scholarly journals The COVID-19 Infodemic – An Accelerated Version of the New Digital Ecosystem

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 125
Author(s):  
Alina Bârgăoanu ◽  
Flavia Durach

The COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented in terms of its quasi-simultaneous global reach and its multilayered character (medical, economic, political, geopolitical and social). It is also unprecedented because it is the first pandemic of the digital age, thus offering an accelerated version of the digital eco-system: interconnectedness across countries, regions, and even continents; globalization/ trans-nationalization of the national/ local communication spaces coupled by the circulation of global polluted narratives which are strikingly similar in terms of content in spite of their appearance of being tailored, even “extremely personalized” to fit local characteristics; and the preeminence of digital platforms within the communication ecosystem, including the semi-private or downright private ones such as WhatsApp or Facebook private messaging applications. Out of these emerging features, we will focus our analysis on the last interconnected two: globalization of seemingly local narratives and the emergence of the WhatsApp or Facebook private instant messaging applications as prominent transmission/ contagion means. We will do so by carrying an in-depth case study of Romania, which may offer an insight into more generalizable trends.

Author(s):  
Katharine Dommett ◽  
Luke Temple ◽  
Patrick Seyd

Abstract Over recent decades, scholars have explored political parties’ adoption of digital technology. Tracing successive eras of change, scholarship has examined the degree to which digital disrupts or embeds traditional power structures—with many studies finding evidence of ‘controlled-interactivity’. In this article, we revisit debates around the adoption of digital tools from a bottom-up perspective. Moving beyond attempts to categorise elite strategies for digital adoption, we consider practices on the ground to document how, in practice, digital technology is being taken up and used. Using a case study of the UK Labour Party, we categorise a range of different practices, highlighting and theorising the presence of digital adherents, laggards, entrepreneurs, renegades and refuseniks. Discussing the drivers of these practices, we offer new insight into variations in digital adoption and consider the significance of these trends for our understanding of party organisation.


Author(s):  
Dario Lolli

In July 2015, a crowdfunding campaign launched to revive the notoriously unprofitable video game series Shenmue closed with the record figure of above US$6 million, to date the highest amount ever raised on Kickstarter for video game funding. This article takes this campaign as an endemic case study of the changing funding mechanisms concerning video game production in the digital ecosystem of Web 2.0. Although the campaign displays some of the participatory elements often attributed to crowdfunding and digital convergence, it also sheds doubts on accountability and the effective capacity of crowdfunding to substantially challenge and de-hierarchize power relations in the video game industry. In particular, the Shenmue III campaign illustrates how the crowdfunding initiative was instrumentally mobilized by its organizers to attract further corporate sponsorships and stakeholders outside crowdfunding. This controversial episode shows how commercial platforms like Kickstarter are increasingly facilitating a process of financialization of crowdfunding, whose main effect is not so much the equal coming together of media consumers and producers as the minimization of risks for large video game corporations. By mapping the history of the Shenmue franchise from its original failure in the era of physical distribution to its recent crowdfunded success, this article argues that the empowering potentials of crowdfunding cannot be readily assumed without a contingent analysis of the cultural and political economy underlying Web 2.0 and its digital platforms.


Author(s):  
Nicholas Nicoli ◽  
Marcos Komodromos

The purpose of this chapter is to explore, describe, and offer new directions on corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication in the digital age. CSR communication is in a state of flux as organizations adapt to technological transformations and new communication approaches conducive to the digital age. The chapter draws on current strategic communication trends and CSR communication literature to underline new theoretical and practical implications. The chapter explicates the relationship between CSR, strategic communication, and more recent forms of CSR communication via digital platforms. The Bank of Cyprus is considered as a case study to illustrate how one largely structured organization applies current approaches of CSR communication.


2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 376-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Baldwin-Philippi

This article investigates the Trump campaign’s strategic use of digital platforms and their affordances and norms that contribute to a technological performance of populism. To do so, I build on theories of populism as a performance, rather than a set of identifiable qualities, and make a theoretical intervention calling for the need to add a material and technological focus to how scholars approach the concept in our contemporary media environment. This article presents a model for understanding populist affordances as those that center “the people” to various degrees, and applies that model in a case study of how campaigns in the 2016 US presidential race engaged in a technological performance of populism across a variety of platforms, including email, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and campaign-created mobile apps. Central to this analysis are campaign strategies of controlled interactivity, amateurism, participatory/user-generated content, and data-driven campaigning.


