(Re)Inventing the Internet: Critical Case Studies

Edited by Andrew Feenberg & Norm Friesen.

With chapters by CMNS PhD alumni:  Sara Grimes, Kate Milberry, Ted Hamilton & Maria Bakardjieva.

Although it has been in existence for over three decades, the Internet remains a contested technology. Its governance and rote in civic life, education, and entertainment are all still openly disputed and debated. The issues include censorship and network control, privacy and surveillance, the political impact of activist bLogging, peer to peer file sharing, the effects of video games on children, and many others. Media conglomerates, governments and users all contribute to shaping the forms and functions of the Internet as the Limits and potentialities of the technologies are tested and extended. What is most surprising about the Internet is the proliferation of controversies and conflicts in which the creativity of ordinary users plays a central rote. The title, (Re)Inventing the Internet, refers to this extraordinary flowering of agency in a society that tends to reduce its members to passive spectators. This collection presents a series of critical case studies that examine specific sites of change and contestation. These cover a range of phenomena including computer gaming cultures, online education, surveillance, and the mutual shaping of digital technologies and civic life.
ISBN 978-94-6091-732-5

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface vii
I. Code and Communication
1. Introduction: Toward a critical theory of the Internet Andrew Feenberg

II. Play and School Online
2. Rationalizing play: A critical theory of digital gaming Sara M Grimes and Andrew Feenberg
3. Alternative rationalisations and ambivalent futures: A critical history of online education Edward Hamilton and Andrew Feenberg

III. The Civic Internet
4. Experiencing surveillance: A phenomenological approach Norm Friesen, Andrew Feenberg, Grace Smith, and Shannon Lowe
5. Subactivism: Lifeworld and politics in the age of the Internet Maria Bakardjieva
6. Hacking for social justice: The politics of prefigurative technology Kate Milberly

Expanding peace journalism: comparative and critical approaches

Expanding peace journalism: comparative and critical approaches
Edited by Ibrahim Seaga Shaw, Jake Lynch, and Robert A. Hackett
Sydney University Press
ISBN: 9781920899707

Expanding peace journalism: comparative and critical approaches draws together cutting-edge contributions from 17 international writers to this rapidly emerging field of research. Media coverage of conflicts is propagandistic and commonly portrays two elite actors contesting a single goal of ‘victory’. This major new text explores and interrogates peace journalism as a significant challenge to this hegemonic discourse, which has been advocated and elaborated over the recent years in journalism, media development and academic spheres.

Expanding peace journalism traces boundaries and links with the adjacent fields including alternative media, social movement activism and media democratisation. It includes case studies – from the media of countries including Australia, Canada, Guatemala, India, Nigeria, Norway, Sweden and the US – and explores connections with human rights, as well as Indigenous and women’s rights activism.

The problem some 50 years ago was what criteria an event had to meet to qualify as news … When the news represents a distorted world image, the distortions are worth knowing. This book, so rich in content, is a testimony to the need for empirical, critical and constructive scrutiny of media. Each chapter opens a new window, a new angle; all of them important.

From the preface by Johan Galtung

About the editors

Ibrahim Seaga Shaw is senior lecturer in media and politics in the Department of Media, Northumbria University in Newcastle Upon Tyne. His research and teaching interests encompass democracy and media agenda-setting, peace journalism and global justice. He was previously a journalist and editor in Sierra Leone.

Jake Lynch is associate professor and director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney, and Secretary General of the International Peace Research Association. He was previously an international reporter, in print and broadcast media, and a newsreader for BBC World Television.

Robert A Hackett is professor of communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, co-director of NewsWatch Canada, and co-founder of the (Canadian) Campaign for Democratic Media. He has written extensively on journalism, political communication and media representation.

Order Expanding Peace Journalism: Comparative and Critical Approaches here

Media Literacies: A Critical Introduction

A Critical Introduction

Michael Hoechsmann & Stuart Poyntz

Media Literacies: A Critical Introduction traces the history of media literacy and grapples with the fresh challenges posed by the convergent media of the 21st century. The book provides a much-needed guide to what it means to be literate in today’s media-saturated environment.

