One of the most far-reaching transformations in our era is the wave of digital technologies rolling over--and upending--nearly every aspect of life. Work and leisure, family and friendship, community and citizenship have all been modified by now-ubiquitous digital tools and platforms. Digital Technology and Democratic Theory looks closely at one significant facet of our rapidly evolving digital lives: how technology is radically changing our lives as citizens and participants in democratic governments. To understand these transformations, this book brings together contributions by scholars from multiple disciplines to wrestle with the question of how digital technologies shape, reshape, and affect fundamental questions about democracy and democratic theory. As expectations have whiplashed--from Twitter optimism in the wake of the Arab Spring to Facebook pessimism in the wake of the 2016 US election--the time is ripe for a more sober and long-term assessment. How should we take stock of digital technologies and their promise and peril for reshaping democratic societies and institutions? To answer, this volume broaches the most pressing technological changes and issues facing democracy as a philosophy and an institution.
Setting Sail Into the Age of Digital Local Government: Trends and Best Practices
About the Book "High-Tech Trash: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure maps an archaeology of failure in a culture seemingly ill-equipped to deal with it. To better understand failure, Kane argues, we must abstract from our subjective, personal disappointments and see them as meaningful symbols of a broader human struggle. By connecting twenty-first century digital aesthetics to critical issues in the history of high-tech, the book elucidates what it means to be an error-prone, fallible human in an age of hyper technology; to fail again and again without recourse to anything but repetition"--Provided by publisher. Book Synopsis A free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press' Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. High-Tech Trash analyzes creative strategies in glitch, noise, and error to chart the development of an aesthetic paradigm rooted in failure. Carolyn L. Kane explores how technologically influenced creative practices, primarily from the second half of the twentieth and first quarter of the twenty-first centuries, critically offset a broader culture of pervasive risk and discontent. In so doing, she questions how we continue onward, striving to do better and acquire more, despite inevitable disappointment. High-Tech Trash speaks to a paradox in contemporary society in which failure is disavowed yet necessary for technological innovation. From the Back Cover "Leonard Cohen sang 'There's a crack in everything ... that's how the light gets in.' Here, Carolyn Kane teaches us how to see that light, one crack at a time."--Fred Turner, author of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties "Kane profiles art practices and media discourses that exploit and celebrate, rather than filter or suppress, all kinds of errors and noises. A welcome intervention in a number of discursive fields."--Peter Krapp, author of Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture "An original work of scholarship that addresses some of the most pervasive phenomena and foundational questions in the contemporary media environment."--Robert Hariman, coauthor of The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship About the Author Carolyn L. Kane is Associate Professor of Communication at Ryerson University and author of Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code.
Digital Learning and Collaborative Practices offers a comprehensive overview of design-based, technology-enhanced approaches to teaching and learning in virtual settings. Today's digital communications foster new opportunities for sharing culture and knowledge while also prompting concerns over division, disinformation and surveillance. This book uniquely emphasises playful, collaborative experiences and democratic values in a variety of environments--adaptive, augmented, dialogic, game-based and beyond. Graduate students and researchers of educational technology, the learning sciences and interaction design will discover rich theories, interventions, models and approaches for concretising emerging practices and competencies in digital learning spaces.
How should we \"fix\" digital technologies to support democracy instead of undermining it? In Designing for Democracy, Jennifer Forestal argues that accurately evaluating the democratic potential of digital spaces means studying how the built environment--a primary component of our \"modern public square\"--structures our activity, shapes our attitudes, and supports the kinds of relationships and behaviors democracy requires. While many scholars and practitioners are attentive to the role of design in shaping behavior, they have yet to fully engage with the question of what structures are required to support democratic communities--and how to build them. Forestal closes this gap by providing a new theory of democratic space. Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, including architecture, psychology, and the history of political thought, she argues that \"democratic spaces\" must be designed with three environmental characteristics--boundaries, durability, and flexibility--that, taken together, afford users the ability to engage in fundamental civic practices. Through extended analyses of Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, Forestal shows precisely how well these digital platforms meet the criteria for democratic spaces, or whether they do so at all. The result is a more nuanced analysis of the democratic communities that form--or fail to emerge--in these spaces, as well as more concrete suggestions for how to improve them. In connecting the built environment, digital technologies, and democratic theory, Designing for Democracy provides blueprints for democracy in a digital age.
