Comprehension, Perception, and Projection

Health social networks (HSNs) allow individuals with health information needs to connect and discuss health-related issues online. Political-technology intertwinement (e.g. GDPR and Digital Technology) highlights that users need to be aware, understand, and willing to provide electronic consent (eConsent) when sharing personal information online. The objective of this study is to explore the ‘As-Is’ factors which impact individuals’ decisional autonomy when consenting to the privacy policy (PP) and Terms and Conditions (T&Cs) on a HSN. We use a Situational Awareness (SA) lens to examine decision autonomy when providing eConsent. A mixed-methods approach reveals that technical and privacy comprehension, user perceptions, and projection of future consequences impact participants’ decision autonomy in providing eConsent. Without dealing with the privacy paradox at the outset, decision awareness and latterly decision satisfaction is negatively impacted. Movement away from clickwrap online consent to customised two-way engagement is the way forward for the design of eConsent.

A code for care and control: The PIN as an operator of interoperability in the Nordic welfare state

Many states make use of personal identity numbers (PINs) to govern people living in their territory and jurisdiction, but only a few rely on an all-purpose PIN used throughout the public and private sectors. This article examines the all-purpose PIN in Finland as a political technology that brings people to the sphere of public welfare services and subjects them to governance by public authorities and expert institutions. Drawing on documentary materials and interviews, it unpacks the history and uses of the PIN as an elementary building block of the Nordic welfare state, and its emerging uses in the post-welfare data economy. The article suggests that, although the PIN is capable of individualizing, identifying, and addressing individuals, its most important and widely embraced feature is the extent to which it enables interoperability among public authorities, private businesses, and their data repositories. Interoperability, together with advances in computing and information technology, has made the PIN a facilitator of public administration, state knowledge production, and everyday life. More recently, in the post-welfare data economy, interoperability has rendered the PIN a national asset in all the Nordic countries, providing a great advantage to biomedical research, innovation business, and healthcare.

Constructing Ableism

This essay builds upon research in disability studies through the extension of Garland-Thomson’s figure of the normate. I argue that biopower, through the disciplinary normalization of individual bodies and the biopolitics of populations, in the nineteenth-century United States produced the normate citizen as a white, able-bodied man. The normate citizen developed with the new political technology of power that emerged with the transition from sovereign power to biopower. I focus on the disciplinary normalization of bodies and the role of industrial capitalism in the construction of able-bodied norms. I argue that the medical model of disability is produced through a dual process of incorporation: the production of corporeal individuals and the localization of illness in the body.

Controlling academics: Power and resistance in the archipelago of post-COVID-19 audit regimes

Government response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic promises to entrench austerity politics deeper into the organization of academic life, and audit regimes are the likely means of achieving this. Redoubled efforts to understand the operation of audit as a strategic technology of control are therefore clearly a priority. A distinctly anthropological literature has emerged over recent years to analyse and understand audit culture in academia, but what seems to be missing are analyses capable of bringing the disparate techniques experienced in academic audit together into coherent technologies, and identifying how these technologies thereby constitute a distinct audit regime within the broader audit culture. While the anthropological literature implicitly calls for further historical and conceptual exploration of the rationality to these techniques, what is required is the translation of our understanding of audit rationality into a presentation of the concrete techniques of control as they are experienced, so that more effective counter-conducts and resistances can be conceived. This article indicates how an excursion into the Soviet Gulag, and the political technology of the ‘camp’ that is its principal apparatus, can reveal not merely how the techniques of audit operate, but also indicate how those techniques might be engaged tactically in the academic setting. This kind of analogic analysis can allow us to understand audit in ways more promising for resistance to its idiomatic power, replacing demoralized and helpless resignation with inspirational exempla. Politically, the article argues that ‘techniques of the self’ are not only necessary to engage audit techniques through particular kinds of counter-conduct, but how these counter-conducts are contributory to the organized and concerted kind of resistance that we so desperately desire. The practice of tukhta is singled out and introduced as an illustrative means for combining survival strategies with the development of critical rationality in praxis.

