (re)producing the very conditions of socio-economic inequality it strives to ameliorate. As a result, we argue that PGIS has become de-politicized, operating within, rather than disrupting, existing spheres of political-economic power. Moving forward, we suggest that PGIS is in need of being retheorized by engaging with the emergent post-politics literature and related areas of critical social and political theory. We argue that by adopting a more radical conception of democracy, justice, and ‘the political’, PGIS praxis can be recentered around disruption rather than participation and, ultimately, brought closer to its self-proclaimed goal of supporting progressive change for the historically marginalized.

scholarly journals Screening for Erdoğanism: Television, post-truth and political fear

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 339-354
Author(s):  
Burçe Çelik
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Security ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Global South ◽  
The Political ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Security Threats ◽  
Production Dynamics

The majority of current political communication studies focuses on digital and social media, and overlooks the centrality of television for the production and endurance of strongman politics in the Global South. By focusing on the journalistic television productions aired during the June 2018 election period in Turkey, this article unpacks the televisual logic that is incarnated in different modalities of telling and narrating of televisual genres. I propose two main themes: the ‘political fear’ of physical and social security threats, and ‘post-truth communications’ as the main televisual idioms for a vision of the future that is either secure or chaotic, that is, with or without Erdoğan. By combining political economy, content and textual analysis, I scrutinise the production dynamics of the televisual economy and the control and content of factual segments.

From Geopolitics to Social and Political Struggle

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Schiller
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Digital Capitalism ◽  
Accumulation By Dispossession ◽  
Interstate System ◽  
Historical Movement ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter examines some of the larger forces that propelled digital capitalism into what was evidently a fraught future. It first considers how the historical movement of the political economy is shaped both within and beyond a top-down, state-oriented geopolitics before discussing how the onset of the digital depression brought changes to the interstate system, indicative of altering political–economic relations. It then describes attempts by numerous states to multilateralize control of U.S.-centric internet in relation to structural changes in the interstate system and to competing efforts to regenerate the political economy in ways that might capture an outsized share of overall profits for specific units of capital and particular fractions of the capitalist class. It also explains the concept of accumulation by dispossession and concludes with suggestions for resolving the digital depression on terms favorable to capital.

Humane Markets

2019 ◽  
pp. 293-315
Author(s):  
James R. Otteson
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Institutions ◽  
Moral Concern ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Political Economic

Markets are often criticized for being amoral, if not immoral. The core of the “political economy” that arose in the eighteenth century, however, envisioned the exchanges that take place in commercial society as neither amoral nor immoral but indeed deeply humane. The claim of the early political economists was that transactions in markets fulfilled two separate but related moral mandates: they lead to increasing prosperity, which addressed their primary “economic” concern of raising the estates of the poor; and they model proper relations among people, which addressed their primary “moral” concern of granting a respect to all, including the least among us. They attempted to capture a vision of human dignity within political-economic institutions that enabled people to improve their stations. Their arguments thus did not bracket out judgments of value: they integrated judgments of value into their foundations and built their political economy on that basis.

The Political Economy of Charles E. Lindblom

1978 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 1012-1016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles W. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Institutional Design ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Market Mechanisms ◽  
Social Coordination ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
And Control ◽  
Coordination And Control

The consistent theme in Charles E. Lindblom's work is a vision of political economy as constitutional engineering. Lindblom sees the question of institutional design in terms of a mechanical metaphor in which political economic systems are contrived out of relatively simple components. Politics and Markets compares a broad range of capitalist and socialist systems as a means of evaluating market mechanisms and authority structures as instruments of social coordination and control. Lindblom's argument that the privileged power of the corporation poses a problem for liberal market-oriented societies is logically distinct from his case that the corporation fits “oddly” with democratic theory, and the latter may be the more significant theme for further inquiry in political economic theory.

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