Digital Networks and Citizenship

PMLA ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 117 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Poster
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Digital Networks ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
Community Values ◽  
Satellite Technology ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Musical Cultures ◽  
National Boundaries

Paradoxical as it may appear, isn't it through the rights of man that transpires today—at a planetary level—the worst discriminations?—Jean Baudrillard, Les mots de passeCritical discourse today locates an antagonism between globalization and citizenship. The deepening of globalizing processes strips citizens of power, this position maintains. As economic processes become globalized, the nation-state loses its ability to protect its population. Citizens lose their ability to elect a leadership that effectively pursues their interests. When production facilities are dispersed beyond the nation, jobs are lost to foreigners, labor markets are affected by conditions in countries with diverse living standards, and capital flows, at the speed of light, to places of optimum returns. Consumption is also planetary in scope, bringing across borders alien cultural assumptions as embodied in commodities. The popular need no longer be the local. Although foreign goods are inflected with community values and easily adapted to local conditions, they remain indexes of otherness. What is more dramatic still than the changes in production and consumption, nation-states are losing their cultural coherence by dint of planetary communications systems. Much of contemporary music is global music or at least a fusion of diverse musical cultures. Satellite technology and the Internet bring all media across national boundaries as if those borders did not exist. Global processes run deep and wide, rendering problematic the figure of the citizen as a member of a national community.

BTS as method: a counter-hegemonic culture in the network society

2021 ◽  
pp. 016344372098602
Author(s):  
Ju Oak Kim
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Network Society ◽  
Digital Networks ◽  
Cultural Resistance ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
Cultural Sphere ◽  
Ideological Dimension ◽  
Manuel Castells

This study focuses on the BTS sensation, examining how three entities – digital networks, the K-pop industry, and fandom – have engaged in the production of an alternative global culture. Based on a multimodal critical discourse analysis of this rising cultural act, the current study pays attention to the dialectical interaction of digital transformation and cultural subjectivization in the contemporary music ecosystem. By integrating Manuel Castells’ notion of the network society into Stuart Hall’s articulation of cultural resistance, I consider BTS as a counter-hegemonic cultural formation from the periphery within the network society. I also argue that the BTS phenomenon has not only unveiled the ideological dimension of Korean cultural formations, but has also proposed new possibilities of non-western and peripheral societies and subjects in the globally networked cultural sphere.

scholarly journals Normal Island: COVID-19, Border Control, and Viral Nationalism in UK Public Health Discourse

2021 ◽  
pp. 136078042110494
Author(s):  
Des Fitzgerald
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Border Control ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Climate Action ◽  
Public Health Discourse ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Health Discourse ◽  
The Relationship

In this contribution, I present emergent analysis of a preoccupation with managing COVID-19 through border control, among non-Governmental public health actors and commentators. Through a reading of statements, tweets, and interviews from the ‘Independent Sage’ group – individually and collectively – I show how the language of border control, and of maintaining immunity within the national boundaries of the UK, has been a notable theme in the group’s analysis. To theorize this emphasis, I draw comparison with the phenomenon of ‘green nationalism’, in which the urgency of climate action has been turned to overtly nationalistic ends; I sketch the outlines of what I call ‘viral nationalism,’ a political ecology that understands the pandemic as an event occurring differentially between nation states, and thus sees pandemic management as, inter alia, a work of involuntary detention at securitized borders. I conclude with some general remarks on the relationship between public health, immunity, and national feeling in the UK.

scholarly journals Living in digital space: Everyday life on Twitter

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-47
Author(s):  
Züleyha Özbaş-Anbarlı
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Network Analysis ◽  
New Media ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Life Time ◽  
Digital Networks ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Digital Space ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Production And Consumption

New media tools and the corresponding digital networks have begun to take part in the centre of our daily lives, thereby caused a practice of everyday life in digital space. In Twitter, a network in which users are involved through the machines, the concepts such as life, time, space, rhythm have developed. This study focuses on the constitution of everyday life in digital space. Twitter is a digital space that users do their everyday life practices in this network and are involved in through the machines. A sample of 10 Turkish users was selected with social network analysis to discover everyday life practices in this digital space. The content produced by this sample was observed employing digital ethnography and analysed by the sociology of everyday life. It is observed that Twitter creates its own rhythm. Observations show in Twitter that tactics have been produced, and strategies have been tried to be turned down with these tactics and acted rhythmic practices as forms of production and consumption in everyday life. People tend to follow similar others on Twitter, and accordingly, content is being produced for an imaginary community.