• Updates traditional models of media literacy by examining how digital media is utilized in today’s convergent culture
• Explores the history and emergence of media education, the digitally mediated lives of today’s youth, digital literacy, and critical citizenship
• Complete with sidebar commentary written by leading media researchers and educators spotlighting new research in the field and an annotated bibliography of key texts and resources

Michael Hoechsmann is Associate Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. He is co-author of Reading Youth Writing: “New” Literacies, Cultural Studies and Education (2008). He is a former Director of Education of Young People’s Press, a youth-oriented non-profit news service.

Stuart Poyntz is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. He has published articles in the Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, the Canadian Journal of Education, Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education, and various edited collections.

Order online at www.wiley.com, or call:
CANADA: 800 567 4797
US: 877 762 2974
UK: 0800 243407
Europe / ROW: +44 (0)1243 843 294

Reinterpretation of Cultural Imperialism

The Korean audio-visual industry has begun producing and exporting domestic television programs and films on a large scale, while reducing imports from the US. The reverse or counter-cultural imperialism, which emphasized the arrival of cultural pluralism, seems to apply in the case of Korea, with the rapid growth of domestic cultural industries and their exports to the East and Southeast Asian regions. The process remains complex, however, because the US still dominates the Korean cultural market through both cultural products and capital. This article investigates the recent development of Korea’s cultural industry as empirical evidence to demonstrate whether cultural imperialism has phased out. It explores Korean cultural product flow in Asia by focusing on product sourcing as well as several dimensions of causality for the increase in exports of cultural products to ascertain the role of the Korean cultural industry in audiovisual product trade in recent years. It then challenges the assertions made by the reverse cultural imperialism thesis and explores whether the concept of cultural imperialism is still useful in explaining the Korean cultural market. The article also analyzes the nature of the transnationalization of the Korea cultural industry as one of the most significant forms of current cultural imperialism

Race After the Internet

“The hope that the Internet will promote tolerance, liberated sensibility and socialinclusion is attacked with flair, insight and extensive evidence in this fine book thatwill be of interest to academics and students around the world.”
James Curran, Professor of Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London

“A must-have collection. Bringing together distinguished authors and emergentvoices, Race After the Internet　breaks new material ground in a field hampered byimmaterialist fantasies. We are fortunate that crucial questions of race and newmedia are being investigated by such skilled and adventurous writers.”
Toby Miller, Professor of Media & Cultural Studies, University of California Riverside

In this collection, Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White bring togetherinterdisciplinary, forward-looking essays that explore the complex role that digital mediatechnologies play in shaping our ideas about race. Race After the Internet containsessays on the shifting terrain of racial identity and its connections to social mediatechnologies like Facebook and MySpace, popular online games like World of Warcraft,YouTube and viral video, genetic ancestry testing, and DNA databases in health and lawenforcement. Contributors aim to broaden the definition of the “digital divide” in orderto convey a more nuanced understanding of access, usage, meaning, participation, andproduction of digital media technology in light of racial inequality.

Contributors: danah boyd, Wendy Chun, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Troy Duster, Anna Everett,Rayvon Fouché, Alexander Galloway, Oscar Gandy, Jr., Eszter Hargittai, Jeong Won Hwang,Tara McPherson, Curtis Marez, Alondra Nelson, Christian Sandvig, Ernest Wilson III

Lisa Nakamura is Professor of Media and Cinema Studies and Director of the AsianAmerican Studies Program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is theauthor of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, winner of the Association ofAsian American Studies 2010 Book Award in Cultural Studies. She is also author of Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet and co-editor, with Beth Kolkoand Gilbert Rodman, of Race in Cyberspace, both published by Routledge.

Peter A. Chow-White is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at SimonFraser University in Vancouver, Canada. His work has appeared in Communication Theory,the International Journal of Communication, Media, Culture & Society, PLoS Medicine, andScience, Technology & Human Values.

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The contributors show that digital media are disrupting entire media industries, but without erasing the past. Throughout, the impact of the unprecedented wave of media consolidation in the late-1990s and the financial crisis of the past few years loom large. The authors also suggest that there is no “supra logic” of “total system integration” that spans the network media, while insisting that one media sector is not the same as the next. Social networking activities often beg, pilfer and borrow “content” from “traditional media”, but it remains the case that Time Warner, Comcast, the BBC and News Corp. are very different creatures than Apple, Baidu, Facebook or Google. In other words, even in the age of convergence and remix culture, different media continue to display their own distinctive political economies, as the volume’s title—The Political Economies of Media—signals.

