Pub Date : 2023-02-26DOI: 10.1177/20594364231160106
Z. Chen
{"title":"Book Review: A Feminist Reading of China’s Digital Public Sphere","authors":"Z. Chen","doi":"10.1177/20594364231160106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231160106","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42637,"journal":{"name":"Global Media and China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79899554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-23DOI: 10.1177/20594364231152313
Yingpei Zhang
policies, from a zero-case strategy to an allegedly abrupt opening up. If anything, it shows how policy makers, like layman, are guided by opaque rules and ideas, a fuzzy logic, a radical contingency, and large doses of uncertainty.While the outcome of this turn is unclear, Yang’s study nods to the resilience of citizens, the affordances of social media, and, simultaneously, the responsiveness, media savviness, and indeed agility of the nation-state. It would be illuminating to see more case studies from different places, also to steer away from a sense of Chinese exceptionalism that a single case study, even if unwanted by the author, risks. It is also the hope of this reviewer that Guobin Yang will soon publish a sequel, either as article or as book, in which he includes developments after Spring 2020, among which the Shanghai lockdown, the Urumqi fire, the empty A4 protests, and the change in policies. It is also hoped that other researchers make good use of this study as a source of inspiration and comparison, to draw linkages with other places in the world, in which similar lockdowns stirred up different forms of protest and resistance. So much more work is indeed to be done.
{"title":"Book Review: The Politics of Dating Apps: Gender, Sexuality, and Emergent Publics","authors":"Yingpei Zhang","doi":"10.1177/20594364231152313","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231152313","url":null,"abstract":"policies, from a zero-case strategy to an allegedly abrupt opening up. If anything, it shows how policy makers, like layman, are guided by opaque rules and ideas, a fuzzy logic, a radical contingency, and large doses of uncertainty.While the outcome of this turn is unclear, Yang’s study nods to the resilience of citizens, the affordances of social media, and, simultaneously, the responsiveness, media savviness, and indeed agility of the nation-state. It would be illuminating to see more case studies from different places, also to steer away from a sense of Chinese exceptionalism that a single case study, even if unwanted by the author, risks. It is also the hope of this reviewer that Guobin Yang will soon publish a sequel, either as article or as book, in which he includes developments after Spring 2020, among which the Shanghai lockdown, the Urumqi fire, the empty A4 protests, and the change in policies. It is also hoped that other researchers make good use of this study as a source of inspiration and comparison, to draw linkages with other places in the world, in which similar lockdowns stirred up different forms of protest and resistance. So much more work is indeed to be done.","PeriodicalId":42637,"journal":{"name":"Global Media and China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74608630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-21DOI: 10.1177/20594364231161658
T. Flew, Chun-Pin Su
In an era that has been termed one of post-globalization (Flew, 2021), there is considerable debate around governance of the global Internet. In particular, multistakeholder approaches which seek to bypass nation-state governments in the name of global ‘netizens’ have been critiqued as lacking real regulatory capacity to transform the behaviour of digital platforms towards public interest goals. At the same time, there has been a ‘regulatory turn’ (Schlesinger, 2020) in internet governance, with national governments – as well as the European Union – proposing an array of laws, policies, regulations and co-regulatory codes to address issues that include monopoly power, content regulation, data and privacy, and the uses of AI. It has been estimated that over 100 new forms of legislation, regulation and policy reports had been developed across multiple jurisdictions by May 2021, all of which pointed in the direction of growing state direction of the internet and its leading players (Puppis & Winseck, 2021). The result is that Internet governance seems to be perpetually stuck between two registers. The global multistakeholder-based agencies such as ICANN, Internet Governance Forum etc. continue to meet, and to propose measures that assume a relatively stateless form of communications infrastructure. At the same time, with the growing ‘platformisation’ of the Internet (Flew, 2021), nation-states and supranational entities such as the European Union identify a relatively small number of global tech giants who dominate core activities in the digital economy (search, social media, digital advertising, e-commerce etc.), and who derive monopoly profits as well as social influence, political power and communications dominance, and who seek to rein in such power through new forms of regulation. For such activists and regulators, the Internet presents itself less as the borderless future, and more as a set of hegemonic structures akin to the industrial-era giants who prompted the first wave of antitrust laws in the 1920s and 1930s (Deibert, 2020; Wu, 2018). The result is a growing irrelevance of global Internet governance regimes, as national governments proceed apace with setting their own rules around digital industries and online conduct. While a large number of nation-states around the world maintained some controls over the Internet – of which China is by far the largest – the regulatory turn of the 2020s has been a characteristic of the liberal democracies, not least the United States. It comes at a time when US
