Pub Date : 2022-02-17DOI: 10.31269/triplec.v20i1.1297
I. Moll
The hegemonic construal of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” portrays rapid technological developments as a bold, new industrial revolution. Since there is sparse evidence of any such revolution across the totality of social, political, cultural and economic institutions, locally and globally, the focus must turn to how this ideological frame functions to further the interests of social and economic elites worldwide. This article examines the way that Klaus Schwab, as the principal intellectual of the World Economic Forum and the interests it represents, has formulated and disseminated this ideology. It argues that the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” frame bolsters the contingent neoliberalism of the post-Washington consensus period, and therefore serves to obscure the continuing decline of the globalised world order with a ‘brave new world’ narrative.
{"title":"The Fourth Industrial Revolution: A New Ideology","authors":"I. Moll","doi":"10.31269/triplec.v20i1.1297","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v20i1.1297","url":null,"abstract":"The hegemonic construal of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” portrays rapid technological developments as a bold, new industrial revolution. Since there is sparse evidence of any such revolution across the totality of social, political, cultural and economic institutions, locally and globally, the focus must turn to how this ideological frame functions to further the interests of social and economic elites worldwide. This article examines the way that Klaus Schwab, as the principal intellectual of the World Economic Forum and the interests it represents, has formulated and disseminated this ideology. It argues that the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” frame bolsters the contingent neoliberalism of the post-Washington consensus period, and therefore serves to obscure the continuing decline of the globalised world order with a ‘brave new world’ narrative.","PeriodicalId":45788,"journal":{"name":"TRIPLEC-Communication Capitalism & Critique","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76488752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-07DOI: 10.31269/triplec.v20i1.1325
James Ranger
Jamie Ranger reviews Jacob Johanssen’s Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture – Audiences, Social Media, and Big Data. The book offers a comprehensive account of our contemporary media environment – digital culture and audiences in particular – by drawing on psychoanalysis and media studies frameworks. Event Horizon, written by Johanssen in co-authorship with Bonni Rambatan, applies a psychoanalytic lens to online culture, modern sexuality and politics to examine the functioning of capitalist ideology.
{"title":"Book Review: Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture – Audiences, Social Media, and Big Data by Jacob Johanssen & Event Horizon – Sexuality, Politics, Online Culture, and the Limits of Capitalism by Bonni Rambatan & Jacob Johanssen","authors":"James Ranger","doi":"10.31269/triplec.v20i1.1325","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v20i1.1325","url":null,"abstract":"Jamie Ranger reviews Jacob Johanssen’s Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture – Audiences, Social Media, and Big Data. The book offers a comprehensive account of our contemporary media environment – digital culture and audiences in particular – by drawing on psychoanalysis and media studies frameworks. Event Horizon, written by Johanssen in co-authorship with Bonni Rambatan, applies a psychoanalytic lens to online culture, modern sexuality and politics to examine the functioning of capitalist ideology.","PeriodicalId":45788,"journal":{"name":"TRIPLEC-Communication Capitalism & Critique","volume":"11 8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89544885","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-12DOI: 10.31269/triplec.v20i1.1281
Nathan Schneider
Critics have been converging around the logic of colonialism to describe the Internet economy. If we are serious about the laden language of the colonial, we should be ready to learn from struggles against pre-digital empires and colonial regimes. Although acts of insurrection may attract more attention, one thing leaders and theorists of anticolonial resistance have stressed persistently is the centrality of self-governance in everyday life as both a means and end of their movements. But the dominant platforms for online communities are not well-suited for durable self-governing. Resistance often relies on the same colonial firms it opposes. What would community-governed technologies look like? This paper introduces the concept of “governable stacks”, a framework for self-governing as resistance to digital colonialism.
