Food Photography, Pixelated Produce, and Cameraless Images

In today's screen saturated culture, perceptions of food are overwhelmingly formed by images circulated via the internet and mobile. The Facebook game FarmVille is the subject of Kheti Badi (Shah, 2015), a photographic artwork reflexively engaging with the contemporary scenario of ‘post-photography'. The work comprises not of photographs taken with a traditional camera but of screenshots of a farm and its holdings as displayed in Farmville; the highly compressed jpegs cropped and resized to the point of destabilizing visual coherence are depictions not of pastoral landscapes but of computer vision and the programmable character of photography. While photography remains an instrument for recording material realities, its power extends toward feeding back into the very processes through which science and technology modify food production. This chapter explores how Kheti Badi, through a series of hyper artificial and un-photographic images, shows the constructed nature of both what we put our hands on in the supermarket and see in advertising's dreamscapes.

Do Campaigns “Go Negative” on Twitter?

The use of negative ads in traditional election campaigns has been well-documented, but we know little about the use of Twitter to “go negative.” We content analyze candidate tweets from four different gubernatorial elections in 2011 to understand how candidates are using Twitter. We coded 849 tweets to explain the determinants of “going negative” on Twitter. Our results show that while tweets are overwhelmingly positive, candidates go negative by tweeting about policy. We believe this supports the innovation hypothesis and argue that Twitter is a conducive social media forum for policy-based messages due to its highly partisan nature. However, other determinants of negative campaigning such as competitiveness of the race and campaign funding were consistent with the normalization hypothesis. Our mixed results are consistent with other studies on social media and suggest there is still much to be learned from this tool.

Political Messaging in Digital Spaces

Political messaging is adapting to new digital spaces. However, the power of citizens through the use of this digital spaces is still unknown. Many citizens criticize political candidates using Facebook or Twitter, others build networks in Snapchat and some others try to collaborate with candidates using Periscope or WhatsApp. This research is focused in understanding this adaptation of political message on this platforms, analyzing the case of the presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto (PRI) in Mexico who won the presidency with a large participation but without the support of Twitter users. After two online protests against this presidential candidate - #IamnotProletariat and #Iam132 – political image could have been undermined and voters could have thought differently. But this was not the case and despite of this, the candidate won. The challenge to understand this online protest and its link to the political message is addressed in this paper.

Exploring the Counting of Ballot Papers Using “Delegated Transferable Vote”

Delegated transferable voting (DTV) refers to an approach to counting votes in elections that extends non-preferential voting systems like First Past The Post (FPTP) to include a transferable element similar to Single Transferable Voting (STV) but instead of voters indicating who they wish their votes to go to on an individual level they entrust that decision in the candidate they vote for, who could be from a small political party that might otherwise be deemed a “wasted vote” under first-past-the-post systems where the candidate they least want could win by having the most votes but still have less than 50% of the popular vote. This chapter discusses how DTV might work in practice through an auto-ethnographic approach in which the authors play an active part in elections in order to test the approach. The elections contested in the UK included to local council level in the Pontypridd area and national elections to the UK Parliament and Welsh Assembly. The potential impact of DTV on these election and method of campaigning used at some of these elections might have had on the voting outcome are discussed.

When Citizens in Authoritarian States Use Facebook for Social Ties but Not Political Participation

Numerous researchers have found a correlation between citizens' use of social networking sites (SNS) like Facebook and their likelihood for eParticipation. However, SNS use does not have the same effect on all citizens' political engagement. In authoritarian countries, Facebook offers a platform for citizens to challenge the power of the state, provide alternative narratives and mobilise for political change. This chapter examines how using Facebook affects the participative behaviours of Ugandans and concludes that in low internet use, authoritarian contexts, the Civic Voluntarism Model's postulation of the factors that explain political participation, and the benefits Facebook brings to participation in Western democracies, are upended. Overwhelming detachment from politics, low belief in citizens' online actions influencing change and fear of reprisals for criticising an authoritarian president in power for 30 years, severely dulled the appetite for eParticipation. Hence, Facebook was growing citizens' civic skills but hardly increasing online participation.

Ubiquitous Food Imaging

In our digital world, our notions of intimacy, communion and sharing are increasingly enacted through new media technologies and social practices which emerge around them. These technologies with the ability to upload, download and disseminate content to select audiences or to a wider public provide opportunities for the creation of new forms of rituals which authenticate and diarise everyday experiences. Our consumption cultures in many ways celebrate the notion of the exhibit and the spectacle, inviting gaze, through everyday objects and rituals. Food as a vital part of culture, identity, belonging, and meaning making celebrates both the everyday and the invitation to renew connections through food as a universal subject of appeal.

Critical Issues on Gender Equality and ICTs in Latin America

In the context of the new media environment, several social, political and economic divides are being produced. As the effects of those changes are not neutral, because of gender inequality, the status of women's human rights in the digital age are precarious. To what extent does the new media environment promote women's human and communication rights or contribute to sustaining the oppression of women in society? Based on the feminist political economy perspective, the aim of this paper is to analyze some of the critical issues on gender equality and ICTs in Latin America.1

Women Can't Win

This chapter employs irony as a tool to make clearer the workings of one form of the e-politics of food, namely, the structural food oppression linked to the weight and shape of the female body. The authors argue that the e-politics of the weight and shape of the female body is one of the most important incarnations of the e-politics of food and one of the most vigorously contested. This chapter examines many forms of public discourse and e-politics, from Bing to Tumblr, from Huffington Post to the Mirror (UK), from TV news in Lacrosse, Wisconsin to The Times of India, from the documentary film Killing Us Softly to the book You Are What You Eat, and from WebMD to Twitter, in the end, with a central focus on Rachel Frederickson on the TV show, The Biggest Loser. The critical rhetorical analysis finds some support for the Women Can't Win thesis. Women are in a Catch-22 situation, trapped between fat-shaming and skinny-shaming.

Towards a Political Theory of eLearning

This study focuses on the political strategies that are utilized in the context of eLearning. The starting point for this paper is the eLearning Political Strategies (ELPoS) model. The model is based on two dimensions: 1) the direction of the political strategy (upward or downward), and 2) the scope of the political strategy (individual or group based). The interaction between the above dimensions defines four types of eLearning political strategies, which result in different political outcomes. The presentation of the model is followed by four mini case studies that demonstrate the political strategies that the model outlines. The discussion and conclusion sections integrate the findings from the case studies and elaborate on the rules that govern the application of political strategies in different eLearning contexts.

Transmedia Storytelling Impact on Government Policy Change

This chapter discusses the impact of transmedia campaigns aimed at achieving a certain level of government policy change. Transmedia campaigns comprise a series of coordinated activities and organized efforts designed to achieve a social, political, or commercial goal by means of multiple media platforms. The Great British Property Scandal and Food, Inc. transmedia campaigns are considered to introduce the argument that this kind of multiplatform campaigning can actually produce concrete results in the political sphere. Moreover, this chapter focuses on the in-depth analysis of the transmedia strategies of the Fish Fight campaign to demonstrate how exactly transmedia strategies collaborate to influence policy change. The research findings point to the effective role of transmedia storytelling strategies in raising awareness in the political sphere through public participation in supporting relevant issues, influencing policy change.