This text is a contemporary political economic analysis of the various dimensions in the rapid growth of the Korean communication industry, including broadcasting, film, telecommunications, and information technology. As the first comprehensive attempt to analyze the rapid growth and change in the Korean communication systems, this book makes sense of those transitions by looking at global trends and how Korea has developed its communication systems.

Globesity, Food Marketing and Family Lifestyles

“Stephen Kline’s study of the politics of risk discourse and the globesity “epidemic” takes us beyond the tired reliance on moral panics and sanctimonious finger waving by demonstrating how a thoughtful, deft analysis of social problems can open up possibilities of new approaches and ways of seeing children’s consumer empowerment.”
— Daniel Thomas Cook, Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University, USA

“[This] book provides a richly detailed historical perspective, which sets the present debates about food marketing in context through a meticulous and wide-ranging scholarship. In Kline’s hands the “Globesity epidemic” becomes a window onto a much larger scene where parents and children need to navigate a sensible take on a vast array of personal and risky choices, while being surrounded on all sides by the competing pressures of commercial interests and government policy responses.”
— William Leiss, University of Ottawa, Canada

“Stephen Kline has an aptitude for provoking us to look at children’s consumerism in a different way as he unpacks the complex interplay between food marketing, family lifestyle and the neoliberal marketplace. Based on sound theory and original empirical work this book offers a fresh perspective on the medicalized discourses on globesity, forcing us to rethink our moral panic about children’s time spent in front of the TV screen.”
— David Marshall, Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour, University of Edinburgh Business School, UK

The growing public awareness of lifestyle risks associated with children’s consumer empowerment is at the heart of this book which uses a comparative news analysis to compare the discursive politics surrounding the ‘globesity pandemic’ in North America and the UK. Focusing on the role that epidemiological advocacy played in galvanizing moral panic about the weight gain in child populations, this study examines how this medicalization of lifestyle choices re-ignited deeply held public debates about children’s commercial TV and its disturbance of patterns of domestic consumption. The globesity pandemic therefore renewed one of the most profound challenges to neoliberalism that exists – the vulnerable child consumer. Exploring empirically children’s special status as ‘vulnerable’ consumers, this book provides new evidence of both the systemic bias created by food marketing in the US and the UK, as well as the processes through which marketing comes to influence children’s discretionary choices in the context of branding and parental mitigation of lifestyle risk taking.

Stephen Kline is Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Canada and Director of the Media Analysis Laboratory. His previous publications include Social Communication in Advertising, Out of the Garden, Digital Play, and Researching Audiences.

New media and technology are firmly embedded in our contemporary society and culture. The application of the internet and mobile communications, including online gaming, has made a huge impact on political participation, business, education, and social relations.

Global Media Convergence and Cultural Transformation: Emerging Social Patterns and Characteristics aims to engage the complex relationship between technology, culture, and socio-economic elements by exploring it in a transnational, yet contextually grounded, framework. This book explores diverse perspectives and approaches, from political economy to cultural studies, and from policy studies to ethnography, In order to reflect varied perspectives on the convergence of culture and new media technology.

Korea’s Online Gaming Empire

In South Korea, online gaming is a cultural phenomenon. Games are broadcast on television, professional gamers are celebrities, and youth culture is often identified with online gaming. Uniquely in the online games market, Korea not only dominates the local market but has also made its mark globally. In Korea’s Online Gaming Empire, Dal Yong Jin examines the rapid growth of this industry from a political economy perspective, discussing it in social, cultural, and economic terms. Korea has the largest percentage of broadband subscribers of any country in the world, and Koreans spend increasing amounts of time and money on Internet-based games. Online gaming has become a mode of socializing–a channel for human relationships. The Korean online game industry has been a pioneer in software development and eSports (electronic sports and leagues). Jin discusses the policies of the Korean government that encouraged the development of online gaming both as a cutting-edge business and as a cultural touchstone; the impact of economic globalization; the relationship between online games and Korean society; and the future of the industry. He examines the rise of Korean online games in the global marketplace, the emergence of eSport as a youth culture phenomenon, the working conditions of professional gamers, the role of game fans as consumers, how Korea’s local online game industry has become global, and whether these emerging firms have challenged the West’s dominance in global markets.