{"title":"Introduction: Sovereignty and the return of governance for digital platforms","authors":"T. Flew, Chun-Pin Su","doi":"10.1177/20594364231161658","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231161658","url":null,"abstract":"In an era that has been termed one of post-globalization (Flew, 2021), there is considerable debate around governance of the global Internet. In particular, multistakeholder approaches which seek to bypass nation-state governments in the name of global ‘netizens’ have been critiqued as lacking real regulatory capacity to transform the behaviour of digital platforms towards public interest goals. At the same time, there has been a ‘regulatory turn’ (Schlesinger, 2020) in internet governance, with national governments – as well as the European Union – proposing an array of laws, policies, regulations and co-regulatory codes to address issues that include monopoly power, content regulation, data and privacy, and the uses of AI. It has been estimated that over 100 new forms of legislation, regulation and policy reports had been developed across multiple jurisdictions by May 2021, all of which pointed in the direction of growing state direction of the internet and its leading players (Puppis & Winseck, 2021). The result is that Internet governance seems to be perpetually stuck between two registers. The global multistakeholder-based agencies such as ICANN, Internet Governance Forum etc. continue to meet, and to propose measures that assume a relatively stateless form of communications infrastructure. At the same time, with the growing ‘platformisation’ of the Internet (Flew, 2021), nation-states and supranational entities such as the European Union identify a relatively small number of global tech giants who dominate core activities in the digital economy (search, social media, digital advertising, e-commerce etc.), and who derive monopoly profits as well as social influence, political power and communications dominance, and who seek to rein in such power through new forms of regulation. For such activists and regulators, the Internet presents itself less as the borderless future, and more as a set of hegemonic structures akin to the industrial-era giants who prompted the first wave of antitrust laws in the 1920s and 1930s (Deibert, 2020; Wu, 2018). The result is a growing irrelevance of global Internet governance regimes, as national governments proceed apace with setting their own rules around digital industries and online conduct. While a large number of nation-states around the world maintained some controls over the Internet – of which China is by far the largest – the regulatory turn of the 2020s has been a characteristic of the liberal democracies, not least the United States. It comes at a time when US","PeriodicalId":42637,"journal":{"name":"Global Media and China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89222731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-07DOI: 10.1177/20594364231152315
Xinyi Zhu
As China has its distinctive cultural elements and political situations, it has intensively impacted the general music education system. Unlike other researchers, focusing on the detailed music education structure, educational standards and balancing traditional and modern approaches to learning music (Reimer, 1989), Culture, Music Education, and the Chinese Dream in Mainland China is aiming to analyse how the traditional Chinese culture and political idea of ‘the Chinese Dream’ have actively influenced the music education process, results, and reflections. Approaching music education through interviewing teachers in primary and secondary schools, the book is able to conduct a comprehensive conclusion of the historical and current political and cultural origins, with the consideration of the global economic development and individual values. The positive side of this book is that it actively combines communication studies and social studies with the topic of music education in China. It engages interdisciplinary research to come together and have a broader understanding of music education in mainland China. In the meantime, the weakness of this book also lies in the fact that Wai-Chung Ho didn’t elaborate and articulate the section on the general educational changes. It solely emphasizes the continuous political and economic development; however, it didn’t provide a sufficient explanation of the education system itself and its change of focus in the past few years.
