The Environmental Teapot and Other Loaded Household Objects: Reconnecting the Politics of Technology, Issues and Things

This book chapter discusses the concept of the politics of objects through a specific empirical example, tea teapots equipped to facilitate environmental awareness and action. It distinguishes between two different forms of object politics: the politics of scripted objects and the politics of augmented objects. Where the former object is political by virtue of the contraints it places on subjects, the latter's politics derive from its capacity to resonate with issues. Here the range of issues the object is capable to confure up - its issuefication - is the principal index of its politicization. The latter form of object politics can be recognized in contemporary objects that are equipped with digital technologies (such as environmental teapots). But it can also be traced back to the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, the object-centred theory of morality and politics proposed by him. The chapter concludes with a discusion of the empirical methods that may be deployed to detect and analyse the politics of augmented objects, in particular textual and visual analysis

Book review: Digital detox: the politics of disconnecting by Trine Syvertsen

In Digital Detox: The Politics of Disconnecting, Trine Syvertsen studies the politics of disconnection as a practice of resistance to the intrusion of digital technologies into everyday life, locating it within the context of neoliberal self-regulation. The book offers a highly accessible overview of the digital detox phenomenon and the politics of the attention economy, recommends Kim Harding

The political imaginaries of blockchain projects: discerning the expressions of an emerging ecosystem

There is a wealth of information, hype around, and research into blockchain’s ‘disruptive’ and ‘transformative’ potential concerning every industry. However, there is an absence of scholarly attention given to identifying and analyzing the political premises and consequences of blockchain projects. Through digital ethnography and participatory action research, this article shows how blockchain experiments personify ‘prefigurative politics’ by design: they embody the politics and power structures which they want to enable in society. By showing how these prefigurative embodiments are informed and determined by the underlying political imaginaries, the article proposes a basic typology of blockchain projects. Furthermore, it outlines a frame to question, cluster, and analyze the expressions of political imaginaries intrinsic to the design and operationalization of blockchain projects on three analytic levels: users, intermediaries, and institutions.</p

Shadow politics: Front stage and the veneer of volunteerism

This article proposes the metaphor of “shadow” to examine two interrelated aspects of digital politics in India: online surveillance of politically inclined actors and datafied shadow texts aimed at managing front stage politics. The specificity of “shadow politics” emerges from ongoing transformations that are deeply interwoven with the digital, first with the data driven confidence around the “total certainty” of tracking and calibrating voter sentiments, and second, with the ideology of digital participation and related claims that data machines are merely tapping into people’s sovereign expressions online

Mobile moralities: ethical consumption in the digital realm

Ethical consumption, as a realm of production and exchange, as a framework for purchasing decisions and as political activism, is now well established in a range of nations. As a politics, it points to an interconnected but divergent set of concerns centred on issues of environmental sustainability, local and global economic and social justice, and community and individual wellbeing. While the subject of sustained critique, not least because of its apparent privileging of ‘the consumer’ as the locus of change, ethical consumption has garnered increasing attention. This is most recently evident in the development and widening use of ‘ethical consumption apps’ for mobile devices. These apps allow the user to both access ethical information on products and, potentially, to connect with a broader politics of consumption. However, in entering the digital realm ethical consumption also becomes embroiled in the complexities of digital technocultures and their ability to allow users of apps to be connected to each other, potentially building communities of interest and/or activism. This paper explores this emerging intersection of the ethical and the digital. It examines, in particular, whether such digital affordances affect the way ethical consumption itself may be conceived and pursued. Does the ethical consumption app work to collectivise or individualise, help to focus or fragment, speak of timidity or potential in relation to an oppositional politics of consumption? In confronting these issues, this paper suggests that contemporary ethical consumption apps – while full of political potential – remain problematic in that the turn to the digital has tended, so far, to accentuate the already individualising tendencies within a politics of ethical consumption. This speaks also, however, to a similar problematic in the politics of digital technocultures; the use of the digital does not automatically enable - merely through greater connectivity and information availability – forms of radical politics

Reconsidering online reputation systems

Social and socioeconomic interactions and transactions often require trust. In digital spaces, the main approach to facilitating trust has effectively been to try to reduce or even remove the need for it through the implementation of reputation systems. These generate metrics based on digital data such as ratings and reviews submitted by users, interaction histories, and so on, that are intended to label individuals as more or less reliable or trustworthy in a particular interaction context. We suggest that conventional approaches to the design of such systems are rooted in a capitalist, competitive paradigm, relying on methodological individualism, and that the reputation technologies themselves thus embody and enact this paradigm in whatever space they operate in. We question whether the politics, ethics and philosophy that contribute to this paradigm align with those of some of the contexts in which reputation systems are now being used, and suggest that alternative approaches to the establishment of trust and reputation in digital spaces need to be considered for alternative contexts

Using digital media reinforces inequalities in political participation

In the past decade digital spaces have become increasingly important in politics and to political participation. But does using digital media help to mobilize new people to participate in politics? In a new study which looks at data across 25 years, Jennifer Oser and Shelley Boulianne find stronger evidence for the opposite effect: political participation motivates digital media use, which reinforces inequalities in political participation

Introducing Identity

This chapter provides an introductory overview of theories of identity and indicates some of the broad ways in which they might be applied to young people's interactions with digital media. The first part of the chapter offers a brief account of five major areas of theory: social-psychological theories of adolescence; sociological theories of youth culture; theories of social identity, and the relations between individuals and groups; notions of identity politics; and theories of subjectivity and modernity. The second part of the chapter covers three major themes that are at stake in the analysis of young people and digital media: theories of technology; the notion of young people as a "digital generation"; and the place of learning, both in and beyond schools. In this course of this broad-ranging overview, the chapter also prefigures some of the more specific themes addressed in the chapters that make up the remainder of the volume