Digital politics

2021 ◽  
pp. 159-177
Author(s):  
John Postill
Keyword(s):  
Digital Politics

Money Code Space

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Parkin
Keyword(s):  
Open Source Software ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Research Problem ◽  
Blockchain Technology ◽  
Distributed Ledger ◽  
Start Up ◽  
Challenging Research ◽  
Digital Politics ◽  
Financial Transactions ◽  
And Control

Newly emerging cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology present a challenging research problem in the field of digital politics and economics. Bitcoin—the first widely implemented cryptocurrency and blockchain architecture—seemingly separates itself from the existing territorial boundedness of nation-state money via a process of algorithmic decentralisation. Proponents declare that the utilisation of cryptography to advance financial transactions will disrupt the modern centralised structures by which capitalist economies are currently organised: corporations, governments, commercial banks, and central banks. Allegedly, software can create a more stable and democratic global economy; a world free from hierarchy and control. In Money Code Space, Jack Parkin debunks these utopian claims by approaching distributed ledger technologies as a spatial and social problem where power forms unevenly across their networks. First-hand accounts of online communities, open-source software governance, infrastructural hardware operations, and Silicon Valley start-up culture are used to ground understandings of cryptocurrencies in the “real world.” Consequently, Parkin demonstrates how Bitcoin and other blockchains are produced across a multitude of tessellated spaces from which certain stakeholders exercise considerable amounts of power over their networks. While money, code, and space are certainly transformed by distributed ledgers, algorithmic decentralisation is rendered inherently paradoxical because it is predicated upon centralised actors, practices, and forces.

One Foot on the Streets, One Foot on the Web

2018 ◽  
pp. 443-453
Author(s):  
Paolo Gerbaudo
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Qualitative Methodology ◽  
Digital Communication ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Digital Politics ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Web

Digital communication technologies are modifying how social movements communicate internally and externally and the way participants are organized and mobilized. This transformation calls for a rethinking of how we conceive of and analyze them. Scholars cannot be content with studying the digital and the physical or the online and the offline separately, but must explore the imbrication between these aspects by studying how the elements of social movements combine in a political “ensemble,” an ecosystem, or an action texture, defining the possibilities and limits of collective action. This chapter proposes a qualitative methodology combining analysis of digital media with observations of events and interviews with participants to develop a holistic account of collective action. This methodology is best positioned to capture the changing nature and meaning of protest action in a digital era, producing a “thick account” of the relationship between digital politics and everyday life.

scholarly journals “Millennial India”: Global Digital Politics in Context

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 343-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sahana Udupa ◽  
Shriram Venkatraman ◽  
Aasim Khan
Keyword(s):  
Public Participation ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Internet User ◽  
The Self ◽  
Contextual Approach ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Civic Action ◽  
Digital Politics

In this special issue, we examine the two decades of digital media expansion in India, the world’s second largest Internet user domain, to propose the idea of “millennial India.” Millennial India highlights the processes of digitalization as a distinct sociopolitical moment entailing new conditions of communication, and the stakes of “millennials” who are drawn to digital media to articulate political matters. These processes, we suggest, have led to a democratization of public participation through the self-activity of online users. Qualifying the assumption that participation leads to empowerment, we show that a politics of civic action has grown simultaneously with violent exclusions via digital circulation. Millennial India emphasizes the need to take a contextual approach to global digital politics, and recognizes the continuities in the structures of political action in as much as the disruptions engendered by digital infrastructures.

From Data Analytics to Data Hermeneutics. Online Political Discussions, Digital Methods and the Continuing Relevance of Interpretive Approaches

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Gerbaudo
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Data Analytics ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
Qualitative Approaches ◽  
Holistic Understanding ◽  
Data Points ◽  
Digital Politics ◽  
The One

Abstract To advance the study of digital politics it is urgent to complement data analytics with data hermeneutics to be understood as a methodological approach that focuses on the interpretation of the deep structures of meaning in social media conversations as they develop around various political phenomena, from digital protest movements to online election campaigns. The diffusion of Big Data techniques in recent scholarship on political behavior has led to a quantitative bias in the understanding of online political phenomena and a disregard for issues of content and meaning. To solve this problem it is necessary to adapt the hermeneutic approach to the conditions of social media communication, and shift its object of analysis from texts to datasets. On the one hand, this involves identifying procedures to select samples of social media posts out of datasets, so that they can be analysed in more depth. I describe three sampling strategies - top sampling, random sampling and zoom-in sampling - to attain this goal. On the other hand, “close reading” procedures used in hermeneutic analysis need to be adapted to the different quality of digital objects vis-à-vis traditional texts. This can be achieved by analysing posts not only as data-points in a dataset, but also as interventions in a collective conversation, and as utterances of broader “discourses”. The task of interpretation of social media data also requires an understanding of the political and social contexts in which digital political phenomena unfold, as well as taking into account the subjective viewpoints and motivations of those involved, which can be gained through in-depth interviews, and other qualitative social science methods. Data hermeneutics thus holds promise for a closing of the gap between quantitative and qualitative approaches in the study of digital politics, allowing for a deeper and more holistic understanding of online political phenomena.

Solidarity and Uncertainty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
C.W. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Aesthetic Politics ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Digital Politics ◽  
Normative Implications

The larger normative implications of the book are discussed. The history is tied into the digital politics of the twenty-first century, and the tensions between elite, fact-based journalism and emotive, aesthetic politics are assessed.

Digital politics

1996 ◽  
Vol 39 (10) ◽  
pp. 19-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hal Berghel
Keyword(s):  
Digital Politics
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