Music Against the Challenges of Digital Society

The aim of the article is to separate the concepts of musicology, music anthropology, music, and instrumentalism. This very division and reflection of the interrelations of concepts provide a starting point for a detailed study of the problems of musical instrumentalism. The article is methodological in nature. It contains a number of important settings that are necessary for the anthropological analysis of music. The Central theoretical explanation of the article is the separation of musical anthropology and the anthropology of music. For this purpose, a number of tasks, namely, the definition of the theoretical fields of musical anthropology and the anthropology of music, and the disclosure of the role of music in traditional and modern society are proposed. The concept of musical action is introduced. Solving these problems allows to give a more complete analysis of the relationship between a person and music. It is this problem that becomes the main problem in the music media mainstream, where popular music is used as a way of producing moods and experiences. Music becomes a particularly valuable commodity in a networked society, which is made not so much for the purpose of incorporating into the values of high culture but to control the behavior of people in the music market. In addition to commercialization, music is becoming an effective political technology that provides consensus among voters. In this regard, there is a cultural problem, how high art in general and music, in particular, can preserve its traditional purpose – to promote humanization

Borders as penal transplants: Control of territory, mobility and illegality in West Africa

This article explores an increasingly significant trend in crime and mobility control that has received scant criminological attention: border externalization, specifically scrutinizing land border security-building by international actors in West Africa. Going beyond the usual focus on migration in border studies, it develops a criminologically grounded theorization of the border as a political technology of crime control and its relationship to the state. This is done by arguing that borders, theorized as ‘penal transplants’ embodying specific (western) visions of state, political power, social control/order and territoriality, are transformed and often distorted when performed in ‘heterarchical’ contexts in the global South. Further, empirically based concepts from ‘the periphery’ are suggested to enrich border criminology, broadening its geographical scope and spatial awareness.

Discounting the Future

This chapter analyses the political, environmental, and human implications of acts of discounting. Discounting is an economic instrument used by companies and policymakers to make the future commensurate with the present. This chapter argues that discounting is a political technology: it embeds debatable assumptions about value and the future, and it produces tangible effects in an expanding range of empirical domains. Drawing on examples from the history of discounting (capital budgeting, forest management, environmental regulation, and pharmaceutical research and development), the chapter discusses four of its political qualities. First, discounting equips collective decisions about the allocation of resources; second, it shapes the characteristics of future entities; third, it is an instrument for governing behaviour that guides decision-making in a myriad of places and instances; and fourth, it problematizes the very separation of the present and the future.

The role of national symbols in the political protests: case of Mexico

This article explores the specificity of using national symbols in the political protests. The construction of the new meanings of national symbols by protest movements is viewed in the frame of collective memory. The goal of this research is to determine the peculiarities of involving unofficial national symbols in the protest discourse by the opposition political forces on the example of modern Mexico. It is demonstrated how the radical protest Neozapatismo movement uses the image of the country's national hero Emiliano Zapata for legitimizing the own agrarian program and rule in the state of Chiapas, as well as a resource for mobilizing the supporters of drastic agrarian reforms. The conclusion is made that due to such characteristics of national symbols as sacred nature, wide occurrence, recognition, they possess high mobilization potential, carrying out mobilization function in the political protests. It pertains to both, state symbols (flag, coat of arms, anthem) and unofficial symbols. National symbols can also be used by protest movements as a means of legitimation / deligitimation of authority. The author underlines that the use by political actors of national symbols, which may cause strong emotional response of the audience, should be considered as manipulative political technology.

Convergent tendencies in political media discourse of postmodern era: manipulative potential of transmedia storytelling

The article deals with the fundamental problem of manipulating public consciousness to achieve certain political goals using new media technologies. The transformation of the modern media landscape associated with the rapid development of digital technologies leads to significant transformations in the social field. The active process of media convergence taking place in digital media space has determined the formation of one of the most relevant tools for the synergy of different polycode texts – transmedia storytelling, which consists in the nonlinear distribution of the global story across different media platforms in parts that do not repeat but complement each other. The product of transmedia storytelling is converged polycode texts based, as a rule, on several digital and traditional platforms, characterized by transmediality, which is most consistent with the mental characteristics of contemporary information consumers, and, in this regard, has significant influencing potential. Within the framework of this study transmedia storytelling is viewed as an effective political technology with a high manipulative potential. Transmedia storytelling allows you to create the most targeted political content, since the main concept of the broadcast message is transmitted through different media platforms and various linguistic and extralinguistic means, integrating reality and virtual reality, generating certain meanings, and broadcasting the necessary convincing attitudes within a given subject area. At the same time, the technology can be used both in a positive (promotional) and a negative (discrediting) political contexts.