{"title":"Governable Stacks against Digital Colonialism","authors":"Nathan Schneider","doi":"10.31269/triplec.v20i1.1281","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v20i1.1281","url":null,"abstract":"Critics have been converging around the logic of colonialism to describe the Internet economy. If we are serious about the laden language of the colonial, we should be ready to learn from struggles against pre-digital empires and colonial regimes. Although acts of insurrection may attract more attention, one thing leaders and theorists of anticolonial resistance have stressed persistently is the centrality of self-governance in everyday life as both a means and end of their movements. But the dominant platforms for online communities are not well-suited for durable self-governing. Resistance often relies on the same colonial firms it opposes. What would community-governed technologies look like? This paper introduces the concept of “governable stacks”, a framework for self-governing as resistance to digital colonialism.","PeriodicalId":45788,"journal":{"name":"TRIPLEC-Communication Capitalism & Critique","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84833228","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-13DOI: 10.31269/triplec.v20i1.1270
Fredrik Stiernstedt, Anne Kaun
Prisons are a recurring topic and backdrop in the popular culture of the Global North. They often serve as spectacular environments that seem far removed from most people’s everyday lives. This article develops the notion of the prison media complex and discusses material entanglements between prisons and private media industries via the production of media technologies, consumption of communication, and technology development in the prison sector. The article seeks to answer the question of how we can conceptualise the prison media complex (PMC) from a materialist perspective. Taking the Swedish context as a starting point, we analyse the economic and material connections that characterise the PMC in this national context. Drawing on archival data, participant observations at prison technology tradeshows and a prison sector conference, as well as freedom of information requests, we bring nuance to the picture of media and communication technologies, as technologies of freedom are also based on unfreedom and captivity.
{"title":"The Prison Media Complex: Labour, Technology and Communication Infrastructures in the Prison System","authors":"Fredrik Stiernstedt, Anne Kaun","doi":"10.31269/triplec.v20i1.1270","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v20i1.1270","url":null,"abstract":"Prisons are a recurring topic and backdrop in the popular culture of the Global North. They often serve as spectacular environments that seem far removed from most people’s everyday lives. This article develops the notion of the prison media complex and discusses material entanglements between prisons and private media industries via the production of media technologies, consumption of communication, and technology development in the prison sector. The article seeks to answer the question of how we can conceptualise the prison media complex (PMC) from a materialist perspective. Taking the Swedish context as a starting point, we analyse the economic and material connections that characterise the PMC in this national context. Drawing on archival data, participant observations at prison technology tradeshows and a prison sector conference, as well as freedom of information requests, we bring nuance to the picture of media and communication technologies, as technologies of freedom are also based on unfreedom and captivity.","PeriodicalId":45788,"journal":{"name":"TRIPLEC-Communication Capitalism & Critique","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81698119","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-02DOI: 10.31269/triplec.v19i2.1272
Sara Moreira, Cristina Parente
This article explores the transformational character of solidarity economy network communication in Portugal and Catalonia, focusing on the first two months of the crisis brought on by COVID-19. We assume that what these networks choose to convey (or remain silent on) in their public communications reflects their positions in the fields of action and values and their theoretical alignment, establishing an ethico-political orientation. Through the analysis of virtual content conveyed by solidarity economy organisations, we analyse the topics covered, the types of content and sources cited, and the level of demand in the discourse, as well as their individual, institutional and collective character. The results reveal very different communicative approaches in each of the cases analysed: from silence or total absence of communicative practices to what can be considered a transformational praxis communication, based on collective action challenging the structures of power and domination and pointing out ways to overcome them. The article proposes a transformative communication radar linking Habermas’s theory of communicative action and Fuchs’s Marxist-inspired praxis communication concept, as a way of distinguishing merely instrumental communicative approaches from those guided by communicative and cooperative rationality driving new agreements and societal transformations.
{"title":"Transformative Communication Radar: Practices, Action and Praxis Communication in Solidarity Economy Networks in Portugal and Catalonia","authors":"Sara Moreira, Cristina Parente","doi":"10.31269/triplec.v19i2.1272","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v19i2.1272","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the transformational character of solidarity economy network communication in Portugal and Catalonia, focusing on the first two months of the crisis brought on by COVID-19. We assume that what these networks choose to convey (or remain silent on) in their public communications reflects their positions in the fields of action and values and their theoretical alignment, establishing an ethico-political orientation. Through the analysis of virtual content conveyed by solidarity economy organisations, we analyse the topics covered, the types of content and sources cited, and the level of demand in the discourse, as well as their individual, institutional and collective character. The results reveal very different communicative approaches in each of the cases analysed: from silence or total absence of communicative practices to what can be considered a transformational praxis communication, based on collective action challenging the structures of power and domination and pointing out ways to overcome them. The article proposes a transformative communication radar linking Habermas’s theory of communicative action and Fuchs’s Marxist-inspired praxis communication concept, as a way of distinguishing merely instrumental communicative approaches from those guided by communicative and cooperative rationality driving new agreements and societal transformations.","PeriodicalId":45788,"journal":{"name":"TRIPLEC-Communication Capitalism & Critique","volume":"180 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80128942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-02DOI: 10.31269/triplec.v19i2.1269
E. Canpolat
This study examines the transformation of everyday life through smartphones, focusing on the daily experiences of smartphone users in Turkey. With their multimedia features, smartphones (defined as a “melting pot” from the technological perspective or polymedia and metamedia in a broader sense) take an important place in users’ everyday lives. As these features and the services accessible through smartphones are offered in commodity form, they inevitably result in the exploitation of users’ labour, the commodification of user data, the shifting of paid work into ‘leisure time’, and finally the transformation of everyday life through smartphones. The main argument of this study is that, under these social conditions, smartphones, referred to as “a melting pot” from the technological perspective, turn into a melting pot of exploitation, and their users experience these interactions not as direct economic relations but as routine social relations.