THE MYTH OF CSR ON THE EXAMPLE OF DOVE CAMPAIGN

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aneta Duda
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Consumer Capitalism ◽  
Corporate Strategies ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Corporate Social ◽  
Corporate Profits ◽  
Skin Cleansing

"This article discusses the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the particular case of a controversial Dove campaign for Real Beauty (CFRB) and its role in the production and consumption of contemporary popular meanings of empowerment, social change, and female beauty in global consumer culture. Because in some instances such corporate strategies appear well received, we move beyond cynical dismissal to analyze corporate discourse to identify its transformative possibilities and contradictions. The analysis replaces the oversimplifying approaches to the ethics of CSR with a communicative perspective that highlights the need for a contextual examination of the ethical dilemmas that arisen from CSR practices. In this article, I engage with this CSR campaign, using critical discourse analysis (CDA) to uncover its mechanisms and ideological functioning. CDA of the print, television, and new media texts reveals a certain juxtaposition between liberation and oppression of CFRB. The analysis show how Dove was able to transform an ordinary commodity, skin cleansing products, into a consumer activist brand through which consumers could take part in solving self-esteem and social problems. My analysis of CFRB shows the ways that CSR often operates to co-opte the criticism by embracing it, consolidating brand loyalty and corporate profits, and defuse struggles around consumption. By doing so, CSR forms a complex strategy to legitimize particular brands and commodities, so it can be seen as the ideological force of contemporary consumer capitalism."

Regulating In-Game Monetization : Implications of Regulation on Games Production

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew E. Perks
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Nation State ◽  
State Governments ◽  
Video Game Industry ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Regulatory Bodies ◽  
Game Industry

A widening gap exists between the understanding of regulation ‘on the books’ and how regulation is exercised in practice. Utilizing the concept of regulatory space, I examine the on-going regulation of ‘loot box’ monetization within the video game industry. Over the period of 2014 to 2018, several legislative attempts to regulate loot boxes have occurred internationally. While each of these pieces of regulation, whether successful or not, is framed within specific nation-states, the shifting landscape of regulation surrounding monetization impacts production and consumption of games worldwide. I argue for a de-centred approach to examine regulation of loot boxes to incorporate the global interconnections of various actors, including corporations, nation state governments, consumers, and independent regulatory bodies.

Material Connections: German Schools, Things, and Soft Power in Argentina and Chile from the 1880s through the Interwar Period

2017 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 519-549
Author(s):  
H. Glenn Penny
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Cultural Hybridity ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Great Insight ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractFrom the late nineteenth century through the interwar period, the production and consumption of German things played critical roles in delineating and connecting a wide variety of German places in Latin America. Such places became ubiquitous in Chile and Argentina. They flourished because there was ample room in the German imagination for the multiplicity of German places and the cultural hybridity that accompanied them to extend beyond Imperial Germany's national boundaries and colonial possessions. They also flourished because host societies found virtue in having those German places in their states. This essay uses German schools in Argentina and Chile as a window into the emergence of such German places and the soft power that accompanied them. Scholars often overlook that power when they focus on colonial questions or formal and informal imperialism in Latin America. More than any other institution, German schools became sites where the production and consumption of German things were concentrated and multilayered, and where the consistencies and great varieties of Germanness that arrived and evolved in Latin America gained their clearest articulation. Because those schools were both centers of communities and nodes in a global pedagogical network that thrived during the interwar period, they provide us with great insight into a nexus of motivations that created German places in Latin America. Life around these schools also underscores the importance of studying immigrants and their things together.