Author(s):  
Jason W Luther ◽  
Patrick Williams

While participatory culture has been of special interest to scholars for nearly three decades, much of the focus has centered on digitally networked contexts. The digital age has indeed transformed our approaches to listening to music and how we operate as fans of music; these approaches can weave together the new and the old, and are enacted among a variety of spaces, objects, and relationships. We explore how the re-emergence of one such object in the digital age — the LP — has produced social arrangements that perhaps excavate older listening practices but do so in ways that have been affected by the mediascape more generally. We offer the concept of phonography culture: a term that emphasizes the social practices of those who not only curate and collect vinyl records but communicate through them in participatory activities including listening parties, vinyl nights at local bars, Facebook groups, and sites of e-commerce. We share the case study of Record Nite, a semi-regular gathering of phonography culture participants, who take turns playing one side of an LP on a given theme, revealing in their fandom and reveling in and encouraging that of others. Over the course of an evening, ten to twenty friends connect over their own “noise” — their experiences, histories, and knowledge of artists, albums, and genres—while simultaneously listening to LPs together. These phonographic, cultural interactions are revelatory because they draw our attention away from individualized and digital listening, which isolate signal, and make space for social and aural noise. That noise is infused with fandom and participation, as well as elements of memory, meaning making, and nostalgia.   NB: The article contains sound examples. In order to listen to embedded audio files, you must first download the pdf file and then open it with Adobe Acrobat.


Author(s):  
Victoria Yang

Digital media companies on YouTube, exemplified by BuzzFeed, reinforce the perception of employment in the creative industries as an ideal opportunity for young millennials to make money “doing what they love.” In 2016, dozens of videos made by former BuzzFeed employees announcing their departures from the company went viral, challenging this view and granting the public unprecedented insight into the company's labour practices. BuzzFeed thus serves as a valuable case study for digital labour in the contemporary creative industries during a time when formal companies, individual creators, and unpaid users compete for viewership on the platform. This research paper reveals and critically engages with the tradeoffs that creative workers face when negotiating the benefits of working for a company, versus “going independent.” Using Marx’s theory of alienation to analyze “Why I Left BuzzFeed” videos, this paper argues that the option for professional creative workers to become independent creators on YouTube represents a shift towards the ideal of “non-alienated labour.” This article concludes by examining how, despite this shift, independent creative workers are still subsumed under capital.


2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 671-685 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Swist ◽  
Philippa Collin

In this article, we consider the role of digital platforms for producing data and shaping how children’s rights are understood, monitored and advocated for. We present a typology of platforms impacting children’s rights, followed by the introduction of a ‘networked capability approach’. A case study is used to explore the potential of this approach for examining the purpose, practices and repercussions of digital platforms. We argue that to recognize and actualize children’s rights in a digital age, we need new conceptual tools to examine the interplay of platforms, people and places that include and exclude children’s valued ‘doings and beings’.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Ibrahim Sirkeci

Transnational Marketing Journal is dedicated to disseminate scholarship on cross-border phenomena in marketing by acknowledging the importance of local and global or in other words, underlining the transnational practices marked by national and local characteristics in a fluid fashion spreading over more than one national territory. The first article by Paulette Schuster looks into “falafel” and “shwarma” in Mexico and discusses the perception of Israeli food in Mexico. The second article is a case study illustrating a critical account of cultural dimensions formulated by Schwarz using the value surveys data. The third article in the issue is a qualitative study of the negative attitudes of millennials torwards mobile marketing. 


Romanticism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-80
Author(s):  
Ruth Knezevich

The genre of annotated verse represents an under-explored form of transporting romanticism. In annotated, locodescriptive poems like those in Anna Seward's Llangollen Vale, readers are invited to read not only the spatiality of the landscapes depicted in the verse but also the landscape of the page itself. Seward's poems, with their focus on understanding geographical, political, and historical spaces both real and imaginary, provide geocritical insight into poetic productions of the early Romantic era. Likewise, geocriticism offers a fresh and useful – even necessary – analytic approach to such poems. I adopt Anna Seward as a case study in annotated verse and argue that attending to the materiality and paratextuality of her work allows us to access the complexities of her poetry and prose as well as her position within the wider framework of transporting Romanticism.


Somatechnics ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Svenja J. Kratz

Abstract: Presented from an ArtScience practitioner's perspective, this paper provides an overview of Svenja Kratz's experience working as an artist within the area of cell and tissue culture at QUT's Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation (IHBI). Using The Absence of Alice, a multi-medium exhibition based on the experience of culturing cells, as a case study, the paper gives insight into the artist's approach to working across art and science and how ideas, processes, and languages from each discipline can intermesh and extend the possibilities of each system. The paper also provides an overview of her most recent artwork, The Human Skin Equivalent/Experience Project, which involves the creation of personal jewellery items incorporating human skin equivalent models grown from the artist's skin and participant cells. Referencing this project, and other contemporary bioart works, the value of ArtScience is discussed, focusing in particular on the way in which cross-art-science projects enable an alternative voice to enter into scientific dialogues and have the potential to yield outcomes valuable to both disciplines.


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