{"title":"Book Review: Culture, music education, and the Chinese dream in mainland China","authors":"Xinyi Zhu","doi":"10.1177/20594364231152315","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231152315","url":null,"abstract":"As China has its distinctive cultural elements and political situations, it has intensively impacted the general music education system. Unlike other researchers, focusing on the detailed music education structure, educational standards and balancing traditional and modern approaches to learning music (Reimer, 1989), Culture, Music Education, and the Chinese Dream in Mainland China is aiming to analyse how the traditional Chinese culture and political idea of ‘the Chinese Dream’ have actively influenced the music education process, results, and reflections. Approaching music education through interviewing teachers in primary and secondary schools, the book is able to conduct a comprehensive conclusion of the historical and current political and cultural origins, with the consideration of the global economic development and individual values. The positive side of this book is that it actively combines communication studies and social studies with the topic of music education in China. It engages interdisciplinary research to come together and have a broader understanding of music education in mainland China. In the meantime, the weakness of this book also lies in the fact that Wai-Chung Ho didn’t elaborate and articulate the section on the general educational changes. It solely emphasizes the continuous political and economic development; however, it didn’t provide a sufficient explanation of the education system itself and its change of focus in the past few years.","PeriodicalId":42637,"journal":{"name":"Global Media and China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76150991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-07DOI: 10.1177/20594364231152317
Jeroen de Kloet
It was in 1919, more than 100 years ago, that the Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote ‘The second coming’, of which the most quoted lines are probably Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. Today, a century later, somehow, these words seem to resonate uncomfortably well the times we are living in. War, climate change, geopolitical tensions, a pandemic: life has become saturated with uncertainty and instability. How to make sense of our current times? What task is left for us, academics? In my reading of Guobin Yang’s new book on the Wuhan lockdown, the answer is that we need now – maybe more urgently than before – detailed, empirical, site-specific studies to grasp what is going on. Or, at least, to try our utmost to grasp the current conjuncture. Such works steer away from easy generalisations; instead, they present us with ambivalences, contradictions, if not paradoxes, and as such refuse to give convenient answers. Yang’s study is a well-researched analysis of the Wuhan lockdown, drawing on an elaborate online ethnography that includes diaries, WeChat groups, WeChat moments, news reports, poems, interviews, Sina Weibo postings, policy documents, press conferences, and so on. While circumstances forced such an approach – the author could not enter China for obvious reasons – the result is both an exemplary study of the possibilities of online research methodologies as well as an empirically and theoretically rich account of the starting months of the pandemic. Building on his previous work, Yang convincingly draws on ample case studies to guide us through the start of the pandemic, roughly from December 2019 to April 2020, zooming in on one city, Wuhan. Allow me a very brief, and therefore incomplete, overview of its nine chapters, with some more reflection on the conclusion of the book. The first chapter focuses on the month before the lockdown, showing how formalism (xingshi zhuyi 形式主义) perpetuates official culture in China. This results in an obsession with appearance, an image management that in the end led to a delayed response to the outbreak. Chapter 2 looks back onto internet culture in China over the past decade, in conjunction with the change in leadership. It shows how platformisation in China has a distinct logic in which ‘[t]he dialectics of party-line domination and bottom-up practices are intricate’, (p. 38) dampening the contentious landscape of the Chinese internet. Chapter 3 zooms in on the mobilization of resources by the state to implement its policies, including the use of loudspeakers, reminiscent of older times, but also blunt force and the pivotal role played by community