scholarly journals Nation-states, transnational corporations and cosmopolitans in the global popular music economy

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-418
Author(s):  
Keith Negus
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Transnational Corporations ◽  
Nation State ◽  
State Control ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Bounded State ◽  
Financial Power ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
Alternative Spaces

This article assesses changing debates about globalisation in light of the growth of digital media. It stresses how popular music is shaped by enduring tensions between nation-state attempts to control territorial borders, the power of transnational corporations aiming to operate across these borders and emergent cosmopolitan practices that offer a cultural challenge to these borders. It outlines how popular music is influenced by physical place and highlights the cultural and political importance of the nation-state for understanding the context within which musical creativity occurs. It explains how transnational corporations use financial power to work across and to gain entry to national boundaries, and assesses claims that cosmopolitanism musical encounters offer more inclusive and alternative spaces to that of bounded state control and unbounded capitalist competition. It concludes by arguing for a more music-centred approach to the powers and pluralisms through which popular music moves at the meeting of states, corporations and cosmopolitans.

Treaties, Borders, and the Partition of Africa

1966 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saadia Touval
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Group ◽  
Local Economy ◽  
African Politics ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
Contractual Obligation ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
Territorial Claims

The article questions the contention that, in the process of partition and the delimitation of borders in Africa, no account was taken of local conditions. The possibility of indirect African influence on the process is examined. At least some of the treaties concluded between Europeans and African rulers were genuine, and regarded as a contractual obligation by both sides. There were cases of African rulers seeking to promote their political interests by entering into an alliance with Europeans. Such treaties were sometimes utilized by European powers in their negotiations with rivals, to support their territorial claims. There were some attempts to define colonial borders so that they coincided with the frontiers of traditional African politics. Thus, treaties between African rulers and Europeans played a role in the process of the partition. In this connexion, it is important to remember that traditional African polities were often polyethnic, or encompassed only a segment of an ethnic group, and did not correspond to the modern European concept of ‘nation states’. There were also occasions in which questions regarding the local economy and communications were considered when borders were delimited. The considerations employed may have been wrong. But it seems necessary to modify the generalization that local circumstances were disregarded in the border-making process.

scholarly journals Who’s Milking It? Scripted Stories of Food Labour

2021 ◽  
pp. 095001702199735
Author(s):  
Lucy McCarthy ◽  
Anne Touboulic ◽  
Jane Glover
Keyword(s):  
Supply Chains ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Food Production ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Process Theory ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Dairy Production ◽  
Food Supply Chains ◽  
Labour Process ◽  
Production And Consumption

This article explores representations of food labour at different stages in the supply chain through a labour process theory perspective. Employing multi-modal critical discourse analysis it analyses visual data collected from three television programmes focused on dairy production and consumption. The research sheds light on the power relations inherent to food production and the devaluing of manual food labour in supply chains, which are shaped by the current capitalist socio-political environment. The findings expose ways in which media can reinforce dominant understandings of food supply chains, while making aspects of food labour invisible.

scholarly journals Digitized narratives of sexual violence: Making sexual violence felt and known through digital disclosures

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 1290-1310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaitlynn Mendes ◽  
Jessalynn Keller ◽  
Jessica Ringrose
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Digital Networks ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Social Media Platforms

In this article, we argue that social media platforms like Tumblr and Twitter have facilitated an emergence of “digitized narratives” of sexual violence. These narratives are rooted in historical ways in which feminists have discursively articulated sexual violence, yet are shaped by distinctive “platform vernacular” or the conventions, affordances, and restrictions of the platforms in which they appear. Drawing on a qualitative content and critical discourse analysis of 450 texts from the Tumblr site Who Needs Feminism? and the hashtag #BeenRapedNeverReported, we argue that digital platforms such as Tumblr and Twitter produce new vernacular practices which shape how “digitized narratives” of sexual violence are not only disclosed and known, but felt and experienced across digital networks.

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