{"title":"Smartphones and Exploitation in the Age of Digital Capitalism: Ordinary Aspects of the Transformation of Everyday Life","authors":"E. Canpolat","doi":"10.31269/triplec.v19i2.1269","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v19i2.1269","url":null,"abstract":"This study examines the transformation of everyday life through smartphones, focusing on the daily experiences of smartphone users in Turkey. With their multimedia features, smartphones (defined as a “melting pot” from the technological perspective or polymedia and metamedia in a broader sense) take an important place in users’ everyday lives. As these features and the services accessible through smartphones are offered in commodity form, they inevitably result in the exploitation of users’ labour, the commodification of user data, the shifting of paid work into ‘leisure time’, and finally the transformation of everyday life through smartphones. The main argument of this study is that, under these social conditions, smartphones, referred to as “a melting pot” from the technological perspective, turn into a melting pot of exploitation, and their users experience these interactions not as direct economic relations but as routine social relations.","PeriodicalId":45788,"journal":{"name":"TRIPLEC-Communication Capitalism & Critique","volume":"136 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79599733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-25DOI: 10.31269/triplec.v19i2.1275
Arwid Lund, Pamela Schultz Nybacka
Digital platforms are a primary means of communication in society. Public libraries play an empowering role in these processes, strengthening citizens’ digital competences. This raises questions about what democratic processes the digital technology is made to enable. The study investigates how a Swedish Digital Library (DL) is envisioned and organised within a national digitalisation strategy. Qualitative methods are used, and a theoretical democracy framework is developed and used together with the concepts of education and Bildung in the analysis. Four empirical themes are identified. The analysis centres on tensions related to horizontality and hierarchy, and Bildung and sociality. The DL vision is dominated by a hierarchical and instrumental educational vision that connects to representative democracy. A subordinated social and pedagogical vision of inner motivational drives and partial forms of sharing, connected to deliberative and semi-participatory democracy forms, exists, mostly in the form of some cherry-picked Web 2.0 discourses.
{"title":"Digital Library Platforms’ Democracy Building Between Instrumental Education and Web 2.0 Sharing: A Swedish Case Study","authors":"Arwid Lund, Pamela Schultz Nybacka","doi":"10.31269/triplec.v19i2.1275","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v19i2.1275","url":null,"abstract":"Digital platforms are a primary means of communication in society. Public libraries play an empowering role in these processes, strengthening citizens’ digital competences. This raises questions about what democratic processes the digital technology is made to enable. The study investigates how a Swedish Digital Library (DL) is envisioned and organised within a national digitalisation strategy. Qualitative methods are used, and a theoretical democracy framework is developed and used together with the concepts of education and Bildung in the analysis. Four empirical themes are identified. The analysis centres on tensions related to horizontality and hierarchy, and Bildung and sociality. The DL vision is dominated by a hierarchical and instrumental educational vision that connects to representative democracy. A subordinated social and pedagogical vision of inner motivational drives and partial forms of sharing, connected to deliberative and semi-participatory democracy forms, exists, mostly in the form of some cherry-picked Web 2.0 discourses.","PeriodicalId":45788,"journal":{"name":"TRIPLEC-Communication Capitalism & Critique","volume":"83 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83884321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-20DOI: 10.31269/triplec.v19i2.1298
Manfred Knoche
This article presents foundations of the analysis of media concentration from the perspective of the approach the critique of the political economy of the media and communication. It outlines the dangers and problems of media concentration, discusses the question of how to measure media concentration, identifies different types of media concentration, and gives a systematic overview of empirical studies of media concentration. As a result of the country comparison on a theoretical (macro) level with an analytically required high level of abstraction, first and foremost identities, commonalities and similarities with regard to the development of media concentration including its causes and consequences can be recognised. The author argues that media concentration also needs to be theorised. It distinguishes and discusses two such theoretical approaches: apologetic-normative competition theories of media concentration and critical-empirical theories of media concentration. Critical-empirical theories of media concentration situate media concentration in the context of the development of capitalism, which requires to use the critique of the political economy as theoretical foundation.