100多年前的1919年，爱尔兰诗人叶芝(W.B. Yeats)写下了《再来》(the second coming)，其中被引用最多的几句话可能是:万物分崩离析;中心站不住了。一个世纪后的今天，不知何故，这些话似乎在我们生活的时代产生了令人不安的共鸣。战争、气候变化、地缘政治紧张局势、流行病:生活充满了不确定性和不稳定性。如何理解我们当前的时代?学者们，留给我们的任务是什么?在我阅读杨国斌关于武汉封锁的新书时，答案是，我们现在——也许比以前更迫切——需要详细的、经验性的、具体地点的研究，以掌握正在发生的事情。或者，至少，尽我们最大的努力把握当前的形势。这样的作品避免了简单的概括;相反，它们呈现给我们的是矛盾、矛盾(如果不是悖论的话)，并因此拒绝给出方便的答案。杨的研究是对武汉封锁进行了深入研究的分析，借鉴了一个精心制作的在线民族志，包括日记、微信群、微信朋友圈、新闻报道、诗歌、采访、新浪微博帖子、政策文件、新闻发布会等。虽然环境迫使作者采用这种方法——作者由于显而易见的原因无法进入中国——但其结果既是对在线研究方法可能性的典范研究，也是对大流行开始几个月的经验和理论的丰富描述。在他之前工作的基础上，杨令人信服地利用了大量的案例研究来指导我们度过大流行的开始，大约从2019年12月到2020年4月，放大了一个城市，武汉。请允许我对它的九章作一个非常简短的、因此是不完整的概述，并对本书的结论作一些更多的思考。第一章聚焦于封城前的一个月，展示了形式主义是如何在中国延续官方文化的。这导致了对外表的痴迷，一种形象管理，最终导致了对疫情的反应延迟。第二章回顾了过去十年中国的互联网文化，并结合领导层的变化。它显示了中国的平台化如何具有独特的逻辑，其中“政党路线统治和自下而上实践的辩证法是复杂的”(第38页)，抑制了中国互联网的争议景观。第三章聚焦于国家为执行其政策而调动资源，包括使用扩音器，这让人想起旧时代，但也有生硬的力量和社区发挥的关键作用
{"title":"Book Review: The Wuhan lockdown","authors":"Jeroen de Kloet","doi":"10.1177/20594364231152317","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231152317","url":null,"abstract":"It was in 1919, more than 100 years ago, that the Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote ‘The second coming’, of which the most quoted lines are probably Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. Today, a century later, somehow, these words seem to resonate uncomfortably well the times we are living in. War, climate change, geopolitical tensions, a pandemic: life has become saturated with uncertainty and instability. How to make sense of our current times? What task is left for us, academics? In my reading of Guobin Yang’s new book on the Wuhan lockdown, the answer is that we need now – maybe more urgently than before – detailed, empirical, site-specific studies to grasp what is going on. Or, at least, to try our utmost to grasp the current conjuncture. Such works steer away from easy generalisations; instead, they present us with ambivalences, contradictions, if not paradoxes, and as such refuse to give convenient answers. Yang’s study is a well-researched analysis of the Wuhan lockdown, drawing on an elaborate online ethnography that includes diaries, WeChat groups, WeChat moments, news reports, poems, interviews, Sina Weibo postings, policy documents, press conferences, and so on. While circumstances forced such an approach – the author could not enter China for obvious reasons – the result is both an exemplary study of the possibilities of online research methodologies as well as an empirically and theoretically rich account of the starting months of the pandemic. Building on his previous work, Yang convincingly draws on ample case studies to guide us through the start of the pandemic, roughly from December 2019 to April 2020, zooming in on one city, Wuhan. Allow me a very brief, and therefore incomplete, overview of its nine chapters, with some more reflection on the conclusion of the book. The first chapter focuses on the month before the lockdown, showing how formalism (xingshi zhuyi 形式主义) perpetuates official culture in China. This results in an obsession with appearance, an image management that in the end led to a delayed response to the outbreak. Chapter 2 looks back onto internet culture in China over the past decade, in conjunction with the change in leadership. It shows how platformisation in China has a distinct logic in which ‘[t]he dialectics of party-line domination and bottom-up practices are intricate’, (p. 38) dampening the contentious landscape of the Chinese internet. Chapter 3 zooms in on the mobilization of resources by the state to implement its policies, including the use of loudspeakers, reminiscent of older times, but also blunt force and the pivotal role played by community","PeriodicalId":42637,"journal":{"name":"Global Media and China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78117670","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-06DOI: 10.1177/20594364231154340
Chun-Pin Su, Wenjia Tang
Digital sovereignty has attracted growing attention as governments around the world attempted to exert national influence over international platforms. Agenda of nation-states becomes apparent when the Chinese-based platform TikTok achieved global success. Under geopolitical, social and cultural dynamics, this paper examines the data sovereignty of TikTok, its sister app Douyin and its international competitor Facebook, aiming at differentiating data related policies between TikTok, Douyin and other global platforms. This study employs comparative views to comprehend data privacy, data portability and data storage. The preliminary finding suggests a stakeholder approach to balancing governance and sovereignty.