This book uncovers how music experience-live and recorded-is changing along with the use of digital technology in the 2000s. Focussing on the Nordic region, this volume utilizes the theory of mentalization: the capacity to perceive and interpret what others are thinking and feeling, and applies it to the analysis of mediated forms of agency in popular music. The rise of new media in music production has enabled sound recording and processing to occur more rapidly and in more places, including the live concert stage. Digital technology has also introduced new distribution and consumption technologies that allow record listening to be more closely linked to the live music experience. The use of digital technology has therefore facilitated an expanding range of activities and experiences with music. Here, Yngvar Kjus addresses a topic that has a truly global reach that is of interest to scholars of musicology, media studies and technology studies.
The summer of 2016 saw one of the most significant citizen protests in the history of democratic South Korea, eventually culminating in the impeachment and conviction of then President Park Geun-hye for corruption. Concerns about the president's behavior were raised in a polarized media environment with low public trust, where extreme right-wing media outlets amplified conspiracy theories and false claims in opposition to impeachment. How then was it possible for pro-impeachment protests seeking major social change to succeed? And why did pro-Park protesters and government efforts to defend Park ultimately fail? Based on interviews with key players in the impeachment movement and original analyses of news reports and social media posts, Networked Collective Actions untangles the intricate interactions among different actors that were supported and sometimes constrained by the technological, socio-political, and legal environments in which they occurred. Moreover, Hyunjin Seo develops a theoretical framework for understanding collective actions in dynamic information ecosysems and analyzes how information consumption patterns might prompt someone to either immediately reject a certain piece of information or to reconsider and adopt that same information. Seo provides a nuanced examination of the role of journalism in a democracy where non-traditional intermediaries (e.g., social media influencers and bots) have emerged as important producers and filters of information, and in light of declining trust in news media.
Critical Theory and Pedagogy articulates a metatheory for a philosophy of education aimed toward democratizing, reconstructing, and decolonizing education to meet the challenges of a global and technological society.
The authors present a new theory of decision-making that provides modes that can be used to describe such widely diverse political entities as the British cabinet, a Quaker meeting, or a village meeting in the Sudan. By studying the Free Democratic party in Switzerland, the authors produced four decision modes: decision by majority vote, decision by amicable agreement, non-decision, and the mode they develop and describe in the book--decision by interpretation. Originally published 1980. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Culture, politics, economics and technology all impact upon policy decisions. To investigate the factors that influence communications policy, however, one has to go beyond conventional views of media and communication studies and combine these with policy studies. Communications Policy: Theories and Issues utilizes new research to highlight key debates and developments, and addresses a broad spectrum of contemporary concerns regarding the structure and the organization of communications systems in the past, present and future. Combining theoretical analysis with empirical research findings, this comprehensive text explores the contemporary theories and issues in communications policy that affect all democratic societies as they seek to address the challenges of emerging information and communications technologies. Featuring contributions from distinguished authors across a range of media disciplines, Communications Policy introduces challenging ideas about how communications should be structured in the future and is essential reading for all policy makers, researchers and students of communications policy. Editors: Stylianos Papathanassopoulos is Professor in Media Organization at the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He is the author of Television in the 21st Century (2005), Media and Politics (2004) and European Television in the Digital Age: Issues, Dynamics and Realities (2002). Ralph Negrine is Professor of Political Communication in the Journalism Studies Department at the University of Sheffield. His previous books include The Transformation of Political Communication (Palgrave, 2008), Television and the Press Since 1945 (1999) and The Communication of Politics (1996). Contributors: Bram Abramson, Johannes M. Bauer, Sandra Braman, Dom Caristi, Alistair Duff, Gisela Gil-Egui, Alison Harcourt, Jackie Harrison, Robert W. McChesney, Serge Proulx, Marc Raboy, Concetta M. Stewart, Yan Tian and Roxanne Welters.
How have online protests--like the recent outrage over the Komen Foundation's decision to defund Planned Parenthood--changed the nature of political action? How do Facebook and other popular social media platforms shape the conversation around current political issues? The ways in which we gather information about current events and communicate it with others have been transformed by the rapid rise of digital media. The political is no longer confined to the institutional and electoral arenas, and that has profound implications for how we understand citizenship and political participation. With From Voice to Influence, Danielle Allen and Jennifer S. Light have brought together a stellar group of political and social theorists, social scientists, and media analysts to explore this transformation. Threading through the contributions is the notion of egalitarian participatory democracy, and among the topics discussed are immigration rights activism, the participatory potential of hip hop culture, and the porous boundary between public and private space on social media. The opportunities presented for political efficacy through digital media to people who otherwise might not be easily heard also raise a host of questions about how to define \"good participation: \" Does the ease with which one can now participate in online petitions or conversations about current events seduce some away from serious civic activities into \"slacktivism?\" Drawing on a diverse body of theory, from Hannah Arendt to Anthony Appiah, From Voice to Influence offers a range of distinctive visions for a political ethics to guide citizens in a digitally connected world.