{"title":"Media Concentration: A Critical Political Economy Perspective","authors":"Manfred Knoche","doi":"10.31269/triplec.v19i2.1298","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v19i2.1298","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents foundations of the analysis of media concentration from the perspective of the approach the critique of the political economy of the media and communication. It outlines the dangers and problems of media concentration, discusses the question of how to measure media concentration, identifies different types of media concentration, and gives a systematic overview of empirical studies of media concentration. As a result of the country comparison on a theoretical (macro) level with an analytically required high level of abstraction, first and foremost identities, commonalities and similarities with regard to the development of media concentration including its causes and consequences can be recognised. The author argues that media concentration also needs to be theorised. It distinguishes and discusses two such theoretical approaches: apologetic-normative competition theories of media concentration and critical-empirical theories of media concentration. Critical-empirical theories of media concentration situate media concentration in the context of the development of capitalism, which requires to use the critique of the political economy as theoretical foundation.","PeriodicalId":45788,"journal":{"name":"TRIPLEC-Communication Capitalism & Critique","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81035134","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-04DOI: 10.31269/triplec.v19i2.1264
Ben Robra, Alex Pazaitis, K. Latoufis
Capitalism is evidently the main cause of ecological degradation, climate change and social inequality. Degrowth as a counter-hegemony opposes the capitalist imperatives of economic growth and capital accumulation and radically seeks to transform society towards sustainability. This has strong political economic implications. Economic organisations and modes of production are essential in overcoming capitalist hegemony. This article investigates two commons-based peer production (CBPP) organisations in a qualitative case study by asking how they could align with degrowth counter-hegemony to help overcome capitalism. Social systems theory is used as an organisational lens to empirically research decision premises and their degrowth counter-hegemonic alignment. The results show that this alignment is possible in relatively small organisations. However, to help degrowth succeed, CBPP needs to be more widely adopted, for which larger organisations seem better equipped. Future studies focusing on the concept of scaling wide in CBPP networks in the context of degrowth counter-hegemony are suggested.
{"title":"Counter-Hegemonic Decision Premises in Commons-Based Peer Production: A Degrowth Case Study","authors":"Ben Robra, Alex Pazaitis, K. Latoufis","doi":"10.31269/triplec.v19i2.1264","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v19i2.1264","url":null,"abstract":"Capitalism is evidently the main cause of ecological degradation, climate change and social inequality. Degrowth as a counter-hegemony opposes the capitalist imperatives of economic growth and capital accumulation and radically seeks to transform society towards sustainability. This has strong political economic implications. Economic organisations and modes of production are essential in overcoming capitalist hegemony. This article investigates two commons-based peer production (CBPP) organisations in a qualitative case study by asking how they could align with degrowth counter-hegemony to help overcome capitalism. Social systems theory is used as an organisational lens to empirically research decision premises and their degrowth counter-hegemonic alignment. The results show that this alignment is possible in relatively small organisations. However, to help degrowth succeed, CBPP needs to be more widely adopted, for which larger organisations seem better equipped. Future studies focusing on the concept of scaling wide in CBPP networks in the context of degrowth counter-hegemony are suggested.","PeriodicalId":45788,"journal":{"name":"TRIPLEC-Communication Capitalism & Critique","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88866912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-14DOI: 10.31269/TRIPLEC.V19I2.1276
James Ranger
Jamie Ranger reviews The Circle of the Snake by Grafton Tanner. The Circle of the Snake grapples with the political consequences of the cultural turn to nostalgia, specifically the dynamic tension between the radical nostalgia required to contest the incessant homogeneity of cultural reproduction and the neoliberal narrative of a nascent digital utopia endemic to our contemporary systems of mediated communication.
{"title":"Book Review: The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech by Grafton Tanner","authors":"James Ranger","doi":"10.31269/TRIPLEC.V19I2.1276","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31269/TRIPLEC.V19I2.1276","url":null,"abstract":"Jamie Ranger reviews The Circle of the Snake by Grafton Tanner. The Circle of the Snake grapples with the political consequences of the cultural turn to nostalgia, specifically the dynamic tension between the radical nostalgia required to contest the incessant homogeneity of cultural reproduction and the neoliberal narrative of a nascent digital utopia endemic to our contemporary systems of mediated communication.","PeriodicalId":45788,"journal":{"name":"TRIPLEC-Communication Capitalism & Critique","volume":"53 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81212231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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