{"title":"Data sovereignty and platform neutrality – A comparative study on TikTok’s data policy","authors":"Chun-Pin Su, Wenjia Tang","doi":"10.1177/20594364231154340","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231154340","url":null,"abstract":"Digital sovereignty has attracted growing attention as governments around the world attempted to exert national influence over international platforms. Agenda of nation-states becomes apparent when the Chinese-based platform TikTok achieved global success. Under geopolitical, social and cultural dynamics, this paper examines the data sovereignty of TikTok, its sister app Douyin and its international competitor Facebook, aiming at differentiating data related policies between TikTok, Douyin and other global platforms. This study employs comparative views to comprehend data privacy, data portability and data storage. The preliminary finding suggests a stakeholder approach to balancing governance and sovereignty.","PeriodicalId":42637,"journal":{"name":"Global Media and China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73184093","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-19DOI: 10.1177/20594364231153200
John Hartley
The deployment of strategic stories, that is, stories designed to prevail over adversaries, is at work in domestic politics as well as in diplomacy. In both cases, the strategy has two aims: to create a division between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and at the same time to ascribe moral supremacy to ‘our side’ while posing ‘their side’ as an existential threat. Strategic storytelling specialises in discrimination and foe creation, but the nature of the actors involved has changed in the digital era. Now, ‘we’ and ‘they’ are organised into decentralised and mediated classes based on common identities, enabling collective action at planetary scale (e.g. climate activism, gender and ethnic justice, far-right extremism). At the same time, media platforms and news organisations are part of the apparatus by which strategic narratives are weaponised for warfare. Thus, I argue, digital media analysis needs to understand the ‘strategic turn’ in storytelling, and its deployment by states and ‘non-state actors’ alike, in this case, news media. Alternative models of worldmaking, in which popular culture acts as a pedagogic platform for class formation and activism, enter an ecology in which narrative is already a weapon of war – where it’s aircraft carriers, all the way down.
{"title":"Strategic stories: weaponized or worldmaking?","authors":"John Hartley","doi":"10.1177/20594364231153200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231153200","url":null,"abstract":"The deployment of strategic stories, that is, stories designed to prevail over adversaries, is at work in domestic politics as well as in diplomacy. In both cases, the strategy has two aims: to create a division between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and at the same time to ascribe moral supremacy to ‘our side’ while posing ‘their side’ as an existential threat. Strategic storytelling specialises in discrimination and foe creation, but the nature of the actors involved has changed in the digital era. Now, ‘we’ and ‘they’ are organised into decentralised and mediated classes based on common identities, enabling collective action at planetary scale (e.g. climate activism, gender and ethnic justice, far-right extremism). At the same time, media platforms and news organisations are part of the apparatus by which strategic narratives are weaponised for warfare. Thus, I argue, digital media analysis needs to understand the ‘strategic turn’ in storytelling, and its deployment by states and ‘non-state actors’ alike, in this case, news media. Alternative models of worldmaking, in which popular culture acts as a pedagogic platform for class formation and activism, enter an ecology in which narrative is already a weapon of war – where it’s aircraft carriers, all the way down.","PeriodicalId":42637,"journal":{"name":"Global Media and China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82603590","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-13DOI: 10.1177/20594364231152673
N. Nicoli, Petros Iosifidis
Since 2007, the European Commission (EC) has opened numerous competition cases regarding Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Meta (AAAM). Enforcement, however, has remained elusive, prompting a new regulatory paradigm in the EU known as the Digital Markets Act. In this study, we analyze the EC’s competition policy approach regarding big tech with an emphasis on AAAM. Rather than implementing a consumer welfare friendly neoclassic economics analysis, we adopt a critical political economy of communications (CPE) approach to analyze these cases. The article explores whether EU competition policy does enough to yield the required measures to preserve a healthy digital economy sector for political and social welfare as much as for consumer welfare.