Online technologies excite the public imagination with narratives of democratization. The Internet is a political medium, borne of democracy, but is it democratizing? Late modern democracies are characterized by civic apathy, public skepticism, disillusionment with politics, and general disinterest in conventional political process. And yet, public interest in blogging, online news, net-based activism, collaborative news filtering, and online networking reveal an electorate that is not disinterested, but rather, fatigued with political conventions of the mainstream. This book examines how online digital media shape and are shaped by contemporary democracies, by addressing the following issues: How do online technologies remake how we function as citizens in contemporary democracies? What happens to our understanding of public and private as digitalized democracies converge technologies, spaces and practices? How do citizens of today understand and practice their civic responsibilities, and how do they compare to citizens of the past? How do discourses of globalization, commercialization and convergence inform audience/producer, citizen/consumer, personal/political, public/private roles individuals must take on? Are resulting political behaviors atomized or collective? Is there a public sphere anymore, and if not, what model of civic engagement expresses current tendencies and tensions best? Students and scholars of media studies, political science, and critical theory will find this to be a fresh engagement with some of the most important questions facing democracies today.
Though people frequently use mobile technologies for news consumption, evidence from several fields shows that smaller screens and slower connection speeds pose major limitations for meaningful reading. In News and Democratic Citizens in the Mobile Era, Johanna Dunaway and Kathleen Searles demonstrate the effects of mobile devices on news attention, engagement, and recall, and identify a key cognitive mechanism underlying these effects: cognitive effort. They advance a theory that is both old and new: the costs of information-seeking curb participatory behaviors unless the benefits outweigh them. For news consumers in the mobile era, for example, mobile devices increase the time, economic, and cognitive costs associated with information-seeking. Only for a small few do the benefits of attending to the news on mobile devices outweigh the costs. Building on economic theories of news, media choice, and the ways audience demand shapes news craft and production, Dunaway and Searles argue that attention, engagement, and recall suffer when people consume news on mobile devices. They then investigate the implications of these effects for the news industry and for an informed democratic citizenry. Drawing on both laboratory and real-world studies, Dunaway and Searles bring the psychophysiology of news consumption to bear on the question of what we could lose in an information environment characterized by a dramatic shift in reliance on mobile devices.
Critical Theory and Pedagogy articulates a metatheory for a philosophy of education aimed toward democratizing, reconstructing, and decolonizing education to meet the challenges of a global and technological society.
Most social studies teachers follow a traditional lecture-discussion-practice format, even though the curriculum was founded on John Dewey's problem-and-inquiry approach to learning. This book guides the reader through his major theories--curriculum, experience, interest, inquiry—and culminates with active, democratic citizenship.
The Condition of Digitality: A Post-Modern Marxism for the Practice of Digital Life
This edited volume presents an overview of cutting-edge research areas within digital ethics as defined by the Digital Ethics Lab of the University of Oxford. It identifies new challenges and opportunities of influence in setting the research agenda in the field.The yearbook presents research on the following topics: conceptual metaphor theory, cybersecurity governance, cyber conflicts, anthropomorphism in AI, digital technologies for mental healthcare, data ethics in the asylum process, AI's legitimacy and democratic deficit, digital afterlife industry, automatic prayer bots, foresight analysis and the future of AI. This volume appeals to students, researchers and professionals.
The book \"Studies in Modern English\" interprets English-language communication in the humanitarian paradigm of knowledge within the linguistic and psycho-sociocultural study of speech activity prioritizing cognitive and communicative paradigms. Digital discourse as the formation of new semiotic phenomena has crowned the rapid scientific and technological progress. Researchers' scientific achievements represented in the book are systemic and valid in terms of evidence-based narratives, which reflect the transformational horizon of information theory, communication theory, and theory of linguodidactics in modern English verbal, creative and digital environments. The book represents an integrated approach to the study of modern English as an open synergetic system, which requires a description of the relationship between verbal and nonverbal notions in digital space. The book integrates such innovative perspectives as the interaction of natural English and programming languages, cyber aggression as a communicative pattern in English-language digital discourse, ethics, and democratization of modern English language, relevant developments in the field of English language as a Foreign Language, and other related issues. A complex focus of the book in the realm of modern English-language communication concerns verbal and nonverbal notions analyzed in the context of socio-cultural and digital communicative spaces.
Mass Media Law: The Printing Press to the Internet is a textbook designed to introduce students to the panoply of legal theories raised by the Internet revolution as well as those supporting traditional media. The book takes a historical approach beginning with the printing press and the telegraph and proceeding to the digital technologies of today, such as social media and search engines.