{"title":"EU digital economy competition policy: From ex-post to ex-ante. The case of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Meta","authors":"N. Nicoli, Petros Iosifidis","doi":"10.1177/20594364231152673","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231152673","url":null,"abstract":"Since 2007, the European Commission (EC) has opened numerous competition cases regarding Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Meta (AAAM). Enforcement, however, has remained elusive, prompting a new regulatory paradigm in the EU known as the Digital Markets Act. In this study, we analyze the EC’s competition policy approach regarding big tech with an emphasis on AAAM. Rather than implementing a consumer welfare friendly neoclassic economics analysis, we adopt a critical political economy of communications (CPE) approach to analyze these cases. The article explores whether EU competition policy does enough to yield the required measures to preserve a healthy digital economy sector for political and social welfare as much as for consumer welfare.","PeriodicalId":42637,"journal":{"name":"Global Media and China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84607779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-04DOI: 10.1177/20594364221150142
Charis Papaevangelou
This article proposes to start considering the role that citizens play in platform governance as a way of critically reflecting on issues of inclusivity in and effectiveness of current decision-making processes. This article attempts to apply the above suggestion by studying citizens’ discourse in recent European efforts to regulate online content. It does so by employing an experimental methodology, namely, a computationally assisted Critical Discourse Analysis on textual data derived from citizens’ contributions to the European Commission’s Public Consultations on three crucial regulatory texts: the Code of Practice on Disinformation, the Recommendation on Tackling Illegal Content Online and the Digital Services Act. The present analysis suggests that the EU’s strategy to advance participatory governance through public consultations seems to ignore citizens’ qualitative input and, thus, the feedback received can be severely limited. Concluding, the article maintains that scholarship should adopt a more encompassing scope when studying platform governance, especially concerning citizen and user participation, beyond the traditional frame of participation through civil society representation, while critically scrutinising existing ostensibly participatory structures.
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Pub Date : 2022-12-22DOI: 10.1177/20594364221148358
Xinyi Zhu
Creative industries have been mushrooming in the past few decades and gradually emerged as one of the most potent industries in China. In the book Creative Industries and Digital Transformation in China, various scholars approached it from diverse perspectives, including reviving the traditional culture, cyberspace in Shanghai, gaming culture, and the fashion eco-system. It reveals the gradually emerging creative industries from historical, modern, and cultural points of view. In general, it is a comprehensive book that incorporates the essential points from the growing process of the contemporary creative industry and embedded the digital transformation process based on the root of Chinese culture. However, there are weaknesses that exist in this book; it majorly lies in the lack of understanding of the political situation and lack of sufficient empirical examples of other major industries to investigate the general understanding of creative industries in China.
{"title":"Book review: Creative industries and digital transformation in China","authors":"Xinyi Zhu","doi":"10.1177/20594364221148358","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364221148358","url":null,"abstract":"Creative industries have been mushrooming in the past few decades and gradually emerged as one of the most potent industries in China. In the book Creative Industries and Digital Transformation in China, various scholars approached it from diverse perspectives, including reviving the traditional culture, cyberspace in Shanghai, gaming culture, and the fashion eco-system. It reveals the gradually emerging creative industries from historical, modern, and cultural points of view. In general, it is a comprehensive book that incorporates the essential points from the growing process of the contemporary creative industry and embedded the digital transformation process based on the root of Chinese culture. However, there are weaknesses that exist in this book; it majorly lies in the lack of understanding of the political situation and lack of sufficient empirical examples of other major industries to investigate the general understanding of creative industries in China.","PeriodicalId":42637,"journal":{"name":"Global Media and China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83549863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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